Beware Mike Huckabee, Another Hope, Arkansas Huckster
Another Man from Hope (Arkansas) is betting that he can fool enough of the people into believing him a sincere saint instead of a smarmy snake oil salesman playing them for suckers, but Republicans are much too smart for him.
Abraham Lincoln: "If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time."
Mike Huckabee thinks he can fool enough of the people to win the presidency, or he is an exception, or both. (Maybe there's something in the water in Hope, Arkansas, where both former president Bill Clinton and presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee were born.)
Marc Cooper of The Huffington Post, December 31, 2007:
"In what is likely to be remembered as one of the more bizarre moments of this campaign season, embattled GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee renounced negative campaigning today by unveiling an attack ad to a ballroom full of reporters and dozens of TV cameras.
"Standing before a banner reading 'Enough is Enough' and flanked by five large charts attacking the record of rival Mitt Romney, a haggard-looking Huckabee said that the fight to win Thursday's Republican caucus had gotten 'out of hand' and 'out of control' and that he would refrain from any more negative campaigning."
After spending the previous day making his own so-called attack commercial, Mike suddenly shifted strategy, as though he had been struck like St. Paul on the Road to Damascus and seen the light.
Mike is no St. Paul. He not only brazenly went about claiming great credit for his supposed conversion, but he actually proved that he had prepared his own attack commercial--BY SHOWING THE ATTACK COMMERCIAL HE HAD PRONOUNCED TOO NEGATIVE!
P. T. Barnum reputedly said. "There's a sucker born every minute." Mike apparently thinks they became Republicans and registered as Iowa Republicans. (But, in the words of the title of Ann Coulter's latest book, "If Democrats had any brains, they'd be Republicans! Republicans are not likely to be so easily fooled.)
Mr. Cooper:
"Huckabee's unorthodox media event [came] as a barrage of new polls has battered his lead in Iowa and put his campaign at risk of crash-and-burn. Some of those surveys now show Romney regaining a lead he had maintained over most of the year until Huckabee began to surge ahead in recent weeks.
"'Conventional political wisdom is that you must counter-punch,' the former Arkansas governor said. 'When you get hit you should hit back. And every bit of advice I have been given says that is exactly what we should do.' Huckabee explained that he, indeed, prepared and produced a TV spot attacking Romney, sent it to local TV stations but had just given the directive to pull it from airing. 'This morning I ordered them to hold the ads,' Huckabee said. 'From now we will run only ads that say why I should be president not why Mitt Romney shouldn't be president.'"
This man is NOT fit to sell used cars. much less lead America in the War on Terror!
And the reporters in the audience realized it.
Mr. Cooper:
"Then, amid loud gasps and laughter from the more than 150 reporters on hand, Huckabee announced he would show the assembled press the same ad. As dozens of TV cameras whirred, and after two false starts, the 30-second spot assaulting Romney's record was shown in full. The tag line of the spot ended with the narrator saying of Romney: 'If a man's dishonest trying to get the job, he'll be dishonest on the job'.
"The room then exploded into a cacophony of questioning from the press memorializing this event as a moment that might be remembered as campaign meltdown for Huckabee.
"When asked if it was cynical to show an ad to dozens of TV cameras while saying the campaign had banned it from the air, Huckabee pleaded innocent of ill-motive. 'If people want to be cynical about it, they'll be cynical about it,' Huckabee said....
"When pressed as to why the downtown hotel ballroom he was speaking in was festooned with charts attacking Romney's record, Huckabee said his staff only learned of his decision 'a few minutes ago when I walked into this room' and, therefore, didn't have time to take down the negative material."
Marc Ambinder noted that Huckabee is presumably "hoping that gullible news executives will run the ad that Huckabee is too much of a saint for not airing -- for free."
That's the stunningly silly strategy!
Steve Benen: "We've all seen some very cheap stunts over the years, but they're not usually this cheap and not this transparent. Reporters covering the campaign aren't idiots, and Huckabee just insulted their intelligence."
Joe Klein: "That sound you hear rumbling out of Des Moines appears to be a monumental implosion."
Let's hope so!
Mike Huckabee is so desperate to win the Iowa Republican caucuses that he bet he could have his cake and eat it too and fool enough of the people all of the time.
Wrong!
Mike wants people to think he's too good a Christian to be a negative campaigner (as though a contrast ad is a bad thing) AND have the media publicize for free his attack ad against Mitt Romney that he canceled because he supposedly considered it too negative.
This is Manipulation 101. Another Man from Hope (Arkansas) is betting that he can fool enough of the people into believing him a sincere saint instead of a smarmy snake oil salesman playing them for suckers, but Republicans are much too smart for him.
Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.
Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.
The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.
Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.