Huck and Me

As I look at the most recent polls which have Mike Huckabee atop the GOP heap in both Iowa and South Carolina, I think about the first times I met the affable former Arkansas governor. He was then the affable lieutenant governor of Arkansas and I was the affable but clumsy rookie reporter just out of college. It was my first TV news reporting job and his first statewide office. Neither of us yet seemed to have firm footing in our jobs.

I remember standing microphone in hand at the back of a room watching some ceremony (something having to do with a new college president maybe?) and the brand new lieutenant governor was standing next to me. After the event wrapped up he inquired genuinely, Should I say something to you about this? I genuinely responded, “I guess?” And I put my microphone in front of his face and we stumbled through an “interview.”

Several years and television jobs later I found myself once again working in Arkansas and by then Huckabee had ascended to governor. Governor Huckabee invited a few of us to lunch at the mansion. He had recently gotten a new chocolate lab and went upstairs to get him to show him off. The dog came barreling down the stairs ahead of the governor and greeted us. Scruffing his head (the dog’s not the governor’s) I joked, “What’s his name? Buddy, is it?” The “joke” was that a previous resident of this mansion who did not share the current occupant’s political affiliation, famously had a chocolate lab named Buddy. And my joke went over like a lead balloon. As soon as I spoke what was no more than a throw-away line, all of Huckabee’s aids went dead silent, dead serious and stared at their boss waiting for indication of how to respond to this heretic-buffoon (me, not the dog). The governor paused just long enough to make me think I was about to be shown the gubernatorial door and then burst into laughter waving his hands and shouting “No! No! No! No way! This is Jet!” Crisis averted. I got to finish dessert.