Fun While It Lasted

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 26, 2007 11:13 AM

The Mike Huckabee boomlet has run, by my precise scientific count, for four or five days now.

Just long enough to trigger a counterreaction.

Couldn't let that one get out of hand.

Pundits on the left have bestirred themselves to challenge pundits on the right who are writing sympathetically about the former Arkansas governor, with the collective message: You can't be serious.

So a faint tide in favor of Huck, so mild that 99.9 percent of Americans remain blissfully unaware of it, may be swamped by an anti-Huck wave, before anyone even notices.

My view of the Huckabee hype is fairly simple: Reporters have run out of things to say about Hillary, Barack, Rudy, Mitt and the gang. Every conceivable story has been written, from cleavage to laughter to multiple marriages, and it's only October. We need a dark horse to shake up the race. Reporters like Huckabee. So he becomes the flavor du jour.

While the country breathlessly waits to learn whether Huckabee can enter the mythical top tier, the New Republic's Noam Scheiber analyzes the boomlet:

"I'm hardly one for media conspiracies. (In fact, to paraphrase Sarah Silverman: as a member of the media, I'm really concerned that we're losing control over world events . . . ) But I find all this talk about how we suddenly have a five-way race for the GOP nomination--Mike Huckabee being the latest addition--a bizarre artifact of the way the media covers presidential politics . . .

"My cynical theory (which at best only partially explains what's going on):

"1.) The beginning of what should have been a Huckabee boomlet in August happened way out in Ames, Iowa, while the beginning of the actual Huckabee boomlet this past weekend took place in Washington, DC, making it a lot easier for journalists, pundits, and bloggers to cover--and, er, create. (Though, in fairness, a lot of journalists trekked to Ames.)

"2.) Perhaps more importantly, the results of Ames weren't announced until fairly late in the evening--8 o'clock or so if I recall--which was well after most MSM reporters had written their stories for the following day. (Many simply went back and inserted a few lines or a paragraph about Huckabee into stories that trumpeted Romney's first-place victory, which was easily foreseen.) On the other hand, Huckabee's speech last Saturday at the Values Voters summit happened around 11, and the result of the event's straw poll were announced just after 3, leaving reporters with plenty of time to write about the reaction to Huckabee's speech and his performance in the balloting.

"3.) Finally, because the first event was in Ames, which most reporters promptly departed, and the second was in Washington, where many reporters, pundits, and bloggers either live, work, or both, the media was able to soak in the afterglow of Huckabee's performance this weekend, to chat about it with others who had witnessed it, and to therefore magnify it in their coverage in subsequent days."

Why does all this remind me of high school?

NYT columnist Gail Collins points to Huck's breakthrough endorsement from Chuck Norris:

"The question we want to consider today is why he is virtually the only prominent name backing Huckabee, who is this season's likable presidential candidate. This is the venerable, if not particularly rewarding role once held by Morris Udall and John McCain2000, and it involves having reporters appreciate you much more than the politicians and donors do.

"Like Bill Clinton, Huckabee was born in a town called Hope and became a pretty good governor of a state that doesn't make it all that easy. (Plus, you have to love the fact that he lived for a while in a mobile home on the Arkansas Statehouse grounds.) He's extremely inclusive, defending minorities who are illegal immigrants as well as the ones registered to vote. He can be both funny and convincing on the stump.

"On the downside, I think he'd be a terrible president. He doesn't know beans about foreign affairs, he wants to replace the income tax with a national sales tax, and his positions on social issues are far to the right of the general populace. But why aren't the social conservatives rallying around this guy? Unlike any of the major candidates, he's still on his first wife and first position on abortion. Once we start getting into the inevitable personal stories of redemption, Americans would have a much better time listening to Huckabee tell how he lost 110 pounds than sitting through Rudy's 9/11 story again or looking at pictures of Mitt's 10 grandchildren.

"Yet the leaders of the Values Voters keep waiting for one of the top-tier candidates to change -- a strategy that any woman who's had an unsatisfactory boyfriend could warn them is never going to pan out."

More media attention has its downside, of course, as this Dick Polman posting makes clear:

"In the spirit of broadcast pioneer Art Linkletter, who once authored a book entitled Kids Say the Darndest Things, I offer today's post, Grownups Say the Dumbest Things . . .

"Mike Huckabee, GOP presidential candidate. I mentioned on Monday that he might be poised to ride a boomlet into the Iowa caucuses, in part because he is an effective communicator and an ordained Baptist preacher who is sincerely in sync with the party's religious conservatives. Nevertheless, in a Republican debate on Sunday night, his fervor got in the way of his facts.

"At one point, he said, 'When our founding fathers put their signatures on the Declaration of Independence, those 56 brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen, they said that we have certain inalienable rights given to us by our creator, and among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, life being one of them . . . '

"Really? 'Most' of the Declaration signers were clergymen? . . . In the reality-based community, 'most' is defined as a majority. This would mean, if Huckabee is using the reality-based definition, that, at minimum, 29 signers were clergymen. Here's the problem, however: All available evidence indicates that, at maximum, the actual number was . . . four."

Ever wonder what impact the explosion of political blogs is having on the campaign as more and more MSM types get into writing online? Here's a penetrating look at the subject by . . . the author of this blog.

The NYT does its Hillary-as-manager piece, a day after its Rudy-is-in-the-grip-of- neocons piece:

"Her meetings have clear agendas and rarely devolve into open-ended 'brainstorming' sessions. She might indulge gossip at the outset (Who's pregnant? Who saw 'Grey's Anatomy'?) but hates wasting time. 'Every meeting should be transactional,' said Tamera Luzzatto, Mrs. Clinton's Senate chief of staff.

"So should each e-mail message. Mrs. Clinton's are spare ('yes, let's do it.'), uncluttered with jokes, emoticons or out-of-nowhere 'whassups.' She carries a BlackBerry, on vibrate, in her purse.

"When asked about her as a manager, people who have worked for Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic senator from New York, described her as 'organized,' 'methodical' and 'disciplined.' They also note that those words were never applied to her husband, Bill Clinton."

Time's Joe Klein backs illegal immigration--and rips the Republicans:

"It's long been my belief that the GOP hole card in 2008 is going to be a rancid furriner-bashing anti-illegal-immigrant smear campaign. Make no mistake, whatever lipstick they put on this pig, the bottom line is the same old know-nothing nativism that has been a minor American stain since the Protestants began to get worried about the Irish Catholic surge in the 1840s (among some of our earliest settlers, the only acceptable immigrants were slaves).

"I tend to be an extremist on this issue. I am wildly in favor of immigration, legal and illegal. I realize that national security--i.e. terrorism--requires that we secure the borders, and that's a good thing, if almost impossible. But as a New Yorker, I'm deeply grateful to the immigrants, many of them illegal, who saved the city by bringing commerce (and sales tax revenues) to some of the toughest neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s. I've found that any Haitian willing to get in a rickety boat and risk all to get here is going to be an aggressive, entrepreneurial hard-working American when he or she arrives. In an unscientific sample, I've also found that 98.9% of all Latinos who cross our southern border looking for work are just fabulous, hardworking people.

"I find the tendency of some of the Republicans running for President to play to our very worst instincts--and I mean racism, in this case--is just nauseating. A few months ago, I asked Mitt Romney if he thought illegal immigration was a net economic plus or minus. He said . . . he wasn't sure (but, of course, he knows that it's a net plus)."

Conservative bloggers erupt over the latest setback for the New Republic in the case of Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who, as I reported yesterday, would not defend his "Baghdad Diarist" piece in a recorded Sept. 6 interview with the magazine's editors from Iraq. The transcript was leaked to Drudge.

Incidentally, New Republic Editor Franklin Foer told me that Beauchamp was under duress because his commanding officer was present during the interview. An Army spokesman, Maj. Kirk Luedeke, told me yesterday that no commanding officer was there, just a squad leader and public affairs officer. "The squad leader is a staff sergeant and direct supervisor but does *not* hold a command position within the unit," Luedeke said by e-mail. He continued: "A 'chilling effect' is certainly possible, but I'd add that a squad leader is much closer in rank to Beauchamp and can be more of a coach/mentor than a superior in many cases."

National Review's James Robbins accuses the New Republic of a cover-up:

"TNR's first response to the release was typical of the tone-deafness with which they have approached the entire affair -- denouncing the selective leak of official documents. It is always suspect when journalists take a principled stand against leaks. It might be more convincing if TNR pledged never to use leaked information in its reporting ever again, maybe then they'd have some credibility. As it happened, the Army report recommended releasing the findings to the media, while TNR was frantically trying to get Beauchamp to cancel all his press interviews. TNR Editor Franklin Foer said that Scott owed it to the magazine to talk only to them to let them 'control the way the story proceeds.' I suppose because they were doing such a great job of controlling it thus far.

"The Beauchamp affair should be taught in journalism schools as a case study of how not to conduct damage control. When it quickly became obvious that there were serious problems both with Beauchamp's 'diaries' and with the author himself, TNR should have cut bait. The magazine could quite reasonably have made a statement that they were taken advantage of by someone they trusted, who was married to someone on their staff who presumably vouched for him, and retracted the stories. It would have been embarrassing, but the matter would have concluded. Instead TNR stood by Beauchamp, tying the magazine's credibility to his, and suffering accordingly. Rather than admitting error and moving on, they invested time, money, and apparently a degree of political capital in fighting a clearly losing cause with no discernable upside even if they had prevailed. It is mystifying -- like Dan Rather defending those bogus National Guard documents, or Peter Arnett sticking to the story of the U.S. conducting Sarin gas attacks against captured American troops in Vietnam. How can people who are so successful make such astonishing errors in professional judgment?"

Ed Morrissey reprints part of the transcript in which Foer and his executive editor, Peter Scoblic, urge Beauchamp not to talk to me and a Newsweek reporter:

"Scoblic: We were told you were setting up interviews with the Times and the Post?

"Beauchamp: With Newsweek and the Washington Post, and it's basically to let the media know I'm not being censored. I can talk to the media, but I don't want to.

"Scoblic: Scott, all that does is trigger another round of stories. I mean, (unintelligible)

"Foer: (Unintelligible) You owe it to us ah to just ah .... you owe it to us to basically kind of report on ourselves and be able to put out whatever next thing ... I think you ought to basically talk to us, and let us control the way this story proceeds. I think that's the least you could do for us. I think it would be further evidence, further sign to us that you're just sticking it to us if you went and talked to these other guys before we could put out anything further.

"Beauchamp: So, um ... what are you saying?

"Foer: I'm saying that I'd rather you not talk to the Washington Post, Newsweek, or whoever else until we put our final judgment on your pieces.

"TNR made it clear that they felt they could not respond because the Army had hindered their access to Beauchamp. That's a lie, and one perpetrated by Foer and the senior TNR management themselves. They had access to Beauchamp and knew he could talk to the media -- and instructed him not to do so. They then stonewalled to make it look as though the Army was holding Beauchamp incommuncado.

"They have lost the last shred of journalistic integrity they could claim. Until August 10th, they could make a claim that they had been victimized by a fabulist. This transcript shows that they participated willingly in the cover-up."

There's not much on the liberal blogs, but TPM's Greg Sargent picks up on my story and says:

"An Army spokesman basically acknowledged here that while they're not willing to reveal the docs supporting their case to TNR, which is the actual target of its probe, someone internally is willing to give some stuff to Drudge, almost certainly with the intent to carry out payback against the mag. I'm not necessarily defending TNR here -- as Kevin Drum notes, this remains murky -- but the bottom line is that this Army conduct stinks really, really badly.

"In the snippet I quoted above the Army promises to 'investigate' this leak to Drudge. Somehow one doubts that this will be 'investigated' with anywhere near the zeal of the Army's probe into TNR and Beauchamp. Somehow one highly doubts that we'll ever learn what their 'investigation' into the leak to Drudge has found."

Finally, the Goldwater-Miller ticket won only six states in 1964--that's the campaign in which Hillary Clinton was a Goldwater Girl. But there's a new Goldwater-Miller ticket: CC Goldwater, the late senator's granddaughter, and Stephanie Miller, the daughter of the late VP nominee Bill Miller. They're having a campaign rally in Phoenix tomorrow. They haven't filed any papers, but Miller's slogan might touch a nerve: "I believe America needs more eye candy."