His spokesman apologized, sort of,but he accomplished what he wanted: tell the right wing base that he agrees with their hate of Obama. Wink, wink, nod, nod.
Michael Dale Huckabee is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Republican Party: He don’t get no respect. In poll after poll, the former Arkansas governor turned Fox News pundit rates as the most popular conservative public figure in the country. In December, a national Reuters Ipsos survey ranked him ahead, in ascending order, of Rush Limbaugh, Tim Pawlenty, Glenn Beck, Haley Barbour, and Mitt Romney—as well as Barack Obama and David Petraeus—in terms of his net favorability rating. (The only person ahead of Huckabee? Hillary Clinton.) More recently, an array of polls of Republican voters have put him at or near the top of the heap among potential GOP presidential candidates. Privately, several of Obama’s top political advisers believe Huckabee would be the toughest opponent for their boss. And yet most professional Republicans dismiss him, deride him, or, most damning of all, simply ignore him.
Perhaps he is not hard-core enough, though by making the Kenya remark he seems to be trying to tack hard right.
The truth is, there are good reasons to believe that Huckabee, in the end, will decline to run—and in so doing will shape the Republican race almost as much as if he gets in. What interests me more than the implications of his decision, however, is the reasoning behind it, the factors he is weighing, and what his thinking says about the state of the GOP heading into 2012.
On the writing of a new book, Huckabee says, “I felt maybe there was a need to present some of them in a way that was not written for academics. This book was not designed so it would be a textbook at Harvard.” Perhaps he flatters himself a bit too much.
though Huckabee asserts in his introduction that he doesn’t “doubt for a minute that Barack Obama loves our country and wants to make it better,” this ostensible graciousness evaporates in the chapters that follow. “Among nations that are traditionally anti-American, President Obama still enjoys high approval ratings,” Huckabee writes at one point. “Why am I not surprised?”
What kind of logic is that?
for all the grassroots energy that the tea party is providing to the GOP right now, the party Establishment still reigns when it comes to the raising of campaign cash—and little that Huckabee has done since 2008 has improved his standing there.
Beyond questions of money, this last consideration—the dynamics that will be in play in the Republican nomination contest—is what is weighing most heavily on Huckabee’s mind. “I think I would have the best chance in the general election, because I offer the most distinct but not rancorous contrast against Obama,” he says. “But the Republican primary, I’m trying to figure out where it goes this time. If it’s going to be a search for a problem-solving pragmatist communicating kind of guy, that’s one thing. But if it’s going to be a purity contest of who’s the most gun-loving, the most anti-immigrant, the most pro-life, the most everything, it gets ridiculous.”
One can only hope that Republicans slash one another savagely, and make their primaries a test of ideological purity. I'm rooting for Bachman and Palin to get in; Romney will run against himself in trying to gain his right wing purity badge, as will Newt. O, the prospects almost make me salivate.
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