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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Huckabee. Funny, improbable name; funny, improbable candidate. How funny? Well, have a look at the first Huckabee for President campaign commercial, aired last week in Iowa and now ubiquitous on the Web. In it, the former governor of Arkansas trades straight-faced non sequiturs with Chuck Norris, the B-list action star. (Norris: "Mike Huckabee wants to put the I.R.S. out of business." Huckabee: "When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn't lifting himself up, he's pushing the earth down.") It's an unusually entertaining spot--or, rather, meta-spot, the subtext of which is its own absurdity and, by extension, that of the whole genre.
How improbable? Well, up until the tail end of the summer, polls had Huckabee's support for the Republican nomination hovering between zero and three per cent, usually closer to zero. In October, he broke into a trot, in November into a Gallup. In a poll released on Thanksgiving eve by Reuters/Zogby, he is in third place, at eleven per cent, nosing past not only John McCain but also Mitt Romney and narrowing the gap with the fading Fred Thompson to four points. In Iowa, where actual voting will occur on January 3rd, he has surged into what is essentially a tie...
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