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Hugs for Our Boy Mike Saturday, Mar 22, 2008 By John Brummett Sometimes, if not so much anymore, you just want to give Mike Huckabee a big old hug. Or a regular-sized one, now that he's shed those pounds. This usually comes a few days after he's given you reason to deplore his incurable demagoguery. That's the pattern. Wednesday morning was hugging time. Huckabee was a guest on MSNBC, of course. This man draws his lifeblood by the light of a camera and the beaming up of a satellite. The subject was Barack Obama and his pastor. Huckabee was an ideal guest. He could give you the politician's angle. He could give you the preacher's angle. What we couldn't have counted on was that he'd give you the compassionate, tolerant angle, and reveal a bit of himself in the process - that his Dr. Jekyll would crowd out his Mr. Hyde side this day. But he did. And it did. First Huckabee made the point that, while he wholly disagreed with some of those more famously incendiary statements of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, we should remember this: "Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Rev. Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said that, if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you'd say 'Well, I didn't mean to say it quite like that.'" Huckabee surely was speaking a tad autobiographically. He's known for getting himself in political trouble by going over the top in his extemporaneous rhetoric, for playing too recklessly to the crowd, for choosing the most inappropriate and offensive metaphor, for breathtaking hyperbole. Now we know that he learned all that from the pulpit, from speaking off the cuff in search of that resounding and validating "amen." He always wanted to be given passes in such instances. Now we can see that at least there's consistency. Huckabee wants Obama's pastor to get a little of that same leniency. Then, even more impressively, Huckabee asked for a little forbearance for black anger in America. Here's what he said: "And one other thing I think we've got to remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, 'That's a terrible statement,' I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I'm going to be probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you - we've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, 'You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus.' And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, 'I probably would, too.' In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me." He has a pretty good-sized one, mostly class-based, as it is. This is what I think Huckabee is up to: He hopes and intends to emerge as a leader, if not the leader, of the Christian evangelical political movement. But he hopes and intends to reform that movement and its message, to supplement the social conservatism on abortion and gays with a loving and tolerant message of Christian benevolence on other matters, race paramount among them. I'd say illegal immigration, too, but he pretty much sold out on that on the campaign trail. His challenge will be to keep Mr. Hyde in check. ------- 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. |
