Huck Hires Ed 'Walking Around' Rollins

I know I've been picking on Huck a lot lately, but I do have some legitimate excuses. First, I actually nearly joined his camp a couple of weeks ago, for about 24 hours, and actually responded to a telephone survey as a Huck supporter. Just prior to that, I wrote a post titled "Plastic & Elastic," expressing my abiding frustration with Romney.

Then I became disaffected with Huck, big time. What looked like authenticity quickly became lunacy. I looked closer at his policy prescriptions and his record and saw a steady pattern of lightweight deliberation. His tax policy is laughable, and demonstrates as much absence of rigor as did his clemency habits as governor. And then, of course, there is the overt play on religion that has frustrated so many.

But now he's made another move that shows his lack of foresight. He's gone and hired Ed Rollins to run his campaign. Yes, that Ed Rollins. The one who made himself infamous for bragging that he had won the NJ gubernatorial election for Christine Todd Whitman by paying black preachers "walking around money" to get them to keep their congregations at home. He later retracted the claim.
Let's take a quick look at his credentials, per Reuters:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Friday hired a veteran strategist and Washington political insider to run his surging campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Ed Rollins, who masterminded former U.S. President Ronald Reagan's landslide re-election in 1984 and worked on Ross Perot's independent presidential bid in 1992, will serve as Huckabee's national campaign chairman.

Masterminded the 1984 re-election? Oh, spare me! That was like saying Joe Torre masterminded the New York Yankees to the 1996 World Series. Give me a payroll like that, and the question isn't how you can win, it's how you can lose. There is no way Reagan could have lost in 1984, no matter how skilled or incompetent his team.

That leaves us with Ross Perot, a campaign on which, to his credit, he bailed when it became common knowledge that the candidate's lights were on but no one was home.

Whatever his credentials, the Rollins hiring presents some interesting possibilities, especially if Obama makes it through. Walking around money, anyone?