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Our Boy Mike changed out there Sunday, Mar 9, 2008 By John Brummett Running for president changed Mike Huckabee. Or perhaps it revealed him. This change, if that's what it was, was not for the better, though, like all of us, Huckabee had an expansive upside. When he commenced running, Huckabee was an economic populist worried about poor people and decrying corporate creed. He spouted assorted moderate views, such as the one reflecting compassion and enlightened pragmatism on illegal immigration. He told me that, like Ethel Merman, "I've gotta be me." I grasped what he was saying, though I thought it had been Sammy Davis Jr. Huckabee came off then as an independent maverick, perhaps the real compassionate conservative. He was an innovator who aspired to shift the Republican Party. He dared to connect more directly with the everyday guy on Main Street who leans conservative. He wanted to move away from the deep and corrupting bosom of Wall Street's ethos of money for money's sake. He was going to make this case that there are conservative values even more important than the almighty dollar. So how did all that turn out? Like this: Huckabee departed the campaign the other night as a marginalized right-wing religious niche candidate, the son of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. As if to demonstrate his transformation from political populist to mega-minister, Huckabee spent his last night as a presidential candidate in a ritzy Four Seasons Hotel near Dallas. There probably were more guests there from Wall Street than Main Street. It had transpired along the way that there was more currency in this right-wing religious niche, and I invoke currency both in metaphorical and actual ways. Huckabee sensed that his chance in Iowa was to play up his right-wing pulpit persona to nab religious conservatives who weren't going to go for Mitt Romney because they didn't trust Mormonism. Then, after getting creamed in New Hampshire where New Englanders don't much care for Southern evangelical blowhards, he decided his only chance was to resurrect himself with the religious conservative card in South Carolina. This man who once gave us soaring rhetoric of racial reconciliation even decided to try to revive that settled issue of South Carolina's affinity for the Rebel battle flag. Huckabee came out in favor of this flag's display, because, as he said, anybody telling a guy from Arkansas what to do with his flag would be advised, in turn, what to do with that flag. Huckabee kept whining to reporters that they shouldn't be defining him as a religious candidate exclusively. He usually was saying this as he walked away from a megachurch that had invited him to speak for a big paycheck. And he kept denying that he had abandoned that early populism. He denied it on the way to a speaking payday on the Cayman Islands. For the last month, his campaign was solely about his profile so that he might land a better TV deal for himself, either in cable news talk or with his own entire religious network, or, best of all, both. If he's not on McLaughlin this very Friday, quipping while Eleanor tries to screech in edgewise, I'll be surprised. I'm reminded of something said to me by my young right-wing punditizing colleague here in Arkansas, the sartorially outspoken David Sanders, a former Huckabee gubernatorial aide. He had me as a guest a few weeks ago on the little television show that AETN lets him have one Friday each month. One of his questions to me that day was whether I agreed that Huckabee had "left part of his soul" in South Carolina by seeking to demagogue in favor of the lamented Confederacy. That was an interesting way to put it. Actually, I remember something about that from my own church-immersed youth, when we were taught that the poor were blessed. They asked in those days: What does it profit a man, really, to gain the whole world but lose his own soul? Quite a bit, I'm guessing. ------- 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. |
