It all started earlier this week, when the Brownback campaign got wind of a letter that Iowa Rev. Tim Rude, a prominent evangelical pastor and Huckabee supporter, sent to a few other church leaders in the state. In it, Rude talked up Huckabee for being a Southern Baptist and trashed Brownback for being a Catholic. “Frankly, as a recovering Catholic myself, that is all I need to know about his discernment compared to (Huckabee’s),” Rude wrote. Confronted with the email on Tuesday, Rude apologized, saying his remarks weren’t meant for public consumption, and they weren’t intended to be “anti-Catholic.” Afterwards Huckabee, in a statement, said that he was glad Rude apologized. “They were not authorized by, disseminated by, approved by, or condoned by the campaign,” Huckabee said, noting that many of his staffers are Catholic. But that wasn’t enough for the Brownback campaign, which demanded a more explicit apology from the former Arkansas governor. “Does Governor Huckabee denounce Pastor Rude’s anti-Catholic comments, or not?” a Brownback spokesman told reporters Wednesday.
On Thursday, the Huckabee campaign apparently decided they’d had enough and hit back, hard. The Cliff Notes version: Huckabee’s camp thinks Brownback is a sissy. “It’s time for Sam Brownback to stop whining and start showing some of the Christian character he seems to always find lacking in others,” Chip Saltsman, Huckabee’s campaign manager, said in a scathing statement issued to reporters. “He has attacked Gov. Huckabee for something that a Huckabee supporter said in an email sent to two individuals. The person who originated the email has apologized and is not a member of the Huckabee staff. For Brownback to claim that the Governor ‘owes him an apology’ is nonsense and indicates that if Brownback is going to fall to pieces every time a supporter of the Governor says something he doesn’t like, he clearly isn’t tough enough to be president.”
Sheesh! But that’s not even the end of it. “The governor strongly disavowed the statement by the supporter, but that wasn’t enough for Brownback. He continued to cry about it,” says Saltsman, who points out that he’s a life-long Catholic–a dig at Brownback, who converted to the religion in 2002. In response, the Brownback campaign released emails showing they’d gotten wind of the Rude email last Sunday and had forwarded them to Saltsman, asking the Huckabee campaign to intervene and stop the “trash talk.” According to John Rankin, a Brownback spokesman, they got no response. What happens next? Sounds like this is shaping up to be one of those disputes that only Willie Aames can resolve.
