Well, I ran into Mike Huckabee the other day.
It was the very day I'd read online an excellent retrospective piece in the Arkansas Times calling Huckabee "bipolar." The point was that he's often really bad but on rare occasions pretty good and is altogether hard to figure.
Actually, to say I "ran into" Huckabee suggests happenstance, which is not the case. I ran into him on purpose.
I ventured to a media availability session that the second-time Republican presidential candidate was having at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Little Rock moments before a big fundraiser elsewhere in the hotel.
What were they going to do? Make a spectacle of throwing me out?
Goodness no. Quite the contrary.
As Huckabee's daughter and campaign manager Sarah put it afterward: "He gave you a lot of love." As his old friend and aide Rex Nelson says, "He loves sparring with you."
Alas, I have a weakness for personality. Huckabee has one--a personality, I mean, though, yes, a weakness as well, or three.
Hillary Clinton would make a better president, infinitely so, but you don't spar with steel and ice. And she doesn't have media availability sessions.
Huckabee is always more tolerable in person than he is in the remote reading of something outrageous he has said or done. He is personally engaging. He was a good governor. Really.
But he can simply take your breath with some of the cynical nonsense he can come out with in what I deem to be less an exercise in seeking the presidency than in burnishing his Falwellian brand.
So there I was exchanging joviality with a man I'd called the Huckster and Wide Body. And standing over to the side was his wife, Janet, whom I'd called Sugar Button and Jethrine.
I didn't exchange any joviality with her. She scares me about as much as Hillary does.
Speaking of the nonsense Huckabee can come out with: The first question to him came from The Associated Press, which wanted to know how he responded to criticism of his having said a month before to religious broadcasters that he wished he'd declared himself transgender when he was in school so he could have gone into the girls' locker room.
Hadn't he trivialized the issue? Hadn't he managed to invoke some sort of prurience toward children as a factor in gender identity?
Huckabee answered that he'd been in Jonesboro earlier in the day and talked to a man encountering stress in the Obama economy. He said people want to talk about that--and about ISIS beheading homosexuals--rather than these things we in the media fixate on.
At that point I must have displayed some sort of facial expression indicating I had something to ask. Huckabee called on me, remarking that obviously I had something on my mind.
I asked if maybe he shouldn't begin to think better of his chronic habit of extemporaneous or spontaneous quipping--the ad-libbed aside, often in questionable taste, delivered as a kind of jazz riff--to amuse his audience.
That's what I think it is, you see.
I don't think he's really as mean and insensitive as he sometimes behaves or asserts. I don't think he's cynically sending a message of hate to the right wing.
I think he simply wants to entertain the audience. He thinks he's being funny, and that funny is the opposite of serious, and that, therefore, we shouldn't take him seriously no matter what he's running for or what he's quipping about.
He replied to my question by saying he couldn't help himself. He said I wouldn't like him nearly as much if he turned off the quip machine.
Question asked.
Question deflected.
I believe I know the real Mike Huckabee. He is an entertainer, a gabber, a huckster and a yuckster, a man whose stock in trade is talking. That's his essence. That's his depth.
The pulpit, the TV studio--those are the places he belongs.
He can talk beautifully. And then something cringe-worthy suddenly will spew forth from his brain and fly out of his mouth, absent any internal regulator.
Huckabee's essence is talking to impress and amuse and entertain, just as Bill Clinton's is to be loved and just as Hillary's is to be respected for her Methodist morality.
We all have such an essence. Mine is needing you to find insight in what I just wrote.
As he left the media availability session, Huckabee stopped by to say he'd read on social media of my admiration for the competence of his daughter, Sarah, a new mother as of the weekend.
He asked where I thought she came by her good qualities.
That was when Janet piped up. "From me," she said.
Huckabee said he'd walked into that one, hadn't he?
Not walked into it. Talked into it. Per usual.
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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 06/09/2015