COMMENTARY

The crickets chirp for thee

Most press accounts from the first Republican presidential cattle call over the weekend in Iowa mentioned that Sarah Palin was embarrassingly inane and Scott Walker impressive and Mike Huckabee also in attendance.

On Monday on the Morning Joe program on MSNBC, political pundit Mark Halperin said arch-conservative attendees at the event in Des Moines were interested in people currently engaged in the political fray, not in retreads and people selling books.

He didn’t call the name—Huckabee—but he described him aptly.

Our Boy Mike is the quintessential retread from 2008. He is running for president, sort of, but mostly he is peddling Gods, Guns, Grits and Gravy, a Bubba manifesto that calls Jay-Z a pimp and likens airport security checks to “bending over and taking it like a prisoner.”

USA Today carried a piece on the speeches by the nine prospective candidates who bothered to appear—Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney didn’t—and quoted from all except Huckabee’s and Rick Perry’s.

And there was news that one of Huckabee’s key operatives from his Iowa caucus victory in 2008 had signed on with Walker, the Wisconsin governor so currently immersed in the fray that he got elected three times the last four years in a blue state where he battled the unions and defeated them.

And no account of Huckabee’s bad weekend could credibly exclude that his old friends who write editorials for this newspaper referred to him Sunday as an Elmer Gantry who has no more business than Mitt Romney bothering us again with a presidential candidacy.

Huckabee’s fleeting flash of success in 2008 stemmed from his seeming freshness and his quips. He parlayed that into the media/entertainment career for which he was better suited. Now he returns with a tired shtick in an apparent attempt to fortify his brand as the quipping evangelical so that he can keep the bucks coming on the speaking and book-signing circuits.

Sometimes it’s necessary to run for president to keep your brand before the public. You see.

A show on Fox on Saturday night can get a little stale. So you have to get out on the road and talk about Beyoncé’s posterior region and how its exposure is not good for the little home-schooled children.

Huckabee is so shop-worn and brand-conscious that he is not making quite so much sense anymore.

The Good Mike, Bad Mike of occasional Arkansas gubernatorial progressivism is now Bad Mike, Worse Mike. The charmer of 2008 is hearing crickets in 2015.

He has taken to saying that we do not need to abide by court rulings legalizing same-sex marriage. Thus he is standing against the rule of law—against rights of equal protection and privacy—that are essential to orderliness and the avoidance of anarchy and chaos.

Thus he is presenting himself as the modern incarnation of Orval Faubus and George Wallace.

Now he says he opposes Common Core. Only months ago he was staunchly and admirably defending his early support for it as an initiative springing from governors to move toward uniform goals of educational accomplishment within a structure of state autonomy about how to achieve those goals.

Now he says he never was for this dreaded federal control of education.

That’s because his brand will not get fortified much if he loses conservative caucus-goers in Iowa and finishes something like eighth or ninth, distinguished from Perry only in that he can better remember the three points he said by way of introduction that he was getting to ready to make.

If Huckabee could get 40,000 or so votes in the Iowa caucuses next winter from home-schoolers and church ladies ready to mount holy war against our courts and the homosexuals, then he could further his media brand as the Baptist pope who twice was briefly a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination.

There’s currency in that, as a Gulf Coast McMansion attests.

I am convinced Huckabee no more wants to be president than we’d want him to be.

Actually, though, he might be a better president than candidate. He’d almost have to be, wouldn’t he?

But as our governor, Huckabee met many of his sworn obligations dutifully, even courageously. His silliness and offensiveness seem to rise only from his prostitution of the political process as a personal business marketing plan.

Running for president to market his brand has turned him into Jason Rapert minus the sincerity and plus a few pounds.

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.

Upcoming Events