Huckabee, Palin vie for spotlight

Competing book tours offer clues to aspirations, analyst says

Sarah Palin signs copies of her book this past week at a Barnes & Noble in Phoenix. She’ll make a stop at the Sam’s in Little Rock on Tuesday.
Sarah Palin signs copies of her book this past week at a Barnes & Noble in Phoenix. She’ll make a stop at the Sam’s in Little Rock on Tuesday.

— They jockey for airtime on Fox, ogle the same groups of voters for a possible presidential run and now have launched competing book tours.

Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee began their tours within three days of each other. The former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate appeared at a Barnes & Noble in Phoenix on Tuesday. Huckabee kicked off his tour at a Barnes & Noble in neighboring Peoria, Ariz., on Friday.

Palin, who is due in central Arkansas this Tuesday, will hit 13 states, mostly in the nation’s middle, with multiple stops in Iowa, Texas and Louisiana. Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and 2008 Republican primary runner-up, is making twice as many appearances, but in far fewer states.

Huckabee is making 32 stops in comparison with Palin’s 16, but in only four states: Arizona, California, Florida and a signing in New Jersey.

He lost in all four in 2008.

Huckabee’s newest release is a children’s book, Can’t Wait Till Christmas. It’s his second foray into Christmas-reading fare. Last year’s A Simple Christmas made Huckabee a best-selling author for 2009, but his literary success was eclipsed by Palin’s Going Rogue.

Palin is touting America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, another installment of her political and philosophical memoirs.

Do book sales conjure up political success? Can a book tour itinerary be interpreted as a political road map?

Ouachita Baptist University political scientist Hal Bass cautions against reading too much into the itinerary.

“I think you can over think this kind of stuff and try to find correlations that don’t have any causal relationships to them,” Bass said. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Palin didn’t respond to requests for comment. Nor did Huckabee.

But Bass said their choices of destinations might yield insight into their political calculations.

“Palin is playing to her strength,” Bass said of her tour, which also touches down in Oklahoma, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, South Carolina and Ohio as well as a Tuesday signing at Sam’s Club in Little Rock.

Huckabee, by contrast, is venturing into parts of the country where he needs to make inroads.

“Huckabee is trying to broaden his base of appeal beyond where it was in 2008, which was essentially evangelicals in the Midwest and South. He’s trying to establish his identity outside his wheelhouse, his comfort zone,” Bass said.

Caroline Sun, a senior publicist for Penguin Young Readers Group, said Huckabee’s book tour was, well, just a book tour.

“We designed the tour to promote the Governor’s new children’s book, CAN’T WAIT TILL CHRISTMAS, and his adult title, A SIMPLE CHRISTMAS, in the weeks leading up to the holiday season,” Sun wrote in an e-mail.

A poll released last week shows Palin holding a 2 percentage-point lead over Huckabee in a GOP primary (19 percent to Huckabee’s 17 percent), but 51 percent of the voters surveyed hold an unfavorable view of Palin while 25 percent view Huckabee negatively.

Huckabee’s 41 percent favorability rating also trumps Palin’s 36 percent.

In a head-to-head match against President Barack Obama, Huckabee loses 46 percent to 44 percent, but Palin comes up short 48 percent to 40 percent in the poll.

The poll released Monday by Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., surveyed 2,424 registered voters nationwide and had a margin oferror of 2 percentage points.

Last weekend in Des Moines, Huckabee told reporters he hadn’t decided if he’d run for president, saying that “I don’t plan to jump in a pool unless there is water in it.”

On Monday, Huckabee said Palin could “run away” with the Republican nomination and that, if he does run, he’d prefer that Palin endorsed him and stayed out of the race, according to The Washington Post.

Ultimately, what’s in the books matters less than the media attention generated by book-related interviews and appearances, Bass said.

“What all this is about is exposure, attention. Content of the book is arguably less important. You associate yourself with motherhood, God and apple pie, and both of these volumes are sufficiently in tune,” he said.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/28/2010

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