Either the unctuous Mike Huckabee is tremendously undisciplined or his internal polling shows him slipping in Iowa to the equally oleaginous Mitt Romney. For Mike has gone negative, against all promises. Big time. And with real flair.
A horse race is what these preliminary spectacles are commonly called. But the one in Iowa is no longer branded by the noble equine; it is, I am delighted to pass along, merely that of a greased-pig race.
The two gubernatorial Holy Men have been kicking, squealing and spinning in the mud, but each is so lathered by the slipperiest of genuine insincerity, neither has been able to execute a full Nelson.
Till now.
The Huckster finally pulled it off, although in truth he pinned himself -- not Romney -- and for that he gets even more points.
What in Huckabee's God's name am I talking about?
Well, it's certainly not the Arkansas governor's recent deployment of garden-variety negative campaigning, whose accepted premise is that a candidate verbally assaults his chief opponent at every turn for being so dang negative all the time. Or, as Mr. Huckabee reframed the paradox: "Every Iowa voter is being bombarded with nasty and negative attack ads that are just absolutely untrue, and I feel that I have to set the record straight. All I’m trying to do is make sure the issues are framed in the proper context, and I don’t think it’s a matter of trying to be negative at all."
And that's when an aide slips the note: "Insert knife now." Which Mike promptly does, leaving blood all over the floor. One classic thrusting maneuver is his offensive defense of his own pardons-gone-wild record, in which he tells "the story of a decorated Iraq war veteran, Anthony Circosta, who could not get a job as a police officer [in Massachusetts] because of a blot on his record for harmlessly shooting another boy with a BB gun at age 13."
Says Mike of this immense human tragedy: "Mitt Romney twice said no because Mitt Romney wants to brag that he never ever gave a pardon. I wouldn’t be bragging about not giving a decorated soldier a chance to become a police officer."
Ouch. A blistering twofer. Not only is Mitt anti-soldier, he's anti-cop to boot, which surely gets the patriotic, law-and-order blood of Republicans everywhere boiling. But heaven forfend that you read anything negative into that. Mike is a Man of God, and he wouldn't manipulate your emotions; nor would he ever cast the first stone; nor would he ever engage in "tearing each other down," as his latest TV ad shrinks from in pious horror.
But so much for such pedestrian hypocrisy. What, pray tell, constituted Huckabee's match-winning Nelson?
Well, forget horses and forget pigs. This one has something of the canine in it -- something along the lines of an offspring of Checkers or Fala.
As you have no doubt heard, Mr. Romney has had less than glowing things to say about John McCain lately; ever since, that is, John started crawling up Mitt's skirt in New Hampshire and pounding him where it hurts. And to the rescue has come ... Mr. Huckabee.
"It is enough to attack me" (and his poor little dog, too?), said the indignant governor in the senator's defense. "But now to attack John McCain" -- "an honorable, decent, true-to-heaven American." And Mike said this presumably without giggling or gagging.
If that sort of maudlin, wholly self-interested friendship of the enemy of one's enemy -- complete with angels soaring betwixt high-flying American flags -- doesn't make you smile in admiration of the greasiest pig of the litter, then you're love of our nation's political swill has faded beyond retrieval.
In fact I salute Mike Huckabee, for he's showing us that the game really can't be played except in the rubbish of genuine insincerity and chronic hypocrisy.
Oh, how I pray that Mike goes all the way. But my money is still on McCain by default, for his more porcine compadres are oinkingly clearing his path.