Mike Huckabee committed not one but two faux pas last week that sharply lowered his standing in the vice presidential sweepstakes. His best hope is that John McCain was too busy with other demons in his campaign to notice.
A cardinal rule is that no one should appear to be too eager to be on the ticket. It is better to be indifferent or reluctant than to be a supplicant for the job. But there was Huckabee in network interviews almost pleading for the nomination, pointing out how much kinder he had been to McCain during the presidential campaigns than the others and how he could not imagine anyone he would rather be on the presidential ticket with than McCain. He said he would like very much to be the running mate.
That might be survivable, although it was embarrassing to watch. It is far worse to be the perpetual clown who finally told one lame joke too many.
Huckabee did that in a speech to the National Rifle Association, which had invited a parade of Republican politicians to speak.
Jokes have always been a Huckabee trademark and sometimes they are quick and clever. But he has an uncontrollable impulse to force a joke when the occasion doesn’t call for it or before the wrong audience. It’s as if he wants to show people that he is not the usual stiff-necked Southern Baptist preacher. Before lawmakers, to embarrassed silence or counterfeit laughter, he would tell a poor joke about animal sex or about flatulence.
Outside Arkansas borders, he has been prone to make jokes about his native state, sometimes with a hard edge. On a New York radio show he called Arkansas “a banana republic” that stole votes from good Republicans like himself. In Oklahoma, he chided the state for having tough environmental standards and threatened jokingly to dam the Illinois River in Arkansas so that it would not flow into Oklahoma if the state kept trying to make polluting Arkansas industries clean up their discharges into the stream, which supplies drinking water to eastern Oklahoma.
During the presidential de-bates, Huckabee early on won some attention for his lighthearted jabs, so he thought it was expected of him. So he interjects little jibes throughout every appearance. When they fall flat or someone takes them seriously, he protests that people should lighten up.
But the NRA prank was of a different magnitude. When a clatter backstage interrupted his speech, Huckabee paused, grinned and quipped that it was Barack Obama tripping a chair and diving to the floor when someone aimed a gun at him. One of the sub-rosa fears of the election season is of a racist crank taking a potshot at the putative Democratic nominee for president.
There are some scary web sites.
The crack brought not a grin from the NRA audience but a rumble of amazement at his obtuseness. Afterward, he issued something of an apology — he did not intend to disparage Sen. Obama — but he said he did not remember making the remark. He had to listen to a tape to realize he had said it. It was just a little inept humor and people should move on, he was saying by weekend.
A vice presidential candidate cannot help the ticket very much — people vote for the president — but the rule is that he should at least not hurt. McCain makes enough gaffes himself.
He doesn’t need a loose cannon either as a running mate or a vice president. He needs a sober-minded adult, not a jester.
—Ernie Dumas
