Mike Huckabee isn’t running for President in 2012. Set aside the fact that he was not suspended-pending-dismissal by Fox the way Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were – that bit of chicanery could always be finessed later. No, you can tell Huckabee’s not running because only a couple days after giving a show of fealty to the birther crowd, he has now taken a shot at Natalie Portman for being an unwed mother.
The reason I was telling everybody in 2007 to keep an eye out for Mike Huckabee was because he was not your bog-standard Southern Republican. He had an interesting personal story (his massive weight loss) and a hook into a policy issue (his interest in public health and nutrition). He played a mean bass (for a sitting governor). He was willing to stray from GOP orthodoxy in ways that worked nicely with populist interest (his unwillingness to kowtow to the Club for Growth). And he had a personality that made everyone who watched him think “You know, this is not an unreasonable guy. He seems like a pleasant enough fellow.”
That sort of thing goes away quickly when you’re on the radio discussing how the President “has an anti-colonial view” because he was “raised in Kenya” and “hates the British” and “gave back the bust of Winston Churchill.” Now, I could be wrong, but my understanding is that a) the bust of Churchill was moved to the residence, not given back, b) the President was actually born and raised in Hawaii by his grandparents, and c) the United States was formed as the result of AN ANTI-COLONIAL REBELLION AGAINST THE BRITISH. And this is how I know Mike Huckabee’s not going to run for President, because he’s pushed all his chips in on playing to the Stupids.
It’s the same reason Sarah Palin isn’t running. If you’re on TV, you can bank a couple million dollars a year to take cheap shots and never be obligated to offer a solution, let alone one that abides by reason and logic. Even with the raise, you could never make the money in elected office that you can stealing it from NewsCorp. So obviously Huckleberry is going to keep cashing Rupert Murdoch’s check – why wouldn’t you?
More to the point, the fact that so many potential candidates are on Fox – and that Fox is setting rules as to how long you can stick around before being kicked off if you’re not going to say one way or the other whether you’re running – is proof, if any more were necessary, that the actual GOP machinery is far less important than Fox News in the strategic operation of the Republican Party. Fox News sets the priorities, employs the players, pumps the memes into public circulation, and apparently now decides the timetable for declaring when/if you’re going to run for office. It’s not unreasonable to speculate that the two major parties at present are the Democrats and Fox, with “Republicans” as merely a faction of the Fox Party.
Which is an extraordinarily unhealthy thing, for one very obvious reason: the needs of a for-profit broadcaster are not the needs of a political party in the electorate – or in governance. Which is why we get what we have. No sane governing party would have blown the first couple of months in office on assorted culture-war issues. Hell, no sane governor would have opened his career by taking an enormous deuce on some of his key supporters for the sake of ideological purity – yet Walker up in Wisconsin has managed to make enemies of the teachers, the firemen, the police AND the Green Bay Packers. That’s bad arithmetic.
But the Fox Party isn’t about governance. It’s about maintaining the special world in which the viewers of Fox are simultaneously the martyred minority holding out against the forces of evil and the righteous majority who represent Real America. It’s about making sure that people tune in every day and every night to be told how right they are and how scary the rest of the world is. It’s about keeping the team fired up and racking up wins.
And right now, it’s making one hell of a mess.