Huckabee: No dummy
Max Brantley over at the Arkansas Times blog and I have both been covering the hoopla surrounding the release of Mike Huckabee’s new book “Do the Right Thing,” and since both of us are too lazy to actually read the book, we’re basically recycling what everyone else says about it.
It’s not our fault, though. My excuse is that my attention deficit disorder renders me semi-literate, at best, while I’m pretty sure that Max’s advance reader’s copy from the publisher was delayed.
But columnist David Sanders scored an early copy, and he has his review today, which boils down to this:
Instead of using his book to mend fences with those who didn’t support him, Huckabee’s pettiness has put him on a destructive bridge-burning crusade. That’s not a smart strategy for someone who may be planning another White House run down the road.
I’ll have to part company with Sanders on his assessment that this is “not a smart strategy.” As usual, it’s Huckabee who gets the last laugh on all us columnists and reviewers and bloggers.
As of this morning, “Do the Right Thing” is number 38 on the Amazon.com best-sellers list (and number 5 on the “Politics” books list). When I checked it yesterday, it was hovering in the mid-50s. (Update: OK, so I just checked it again at 4:30 p.m. and Huck’s book slipped to #41, so maybe that “and rising” in the headline was premature.)
So to summarize: Mike Huckabee writes a book; sprinkles in a few score-settling passages to sex it up and goose media interest and sales (reserving his toughest hits for Mitt Romney, a guy who’s going exactly nowhere in U.S. presidential politics); conducts an 18-state tour in a bus with his picture on the side; receives millions of dollars in free TV, radio and print coverage; and has all us low-rent scrubs talking about him for days on end. By 2012, all of the controversy will be long forgotten, of course.
And HE’S the dummy? No, I don’t think it works quite like that.
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