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| | Huckabee's White House calculus
Sunday, May 22, 2005 By John Brummett Mike Huckabee really is going to run for president, a person close to him told me matter-of-factly at an accidental lunch meeting the other day. For the moment, Huckabee wouldn't be among the top 10 prospects mentioned if you asked a supposed national political expert to assess the likely field of Republican candidates for president in 2008. You'd hear first about Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Jeb Bush, Bill Frist, George Allen, Chuck Hagel, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, George Pataki and Condoleezza Rice. Huckabee might be next in line only because he's on a book tour and getting interviewed every time he turns around about losing a third of himself and running a marathon. But even when he's mentioned, it tends to be condescendingly and incorrectly. Charles Cook, a leading political handicapper, wrote the other day that Huckabee would be a potential beneficiary if Santorum, the Pennsylvania senator who is the most polarizing right-winger in the prospective field, didn't run. Our Boy Mike looks like a Santorum-styled social conservative only because he came out of a Southern Baptist pulpit and talks the talk on abortion. When he's traditionally right wing, he's combatively so and overstatedly so. Otherwise, though, his positions on immigration and Medicaid spending and the tobacco settlement make him something akin to the compassionate conservative that Karl Rove helped George W. Bush contend falsely that he was. Jim Holt, the Hutchinsons - those are the real socially conservative Republicans in Arkansas. The essence of a Huckabee candidacy would be compelling biography, convenient geography and a philosophical straddle linking social conservatives who'd like his pulpit background and less strident conservatives who'd like his moderation. Huckabee's covered on biography. He's the Republican not only from Bill Clinton's home state, but hometown, who - as the story would be told to Republican primary voters - led Arkansas out of the corrupt Clintonian wilderness and got famously fit in the process. He would not be a beneficiary if Santorum didn't run. He would be a beneficiary if Jeb Bush kept his vow not to run and Tennessee's Bill Frist continued to underwhelm as Senate majority leader. That would leave the South, delegate-rich and the electoral base for any Republican presidential candidate, wide open. That would be the geographic component. But maybe the best thing going for Huckabee is the rampant impracticality among the 10 people mentioned ahead of him. Giuliani is pro-choice, pro-gay and anti-gun, and Republicans who embrace him as a celebrity and hero wouldn't overlook those matters if he ran for president. McCain is famously temperamental and he currently is being unforgivably friendly with moderate Democrats in trying to fashion a filibuster compromise. Frist appears to be cold and inept. Hagel's problem is that senators don't get elected president. Romney is another little-known governor. Santorum is an extremist. Pataki is about as liberal as Giuliani. Condoleezza is wholly untested in electoral politics and it remains to be seen whether Republican primary voters would embrace an African-American woman for president. Virginia's George Allen might be Huckabee's biggest problem, but governors always seem to do better that senators. Finally, I should take this opportunity to correct recent idle speculation in this space that was as inane as any I've ever offered. It was that Huckabee would resign the governorship next spring to let Win Paul Rockefeller run as the incumbent governor in the Republican primary. That would force Huckabee to give up in midterm his chairmanship of the National Governors' Association. I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know that I was thinking. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
