Plumb Bob Blog

01/04/2008 (3:42 pm)

Politics With a Clear Conscience

It wasn’t a ploy. It was impromptu. It was genuine.

I know this is old news, but please read it. It says something remarkable about Mike Huckabee.

By December, Huckabee’s unexpected success in the polls both attracted and warranted attention from Big-Leaguers. So Ed Rollins, well-known political operative who engineered Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over Walter Mondale in 1984, joined the Huckabee campaign as national chairman in mid-December. And Rollins plays rough.

“The negatives feel good,” says Ed Rollins… “It’s like being a boxer when you’re young. To me, hitting somebody, knocking somebody down, is a great feeling. Firing out a negative ad just feels amazing.”

Since Romney was attacking, Rollins planned to attack back. They’d done the ad, they’d loaded mailers on the truck, they’d scheduled a press conference to launch the attack.

And then, Huckabee went for a jog about an hour before the news conference, and when he came back, he announced that he didn’t want to run the ad. But it was too late to cancel the press conference.

So Huckabee held the conference anyway. The WaPo describes the scene:

Surrounded by placards declaring “Enough Is Enough,” Huckabee showed the ad he said he wasn’t going to run, leaving reporters scrambling to determine whether this was a planned maneuver, an act of bad timing or something lifted from a Capra movie. “I just realized that this is not how we run our campaign in this state,” the candidate said. “We’ve gotten here by being positive.” All that was missing was Zuzu’s petals.

They didn’t understand, and Huckabee knew they wouldn’t understand. He knew it would be awkward. He knew it would look bad. He did it anyway. His conscience said he had to.

This is part of what being an Evangelical means. It means that sometimes, he’ll think better of some decision he’s made out of a sense of obligation to God, and let it put him in an awkward position. The awkward position is beside the point; it’s just something he’ll have to do. This won’t be the last time we see something like this.

What it means is that Mr. Huckabee cares more about God than he does about the “smart move.”

This is a remarkable campaign season. We’re already seeing one candidate, Fred Thompson, who chooses to run a campaign the way reporters have complained nobody ever runs — with thoughtful discussions of the issues instead of clever sound bites. And they’re ignoring him, proving that they really don’t like what they said they wanted.

Now, we’re seeing a politician who cares more about the right thing than the politically astute thing. And again, we react like it’s something wrong, rather than acknowledging that it represents something we’ve said all along that we wanted.

Maybe we don’t have the nation we say we want because we don’t really want it. Maybe we’re more committed to worthless, “classy” things, and when we say we’d prefer sincerity or depth, we’re just trying to sound more decent than we really are.

Rollins says he’s teaching Huckabee how to fight dirty. From the WaPo again:

“He’s praying for me and I’ll help him brawl. I’ll help him brawl, absolutely. I would be irresponsible to a client if I didn’t say, ‘You’ve got to go negative, you’ve got to respond.’ ”

(Asked about the brawling comment, Huckabee said by e-mail, through a spokeswoman, “He is! And I’m teaching him how to turn the other cheek!”)

Peggy Noonan thinks maybe Ed Rollins isn’t right for Huckabee’s campaign. We’ll see.

I still don’t like his politics. I need to hear him say “Government is not the solution, it’s the problem.” He probably won’t say it. He thinks government is part of the solution. I think he’s badly mistaken.

But I like him a lot more today than I did yesterday.

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