Handicapping the race
Mike Huckabee is very nearly toast. Ted Cruz doesn’t work well with others. Marco Rubio is maybe the best of the bunch.
And the name of Donald Trump, I am delighted to say, never came up, except once, I think. That was when Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin said some people see Cruz as the most Trump-like of the rest of the field.
—————— That’s the takeaway from a segment on Talk Business shown Sunday morning on KATV, Channel 7, in which I talked about Republican presidential politics with two deeply entrenched Arkansas GOP insiders—Griffin, who does national consulting on the side, and former state Rep. John Burris, now a consultant and emerging lobbyist.
I asked Griffin before the session if he would be hamstrung in talking about the life-supported Huckabee candidacy, considering that he was an unpaid adviser to it. He said not so much because, as it turned out, he never got more than superficially engaged with the campaign.
There was a past-tense tone to the whole thing. And it spoke a volume or two.
Basically, Griffin rambled an answer on-air that came down to his essentially saying we didn’t need him to tell us how bad it looked for Huckabee.
He noted that Huckabee’s daughter and campaign manager, Sarah Huckabee, had told Politico earlier in the week that the campaign likely wouldn’t go on if it fared poorly—as is expected—in the Iowa caucuses. (In that article, veteran Republican operative Ed Rollins, who worked for Huckabee’s infinitely more effective campaign in 2008, said this year’s Huckabee effort was being “run by the family” and was “going nowhere,” and “dead.”)
An interesting note on Huckabee: Polls show him with higher personal favorability ratings than any candidate in the field. But that seems to reflect only a soft and dismissive regard. As a presidential candidate, Republicans see Huckabee dimly as a nice guy.
I asked Burris why it was that, even with Huckabee in the race, Cruz had swept to a lopsided victory in a straw vote of the Republican State Committee a couple of weeks before.
Burris said that bunch likely would have favored fringe-candidate Curtis Coleman over U.S. Sen. John Boozman. I recoiled and Griffin scoffed. Griffin reminded me after the show that Burris ran for vice chairman of the Republican State Committee in 2012 and didn’t get it.
But it is true, Burris said, that the state committee is a little more to the impractical right than the state’s Republican electorate generally.
And Cruz is nothing if not impractically conservative.
Nonetheless, when I asked for a prediction of the winner of the state’s GOP presidential primary March 1, Burris said, oh, maybe Cruz. But he said Cruz would not go on to take the nomination. He thought Rubio might, and said he hoped so.
Griffin wouldn’t make any prediction or state any preference other than saying he was on record supporting Huckabee. But he ended up talking about how smart Rubio is.
So I asked Griffin to avail himself of his recent membership in Congress to discuss the apparent fact that Cruz is not well-liked among Republicans who have dealt with him in Washington.
Griffin replied that it is true that Cruz isn’t well-liked. He said Cruz doesn’t work well with others.
Griffin said practically all Republicans are genuinely conservative but that Cruz has a tendency to extol himself as the most genuine of all and attack members of his own party as imposters if they don’t agree with him.
Burris, who was political director for Tom Cotton’s Senate bid last year, used the opening to contrast Cruz with Cotton, whom Burris seldom misses an opportunity to extol.
Burris said no one could doubt Cotton’s strong conservative bona fides, but that Cotton had pursued and indeed defined his strong conservativism without trashing fellow Republicans in the way that Cruz has trashed fellow Republicans. Actually, that’s true. Cotton has done a couple of alienating and dubious things, such as circulating that sabotaging letter to Iran saying President Barack Obama was a sorry rascal not to be negotiated with. But the fact is that Cotton got nearly every Republican colleague in the Senate to sign the letter before he went public with it.
The current complication for competent, reasonable Republicans is that a majority of the Republican base— the 35 to 40 percent for Trump and the 15 to 20 percent for Cruz—actually prefers a guy who doesn’t get along with others.
That surely includes the 30 percent of Republican respondents who recently told a Public Policy Polling survey that they want to bomb Agrabah—a fictional kingdom in the Disney film called Aladdin.
A poll of Democrats asked the same question. A lesser 19 percent of them—but still 19 percent too many— favored war with Disney.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.