Like every other potential presidential candidate, Republican Mike Huckabee has told reporters that he will decide early next year on making a second try for the White House.
Well, early next year, as a galley of his newest book, due out Jan. 20, has landed at the Washington Examiner and offers the strongest indications yet that Huckabee’s getting in.
The first hint is the book’s release date. Presidents are inaugurated on Jan. 20 following their election.
The second is the former Arkansas governor’s sneering paragraphs about Washington. “I feel out of place in Washington,” he pens in God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy.
“For a city where everyone sure is in a hurry and acts busy, nothing productive ever happens there,” he adds before showing his hand. “Some people think that because I’m involved in politics, I surely must live there. I don’t. In fact, there’s only one address in that city that I’d probably want to relocate to.”
The parts of God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy previewed for the Examiner reveal a colorful and agenda-filled campaign book that fits well with Huckabee’s down-home style. He touches on many issues, ranging from gun control to the name of the Washington Redskins.
And his attack on the Internal Revenue Service will give him a popular issue to prove he’s an outsider — and win headlines. “The IRS has become a criminal enterprise,” he writes. “It ruins lives, all in the name of being a ‘service.’ Calling the IRS a ‘service’ is like calling your taxes ‘voluntary contributions.’ ”
CHAMBER PREDICTS GOP SENATE WILL LAST JUST TWO YEARS
That was fast — or will be. The likelihood that Republicans will win enough seats to take control of the Senate in the Nov. 4 midterm elections is already being tempered with predictions that it won’t last long.
Rob Engstrom, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce political director, is warning that come 2016, it’s just as likely that the Democrats will win back the Senate. That year, 24 Republican seats will be up for re-election compared with just 10 Democrats. And the Democratic Senate seats are all in blue states President Obama won in 2012.
“We are likely, in my opinion, to have a divided house, a House that is Republican and a Senate that is Democrat,” he told University of Arkansas students this month during a visit to Little Rock.
As for this year, Engstrom, a former political whiz kid at the Republican National Committee, sees the GOP winning 51 or 52 seats in the 100-chair Senate.
RAND PAUL: ‘I’M ALWAYS A LITTLE NERVOUS’
He’s only been an elected official since late 2010, but Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has become a polished speaker whose folksy style has helped him rise to the top of the GOP ranks.
But Paul wasn’t always so smooth. “When I was in high school, I’d give my speech from my notecards, and my hands would shake, and I was terrible,” he told the Examiner.
Paul’s secret to his speaking confidence: “I rented it off eBay,” he joked, then added that it’s all practice.
“I think there is an analogy to medicine, in the sense that my hands shook the first time I drew blood, too. Now I’m pretty good at stuff like that, and I don’t think twice about cutting into the eye to take a cataract out,” Paul said. “But you get better at stuff with practice and you also get less likely to have your emotions bother you the more you do it. But I’m still always a little nervous.”
FROM RESPECT TO SNARK, THANKS TO TWITTER
Back in the good old days, journalists used to respect politicians and even bolstered many of their projects and agendas.
Enter Twitter, and the media industry’s embrace of the site that encourages quickie comments.
The result? Insults and snark directed at politicians from those very same journalists.
“For many years, the media have operated as political institution in tune with key political actors’ agendas,” says a new study of tweets from 430 political reporters in the scholarly publication “Journalism.”
Now, it adds, “Twitter has disrupted this balance” with tweets that have politicians feeling “like they are being bullied by journalists desperate for zingers.”
The study from the University of Texas looked at 5,700 tweets from the first 2012 presidential debate. It found a wave of insults and snarky comments from reporters.
But it concludes that Twitter journalism has helped give the nation a better perspective on politics, snark and all, as reporters reveal their criticism of candidates that is typically kept out of their news stories.
“The public is rewarded with carefully crafted political messages being collectively and publicly deconstructed online,” says the study, which was provided to the Examiner.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
