Dicin' And Slicin'.(The Talk of the Town)(Mike Huckabee)

The former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who won eight states and more than four million votes in the Republican Presidential primaries, spent Election Night at home in Little Rock. Eating takeout in the den with his family and a few staffers, Huckabee wasn't surprised to see Barack Obama win, although he couldn't help but think that things might not have turned out the way they did had he been the nominee. "It would've been very different," he said the other day. "Because I would've campaigned that the economy was headed toward meltdown. And I was saying this back when I was getting laughed at by the Wall Street Journal and pilloried by the National Review. They were just dicin' and slicin' me for not following the company line."

Huckabee--tired-eyed but expansive, wearing a gold wristwatch, a suit and a tie (checked, with red and pink daisies), and kangaroo-skin cowboy boots embossed with the Arkansas state seal ("Regnat Populus," wheat sheaf, steamboat, bee-hive)--was speaking one morning last week in the library of the Cornell Club, where he was scheduled to give a lecture to the Hudson Union Society. He was in New York as part of a fifty-six-city tour to promote his seventh book, "Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America." (He also comes to town often to tape a show he has on Fox News--"I was on the D train a couple of weeks ago. I'd gone to church over at Times Square Church and I thought, Well, you know, there's a place in Chinatown that I absolutely love, Peking Duck House.") Huckabee, who lost more than a hundred pounds in 2004--that was his fourth book, "Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork"--has a doofy sense of humor, but lately he has been deprecating others as much as himself, morphing from nice guy to Party meanie. In "Do the Right Thing," he takes a poke at Mitt Romney. "I never felt that he was levelling with the people," Huckabee said. "There was sort of a dismissive tone to the approach he took to me and several others."

While some of Huckabee's gripes come off as rinky-dink--in the book, he admonishes Romney for hogging golf-cart parking spaces during the Iowa straw poll--others are more stinging. Asked about Sarah Palin, he responded, "She, uh, was an appropriate choice, because she put John McCain back in the game." That was the get-along answer, but a few minutes later the new, aggrieved Huckabee resurfaced. He recalled, "It was funny that all through the primary--I mean literally up until McCain got enough delegates to ...