Former Arkansas governor, likely 2012 presidential candidate and Fox News host Mike Huckabee rolled into Peachtree City Saturday night for a book-signing of his most recent release, “A Simple Christmas: Twelve Stories That Celebrate the True Holiday Spirit.”

In between signing books for the 350 people who showed up, Huckabee took a few questions from The Citizen:

Question: What is your assessment of the current national situation, from January until now?

“I am very troubled by the ridiculous overspending by this Congress and this administration. They seem to have no understanding of the debt situation they are putting our future generations in and their attempts to spend our way into prosperity are absurd on their face,” Huckabee said.

“The complete misunderstanding of how free enterprise works and the trampling on small business is repulsive. Their attempts to essentially move us to a country that focuses on the re-distribution of somebody else’s assets goes against every basic principle of the American economy and I think they are greatly jeopardizing our national security by appeasing our enemies and distancing our friends. Other than that they are doing great.”

Question: Now let’s go backward in time to Bush II and other administrations.

“The biggest problem was that they didn’t stop spending. They bragged about not raising taxes, but their spending was as bad as any Democratic administration in Congress.

“And then the ultimate insult to conservatism was the TARP plan. I felt that TARP was a total violation of the Constitution. It is not the role of government to pick winners and losers in the marketplace. The government’s role is to be the referee wearing the striped shirt, governing the game to make sure it’s played fairly.

“But when the referee starts determining the outcome of the game, they’ve ceased being a referee and have become a player. Government is constitutionally prohibited from choosing a side in the market. And that’s exactly what TARP and the bail-outs have done,” Huckabee said.

Question: Huckabee was asked about his feelings on Congress and the President.

“I got excoriated during the campaign because I talked about the ‘axis of power’ between Wall Street and Washington. I said there was a collusion that would come back to bite us. And I was laughed at and ridiculed by the Republican Establishment and a year later I was proven right,” said Huckabee.

Question: Many conservatives and Republicans say the problem is Obama. Many liberals and Democrats say it was Bush. We say we have a free enterprise economic system. But we have two economic systems operating in this country - the free enterprise of small businesses and the cartelized system for large national and global corporations. Virtually nobody in Congress will go up against the cartelized industries.

“That’s one of the things I essentially said in my book, ‘Do the Right Thing,’ and some of it is in ‘Hope to a Higher Ground.’ Some of the previous books I’ve written really detail that very position,” said Huckabee. “We’ve had an unholy alliance between people and power, and the people who funded them.”

Question: Including large multinational corporations?

“Sure, oh yeah,” Huckabee added.

Question: Leaders are not born. Leaders arrive. Where are you?

“I think it’s a matter of being at the right place at the right time and making yourself available,” Huckabee said. “I became governor under rather unusual circumstances and (later) ran for president with the view that I felt I could bring a different style of leadership to the country. As far as what the future holds, the honest answer is I just don’t know.”