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Huckabee reaches out to touch Reagan Tuesday, Dec 18, 2007 By John Brummett From the after-dinner dais, Mike Huckabee does a pretty good Ronald Reagan impersonation. I first heard it at one of those ancient roasts-and-toasts. The shifting of the head as he began by saying "well," mimicking dead-on that oddly engaging tone of seeming self-effacement - why, it was positively uncanny. Now Our Boy Mike is trying to take the imitation to real life, or least the version of real life occurring on the presidential campaign trail. Huckabee sees himself as something of a natural descendent or even second coming of Reagan. He comes at you as an accomplished professional communicator trained in radio and the pulpit, much as Reagan was trained in radio and the movie set. He seeks to emulate Reagan's pleasant if simplistic rhetoric, his pop conservatism laced with aw-shucks warmth, his quick and quipping humor. In August 1980, Huckabee was a kid and seminary dropout working as a communications aide for the fire-brand Baptist preacher, Jim Robison. That was when Robison brought Reagan to a religious gathering and pretty much declared the political culture war by which Reagan got elected to launch a conservative American cycle. Robison railed against the homosexuals. Reagan, who didn't attend church much, then got up and said all our answers, political or otherwise, could be found in the Bible. In late November, Huckabee was telling The Washington Post that he compared to Reagan. About this time in 1979, Huckabee recalled, Reagan was running behind in Iowa and lacking funds. Huckabee said the similarity to his own situation was brought to his mind in a recent visit with Ed Rollins, the old Republican strategist and operative who was Reagan's campaign manager for the landslide victory of 1984. So on Friday we got an indication of what that visit with Rollins had been about. Huckabee announced the bringing on of the essentially retired Rollins as his national campaign chairman. Huckabee was reaching out to try to touch Reagan. This announcement was more important for Rollins' longtime high profile - for the insider seriousness of Huckabee's candidacy that the association signals or lends - than for any practical application. It's as if the Razorbacks had hired as their new coach not Bobby Petrino, but, oh, Barry Switzer. You'd have had to sit up and take notice. Switzer has won national collegiate championships and a Super Bowl. But you'd have had to doubt whether Switzer was much in touch anymore with the game as now played. Ditto for Huckabee and Rollins. It's more than that, actually. In more recent times, Rollins has been failed or odd. He abandoned the Republicans in 1992 to sign on with Ross Perot, and that, predictably, turned out to be stormy and failed. When Rollins was a consultant to Christine Todd Whitman's successful Republican gubernatorial campaign in New Jersey, he popped off afterward about how they'd held the black vote down for the Democratic candidate by going to black preachers and making donations to their "favorite charities" to arrange for them not to encourage voter turnout from the pulpit. It landed Rollins in such hot water that his only way out was to call himself a liar. He said he'd made the whole thing up to embellish his reputation as a political mastermind. As a veteran politico with media savvy and insider pals, he was forgiven and permitted to insinuate himself back into the pundit class. Now he proclaims that he has one race left in him and that he will favor Our Boy Mike with it. Huckabee loves redemption. As we know from his record: If you beg his pardon, he's apt to grant it. ------- 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. |
