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Living to run and running to live Monday, Feb 18, 2008 By John Brummett Once there was a blustery and egomaniacal newspaper columnist, if I might risk redundancy, who went on a columnizing rampage about the basketball coach. The mad columnist wrote that this coach was a hopeless nincompoop who simply had to be fired lest the local college team never achieve success again. Then this basketball coach took his team to the national championship. His guys put down Duke on a late three-pointer. So then the wild and crazy newspaper columnist, now passed on to the great op-ed page in the sky, wrote that the coach never could have done it without him. The criticism had made the coach tougher and better, you see. Why, that had been the method to the columnist's madness all along, or so the columnist explained. That brings us to Mike Huckabee, who is still running for the Republican presidential nomination though it is a physical impossibility for him to win. He needs more than 800 delegates. Only a little more than 700 remain to be contested. You do the math, because he sure as heck won't. In other words, Huckabee could run the table, winning every delegate still available, and still he'd fall short. All he would accomplish by his own success would be to deny John McCain an outright victory, lift the unctuous Mitt Romney to kingmaker and put the Republicans in the same heck of a mess the Democrats are liable to wind up in. Except to hear him tell it, that is. Huckabee explained the other day that his continued candidacy will make John McCain stronger, and thus is good for McCain and the Republicans in their chances of dealing successfully with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in the fall. This assumes that it is good for McCain to continue to be on the ballot every Tuesday to compile sometimes embarrassingly anemic victory margins. It assumes that it is good for television networks to do exit polls every Tuesday showing that conservatives can't stand McCain and couldn't possibly bring themselves to vote for this man with whom they are tragically stuck as their nominee. It assumes that it is good for Republicans to hold primaries attended by roughly half the number of people who are drawn to the thoroughly more fashionable Democrats. It assumes that it is good for McCain to come out every Tuesday night and give a clumsily delivered "victory" speech moments after Obama has just inspired tens of thousands with hopes and dreams and perfect pitch and brilliant cadence. Huckabee has an idea he'll do well in Texas on March 4. So he's in for three more weeks, at which time he hopes to achieve personal success that would effectively showcase the weakness of his party's nominees in only the nation's largest and most vital red state. This, you must understand, will be good for McCain. It'll make him so much stronger once it's demonstrated empirically that the pickup truck drivers in Texas have such little use for him they voted for even the hopeless preacher instead. This is all nonsense by Huckabee, of course. It's in the best interests of McCain and Republicans for the anointing to take place and for the planning and coalescing to begin. But Huckabee is a marathoner, and sometimes marathoners run simply from inertia. Huckabee runs merely to run. He also runs for his self-aggrandizement. He has no job to go back to, but he can get some high-dollar sermons out of this. He might get a cable talk show. And, shoot, it's conceivable that he could wind up an aging heartbeat from the presidency. But I'm thinking McCain is not all that crazy about him right now. ------- John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com. |
