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How much for that handshake? Saturday, Feb 16, 2008 By John Brummett It sounds so funny you wish you had been there. As related by reporters, Mike Huckabee's charter plane was en route Wednesday from Little Rock to Wisconsin, site of a primary on Tuesday. Huckabee's campaign manager, Chip Saltsman, strolled over to give the traveling reporters a heads-up. It was that Huckabee would leave the campaign trail Friday night to go to the Cayman Islands to give a speech for hire, then return Sunday to resume campaigning in Wisconsin. The reporters thought this was a joke, and laughed. Why, the very idea that a candidate for president would depart the campaign for two days at such a vital juncture - hilarious. Why, the very idea that a candidate for president who had decried off-shore tax shelter havens would travel to such an infamous haven to collect a paycheck - such rich and powerful comic irony. That's a good one, Chip. It's good of you to keep it light. But seriously ... Alas, as it happened, Saltsman wasn't joking. This was real. Huckabee would indeed be making that quick trip to that exotic place at that precise juncture for that very purpose. As related by one reporter on board, Saltsman was rendered a tad testy and defensive by the reporters' honestly instinctive assumption that such a thing was laughable. This engagement had been scheduled for months, Saltsman said. The former governor had spoken at this event - the Young Caymanian Leadership Awards banquet, it turned out - several years before. Then Saltsman performed the whine that Huckabee has so long perfected and would himself repeat the next day. It's that old "woe is me, I'm not rich like everyone else" line. Saltsman explained that the former governor is the only candidate remaining in the presidential race who is not at the taxpayer trough getting paid for a public job he or she may not actually be performing at the moment, owing to the fact that he and she are always out campaigning. The governor has to earn his own private living with actual effort, so that he can pay his mortgage and insure his health care. And what he does for a living is talk - make paid speeches, that is, Saltsman explained. It wasn't as if Huckabee was going to the Cayman Islands to hide money. He was going to make money so that he could bring it back to the United States and let the relevant governments take 40 or so percent. Still, an active political candidate speaking for hire is a bit like a fellow campaigning for office and saying, "Ma'am, I'll kiss that baby, but the charge is a buck." Or announcing from the stump: "I'll be shaking hands at the rope line after this speech. Just see those people right over there about purchasing tickets." OK, I acknowledge that, on Grand Cayman, Huckabee wouldn't be speaking to voters. But he would be engaging in what is a basic political staple, and doing it for personal enrichment. And he would be taking time off from real campaigning to do it. It's just odd. It doesn't sound right. It went down better as a joke. Anyway, Huckabee knew when he decided to run for president that he didn't have an ongoing job or an abundance of holdings or a public office by which he could sustain himself. Yet now he whines. More than that, he persists in this campaign even while there isn't a good or mathematically sound or even sane reason for him to continue. I'll be glad when Huckabee gets his cable talk show. He's always needed a clearer line of separation between campaigning and money-making. Cashing in works better as a second phase to a public life, not as a concurrent phase. And the show ought to be pretty good. ------- 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. |
