Mike Huckabee, soon to run for evangelical pope by going through an exercise of pretending to run for the Republican presidential nomination, says a lot of things that are not quite so.
Some people say he's full of it. I don't much care for such language. I prefer to say that Huckabee is given chronically to hyperbole. And I like to explain that his kind of hyperbole--which overcooks the narrative of pristine good against pure evil--is a peril of Huckabee's formative days in the preaching profession.
Fundamentalist and evangelical preachers usually don't last long preaching about ambiguity and ambivalence.
Huckabee's latest hyperbole is that he's the perfect Republican to oppose Hillary Clinton because he spent his early political life battling and defeating the vaunted Clinton political machine in Arkansas and bears scars as proof.
So let us go in search of this entanglement and these scars by reviewing the political history in Arkansas of the chronic hyperbolizer.
I first heard of Huckabee, and first spoke with him, when he, as a young Texarkana preacher with a flair for visual and audio ministry, burst on the public scene in 1990 as the winning compromise candidate for president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention.
The convention had become embroiled in a controversy between moderates and conservatives. It had something to do with Ronnie Floyd, the Springdale mega-Baptist and conservative who is now head of the whole Southern Baptist Convention.
Huckabee often told me--perhaps it was hyperbole as well--that Baptist politics was tougher than regular politics.
Two years later, in 1992, Huckabee ventured into secular politics by seeking way too much too soon. He was the Republican challenger to U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers, who preceded Bill Clinton in Arkansas political prominence and whose organization was his own, not Clinton's.
Huckabee called Bumpers a pornographer for supporting the National Endowment for the Arts. For that, Huckabee got handed a 60-40 defeat. That perhaps left a scar, but it was Bumpers, not Clinton, who was out of state at the time getting elected president, who inflicted the wound.
So then, in 1993, with Clinton in Washington as president trying to get gays in the military and pass a budget while Hillary was leading a health-care reform task force, there was a special election in Arkansas. It was to replace as lieutenant governor one Jim Guy Tucker, who had ascended to the governorship on Clinton's ascending to the presidency.
In a light vote, Huckabee defeated the young Democratic nominee, lawyer Nate Coulter, by a scant 5,000 votes and a 51-49 margin.
Coulter had worked for Bumpers and Clinton, and ... well, I'll just quote Coulter's text to me on the question of whether he was, in that race, an agent of any Clinton machine.
He describes the matter thoroughly with the sharp and detailed memory of one haunted by narrow electoral defeat in a pivotal contest.
And he isn't the only one haunted.
But for 5,000 votes, Huckabee might be preaching today in Des Arc and the state might have embraced a new generation of Democratic leadership, though surely not one that could have survived Barack Obama's galling Arkansas voters by becoming president.
So Coulter wrote:
"In 1993 I obviously benefited from having worked for Bumpers and Clinton. I knew whom to call on in different counties and who liked politics. But more of that came from Dale's organization than Clinton's.
"Most of the Clinton benefit came from the negative reaction out of Clinton's folks when they learned that my main opponent in the primary, Tom McRae, had run against Clinton in 1990. Beating McRae was more important to them.
"The Bumpers crowd was more animated about Huckabee for challenging their man.
"Someone might point out that Huckabee had former and future Clinton spinmeister Dick Morris doing his media and he coined the negative term 'Clinton machine.'
"If there had really been a machine, I would have won all those Delta counties with bigger Clinton-like margins, and thus the election. As it was, I won narrowly in a score of counties in East Arkansas where Democrats used to rack up margins to offset Northwest Arkansas deficits. Result: Huckabee wins by 5,000 votes."
So then, in 1996, Tucker resigned after a federal conviction and a few-hour meltdown, and Huckabee became governor.
In 1998, Huckabee won the office by his own election, defeating a fine lawyer but political neophyte, Bill Bristow of Jonesboro, who had absolutely no tie to any Clinton machine.
In 2002, Huckabee won a harder-fought battle--getting 53 percent--against Jimmie Lou Fisher, who was indeed close to Clinton and his campaigns, but who had been a David Pryor disciple long before that.
Anyway, by then the Huckabee-Fisher race was about Huckabee's self-inflicted scars, mainly his supporting and facilitating convicted rapist Wayne Dumond's release from prison.
But there is this classic Arkansas connection: Dumond's original rape victim was a third-cousin of Clinton.
Maybe that's what Huckabee is talking about. It makes as much sense as anything else, which is to say precious little.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/21/2015