Huckabee the Clinton Slayer, a work of fiction suitable for instant home viewing through video on demand, or maybe one of the C-SPAN channels, premiered Tuesday in Hope.
Mike Huckabee, professional hyperbolizer and quipster, trained in voice, diction and pretense from a background in radio, the pulpit, politics and television, stars as the brave hero.
This is the story of a fireman’s son from Bill Clinton’s hometown who overcomes the powerful oppression of the dreaded Clinton Machine in Arkansas. Against all odds, the fireman’s son becomes the Republican governor of the Clinton-controlled state. Then, relying on his independent wits alone, he emerges as a national force.
Now he deems himself for the second time—but for real this time, he insists—suitable for the Republican presidential nomination and even the presidency.
In the story, Huckabee rises to offer the nation its last best hope to keep that same Clinton Machine from regaining its burdensome grip on the entire country in the person of Bill Clinton’s wife, Hillary, killer of thousands … of emails.
The show’s trailer is a video in which Rex Nelson talks about Huckabee’s becoming lieutenant governor in 1993 only to find the door nailed shut to his office at the state Capitol.
The video as originally shown identified Nelson as being with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, as he is, but only as a once-a-week columnist writing very engaging apolitical material about the culture and heritage and food—especially the food—of Arkansas.
As corrected for presentation Tuesday at the premiere, the video identified Nelson as the former political editor of the paper, which he was, and ably—before, that is, becoming director of communications for Huckabee as governor.
The point is to endow Nelson’s comments with the imprimatur of journalistic observation rather than the unabashed advocacy in which he actually engages, and in which he is proud to engage. Those radio-throated Ouachita Baptists stick together, you know.
Nelson’s misapplied context is a minor point, perhaps, when compared to the video’s image of the nailing shut of the door of the lieutenant’s office.
The intimation is that the dastardly act was performed by the evil Clinton Machine to squelch the white-hat incursion of the noble Huckabee.
Actually, and unbelievably, the pointless lieutenant governor has a suite of state Capitol rooms. There is a general reception area, then a closet-sized office to the side and then the private corner quarters of the lieutenant governor himself.
What was nailed shut as Huckabee entered was the closet-sized office to the side. It had been shut off to him by Secretary of State Bill McCuen, later disgraced and now passed, and no friend of Clinton.
McCuen’s explanation, albeit with a grin, was that he needed that space for the staff of the Martin Luther King Jr. Commission.
Huckabee eventually was given use of the little anteroom. The full suite remains today the offices of an unneeded staff for an unneeded lieutenant governor.
A reminder: For a while last year, this suite was occupied by a staff to a lieutenant governor who did not exist and who was not replaced.
Nailing shut any part of that office to any lieutenant governor is a defensible act in the context of the best use of taxpayer-owned square footage. But McCuen took his action in the spirit of what they called “rascalism” in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?
And Bill Clinton had not a thing in the world to do with it. And Hillary didn’t either.
By the time Huckabee had become lieutenant governor, Bill Clinton was otherwise engaged extending his machine to all of the United States. Hillary was otherwise engaged trying to wrap the machine’s tentacles around the nation’s health-care industry.
All of that is to say that Huckabee the Clinton Slayer is—as they say—based on a true story. It is not itself a true story.
Fictionalizing an actual historical account is in the finest tradition of the American entertainment industry. You have Lawrence of Arabia, anything by Oliver Stone and now the Huckabee presidential campaign.
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.