Mike Huckabee: Dark Horse Candidate?
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee speaks at the Values Voter Summit on Saturday in Washington.
Stephanie Kuykendal/Getty Images
Confrontations among the GOP "Big Four" — Sen. John McCain, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Sen. Fred Thompson and former Gov. Mitt Romney — set many commentators buzzing after Sunday night's Republican debate in Orlando. But some attention also centered around former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and his decision not to join in.
Huckabee compared the debate to a demolition derby. "I'm kind of glad I wasn't in on the first few minutes because it was all about these guys fighting each other," Huckabee said, adding there were more important things to talk about.
This follows Huckabee's close second-place finish behind Romney in a straw poll at the Values Voter Summit last week in Washington. The Weekly Standard's Dean Barnett notes that in the most recent Rasmussen poll in Iowa, Huckabee was third with 18 percent, within striking distance of Romney at 25 percent and just behind Thompson at 19 percent.
So is Huckabee pulling away from the rest of the pack that follows the Big Four? Could he even be the GOP's version of Jimmy Carter, a once obscure governor from Georgia who defeated all the big names in 1976? I talked with some of NPR's political reporters about this idea, which they found intriguing, but they said Carter's success would be difficult to replicate.
The biggest problem facing any potential dark horse is, of course, that times have changed. Carter could build slowly into the Democratic convention. Now, a candidate can only build slowly until the first primary.
This neck of the race is a marathon of positioning and name-building that will eventually turn into a sprint. Don Gonyea, NPR's White House correspondent, compares it to an Olympic long-distance cycling race in a velodrome. For the first 19 laps of a 20-lap race, the cyclists move very slowly — they can even come to a complete stop on occasion. It's a game of wits and chess-like strategy. Then, the bell sounds the final lap, and they madly sprint for the finish.
So it's not that Huckabee doesn't have a chance to do well. But he would have to get himself into a good position pretty quickly — that bell's going to ring in about two months.
3:13 PM ET | 10-22-2007 | permalink
