See Mike run ... maybe

Mike Huckabee made big news Saturday night. He announced he was giving up a major media gig providing big bucks.

That's like my beagle Roscoe announcing he was giving up sniffing.

In a related development, Huckabee also announced that he couldn't foreclose the possibility that he might seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

He ran for president in 2008 for the purpose of doing well enough to get a show on Fox. Now he gives up the show on Fox so that he may pursue the idea of running for president.

Thus he currently behaves as the inverse of himself.


Here is what I think has happened:

Friends and supporters have persuaded Huckabee that the Republican presidential field is uncommonly weak and susceptible to his overwhelmingly superior political talent. No one in the potential field can match him for glibness and wit and superficial personal appeal.

Perhaps he has heard, for as long as he could stay awake, a speech by Jeb Bush, who gave up a personality so that his brother George W. could have one.

Huckabee has been buoyed by the Election Day exit poll in Iowa--where, don't forget, he won the caucuses in 2008--showing him with a 19 percent plurality as the preferred presidential candidate among Republican voters.

He also has been buoyed by his base of support among evangelical Christians--fellow pastors and the like--who love the hyperbolic and preacherly way he condemns the homosexuals and abortionists.

And he has been heartened by a bit of establishment Republican encouragement--not previously something to which he has been accustomed--from people believing him to provide a suitable weapon for sapping votes from the rising kook-right candidates Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Ben Carson.

It was amusing Saturday night to see Paul's campaign take to Twitter to say Republicans need a presidential candidate who cuts taxes, not raises them, and who opposes, not embraces, the Common Core educational goals.

Huckabee was quite the tax-raiser in Arkansas, and, though he has since tried to backtrack, an early advocate of Common Core.

Finally, there are a few Republicans who like the idea of confronting Hillary Clinton with an insult-wielding pulpiteer from the place down South where she spent a few unhappy years. Huckabee would rout Hillary in Arkansas, and some national Republicans relish the chance to put a spotlight on that.

So you live and learn. And what Huckabee knows from his previous presidential campaign is that--if he actually intends to be serious the next time--he needs prearranged money and pre-established organizational support to kick in once the shtick has done for him what it can.

That means that, in order merely to keep his current campaign option alive, he must now set about lining up financial backing and an organization.

And that smacks enough of an active candidacy that Fox--which is fine with being biased for conservatives but not with being biased among them--found it necessary to tell him he'd have to give up the Saturday night hour-long talk show of more than six years running.

I'm thinking he could probably get the show back. His ratings were fine for a Saturday night cable talkfest. And he departed with an embarrassingly solicitous on-air extolling of Fox president Roger Ailes.

In the meantime, Huckabee has yet another book, something about God and guns and grits and gravy, soon coming out. He will commence selling it today on Jim Bakker's radio show. He will continue to do radio commentaries and make paid speeches.

And then: If he really wants to be the Republican presidential nominee, to the point that he will toil to raise plenty of money to go with the glib, and seek some substance to augment the style, then he has a mildly credible shot.

In the end, I think his bid for the nomination would fail, in part because he was a pragmatic and progressive governor of Arkansas--raising taxes and consolidating schools and expanding Medicaid and spending tobacco-settlement money and talking compassionately about the children of illegal immigrants.

Today's Republican primary voters won't stand for that kind of thing, unless they're the kind already voting for Jeb Bush.

My instinct is that Huckabee won't run and will wind up hosting the show again by summer. But people closer to him say my instinct is yesterday's and wrong.

They say that Huckabee is changed and dead serious this time. They say he can can lock in the evangelicals and get the money. They say he can win in Iowa and then in South Carolina and then in a Southern-wide super primary.

They say his brand otherwise will wane and that this is his last and best chance.

That part about the brand otherwise waning ... that's the part that maybe I can begin to understand.

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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 01/06/2015

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