The Candidates and The Late-Night Returns

Hooey, said an NBC insider, who reminded The TV Column that Huckabee was booked to appear on Leno's show long before Letterman's Worldwide Pants struck that deal with the guild last week to enable his and Craig Ferguson's CBS late-night shows to return with their writers.

"I support the writers, by the way, unequivocally, absolutely," Huckabee also said yesterday on the campaign trail.

"They're dead right on this one. And they ought to get royalties off the residuals and the long-term contracts."

When told he was wrong regarding Leno and WGA interim deal, Huckabee said, "Hmmm" and "Oh," the AP reported.

Picketing writers whom Huckabee supports unequivocally and absolutely returned the favor yesterday by marching in front of NBC's Burbank headquarters, carrying signs that said, among other things, "Huckabee Is a Scab." An NBC insider said that the network had made arrangements for Huckabee to enter the Burbank complex without having to encounter the picketers.

Later in the day, Huckabee abandoned his Play Dumb Strategy in favor of an Accentuate the Positive Campaign:

"The Governor would only agree to join Jay, an active member of the Writers Guild, for the taping after he was assured that no replacement writers were being used in the show's production," a Huckabee rep said in a statement e-mailed to The TV Column late yesterday.

"Governor Huckabee believes that the writers deserve to be fairly compensated for the sale of their work. Governor Huckabee is glad that Jay Leno was able to put his 160 employees back to work, and he strongly encourages both sides of the current labor dispute to work diligently toward an equitable solution for all parties involved."

The Writers Guild of America West weighed in on Huckabee's appearance with unusual restraint, saying it was "disappointed" that Huckabee "crossed the WGA picket line today at NBC."

"We welcome the statements of support he has made for striking writers, but we ask him to respect our picket lines in the future," the guild added.

The guild is battling the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers over residuals for programs streamed on the Internet as well as whether the guild will represent writers on reality-TV programming, among other issues. When the guild launched its strike on Nov. 5, Letterman, Ferguson, Leno, O'Brien and ABC's Kimmel were thrown into repeats. All returned to the air last night.

Unlike Letterman's and Ferguson's shows, both produced by Worldwide Pants, the other three late-night shows are owned by the networks. Leno, O'Brien and Kimmel, all WGA members who had been paying their non-writing staffs since their respective networks laid those employees off last month, said two weeks ago they were reluctantly returning to the air on Jan. 2.