Mike Huckabee: Another White House Whirl in 2012?

Before Sarah Palin became the embodiment of the conservative grassroots, another national candidate from a state beginning with "A" mastered 21^st century Republican populism on his way to winning the 2008 Iowa caucuses. During the campaign, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the funniest Republican since the heyday of Bob Dole, would go off on little-guy riffs like this: "If you're a person for whom 'summer' is a verb, if you went to Harvard or Yale, you probably think the economy is doing just dandy."

Get the new
PD toolbar!

After John McCain won the nomination, Huckabee did not fade away. Instead, he morphed into a guitar-playing Fox News weekend talk show host. But just to make sure that the Washington political press corps did not forget him, Huckabee appeared Wednesday at a reporters' breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. A former pastor, Huckabee was ostensibly plugging his gravely serious new public policy tome, "A Simple Christmas: Twelve Stories That Celebrate the True Holiday Spirit."

"There's no ulterior motive," Huckabee insisted, "although I assume people will look for one."

There was nothing in the Huckabee interview to inspire any get-me-rewrite frenzy among the reporters. But his morning-after-the-election comments do convey the minefield that social conservative politicians (and putative 2012 candidates) have to negotiate in dealing with the GOP's angry, tempest-in-a-teabag right flank. Asked about the vicious Republican divisions in Tuesday's upstate New York House election (23^rd Congressional District) won by the Democrats, Huckabee said, "Politics is not theology. In theology, things are pretty clear – left, right, up, down, black, white, heaven, hell. It's real simple stuff. Politics is not as pure. It never has been. It never will be." The problem, Huckabee concedes, is that Republican purists want a litmus test party as they say, in effect, "It has to be just like me – and nothing but."

Unlike Palin, who endorsed on Facebook the losing Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in New York's 23^rd district, Huckabee stayed on the sidelines without even a single tweet. He was troubled by Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava's liberal views on social issues (pro-abortion rights and gay marriage), but he was not willing to join Hoffman's third party uprising that drove Scozzafava from the race. "I feel sorry for people like Newt Gingrich, who was just excoriated over his support for Dede," Huckabee said, casting his lot with the practical politicians. As for Palin, whose neon-lit celebrity appears to irk Huckabee, he sniffed, "She apparently did not have a big impact on the ultimate outcome."

Over the decades, Monitor breakfasts have been where presidential campaigns have been launched and even lost. But Huckabee seems in no rush to overtly join the 2012 jousting. "I'm loving what I'm doing," he said, referring to his books, his Fox News show, and a radio show on ABC. "I know that people think that I'm doing everything I'm doing to set up for 2012. It's really not the case. I'm not going to get focused on it at all until 2010 is over."

All this is boilerplate, the kind of mechanical denials that invariably invite skepticism. But a few minutes later, Huckabee, a politician who is apparently making serious money for the first time in his career, said something about running for president again that had the ring of (gasp!) truth. "This is a money game, not an idea game," he said, harking back to the lessons of running against the likes of Mitt Romney in 2008. "And it's one of the great frustrations. And it's one of the reasons why I'm not jumping up and down and saying I'm going to run again. It's not only campaign money. It's that you need a lot of personal money to run. Can you forgo an income for up to two years?"

Huckabee – who is still waiting for a scientific consensus about the reality of global warming – will never be confused with Al Gore, who grew a rebellious beard after his heartbreak-house 2000 election loss. But it was telling that Huckabee, unlike almost all the reporters, did not deign to wear a tie to the Monitor breakfast. Afterwards, when I asked him about his sartorial choice, the 2008 White House dreamer replied, "I'm just enjoying that I don't have to wear a tie. And I'm not. And I love the freedom."

For Huckabee, freedom may be another word for no future primaries left to lose.


Follow PoliticsDaily On Facebook and Twitter,
and download the new Politics Daily toolbar!