Let a Hundred Daggers Draw

Huckabee is going to face two challenges today: He will be ignored, and when not ignored, mocked: "When are you going to get out?" Not sure how he's going to handle that. But he's good humored. You can't too effectively mock someone who stays in a good mood and is witty. Developing...

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2:45AM, Wednesday

Developed. No Daggers, no Huck. The second explains the first. Huck has made no news nowhere. Apparently he hasn't tried. Apparently he sees wisdom in staying out of the public eye for awhile.

Last night I noted I could find no concession speech carried by any news outlet. But Byron York reports this:

"The nomination is not secured until somebody has 1,191 delegates,” Mike Huckabee said last night in Little Rock after losing primary battles to John McCain in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. “That has not yet happened. . . and if there are these calls to say, ‘Let’s just call it off,’ that’s a disservice to the people in Texas and Ohio and Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Nebraska and other states and territories who have yet to have the opportunity to vote. So we march on.”

So, his standard view on this matter, delivered Tuesday evening, but no coverage?

I'm totally uncertain about this but I can't see that he was just ignored. This is a call to battle. It would have been good for at least one story. But it wasn't carried. It suggests the media wasn't there, that they weren't invited. I don't know. I don't know where York got his information. Were they there? Were they not? Who was there?

I'm speculating --total speculation-- that there was no national media invited and that it's part of an intentional policy to just lay low until the heat's off. No coverage, and McCain has his night in the limelight. That's good for McCain, it's good for the party. No coverage, and it's good for Huck as well. He avoids getting the MaC angry, and he avoids getting blasted. There would be only one question anyway: "How'd you blow Potomac so badly and when are you going to get out?"

Huck needs media, but that might not be the kind of media he wants. It could be that his entire intent for awhile is to disappear. The same York article, for example, says that for most of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday he'll be in the Cayman Islands giving a speech. Tuesday is the next primary, Wisconsin, but you're hardly running hard if you're spending most of the week on a beach.

So if he does happen to do well in Wisconsin, which will shakeup McCain's coronation a bit, it can't be said that party unity is being made to suffer due to Huck's insufferable, selfish personal ambition. It will be clearly seen that he got votes because a lot in the party want a chance to cast that vote. If it's meaningful to them it's meaningful to democracy. If that's the choice of the people you can't blame Huck, you can only praise the people.

That anyway is what I speculate is his present strategy. If there is a grass roots movement --I believe there is-- the grass roots can do the work themselves. He's on the ballot, he's available to be their voice. They organize, they vote. Huck is the recipient, not the instrument. To criticize Huck in that scenario would be not to criticize Huck but to criticize the people, and the democratic process itself, and that sort of criticism would not do the McCain people any good at all.