Huckabee goes into verbal overdrive

Today we have before us the question of whether Republican presidential front-runner Mike Huckabee is a horribly uninformed blabbermouth or a sinister purveyor of a cynically strategic smear.

Of course we always could avail ourselves of the handy "all of the above" option.

Knowing Huckabee as I do from his decade as a moderate tax-and-spend governor of Arkansas, I cling confidently to the belief that his failing is merely that of the horribly uninformed blabbermouth.

I thus defend him on that basis.

As I have explained previously, Huckabee is blessed with the gift of gab, one he refined as a teenage radio announcer and further honed as an ordained Southern Baptist preacher. He thinks he is Ronald Reagan, or, actually, even a little more adroit than Reagan.

Unlike the Gipper, Huckabee will venture at times, as he did disastrously last week, to step off the script and into a little jazz riffing.

Actually, though, I can provide anecdotal evidence that Huckabee is not altogether averse to telling something that is not so and not feeling bad about it. I will provide that anecdote toward the end of this space.

Today's question arises from the fact that Huckabee, out on the stump last week selling a book and keeping open his tepid interest in actually running for president, got all wound up on a New York right-wing radio talk show.

Trying to mitigate his fair-minded logic in having previously said that it was a waste of Republicans' time to pursue this nonsense that President Obama is not a natural-born United States citizen, Huckabee went off on how Obama developed an anti-West, anti-Brit and anti-Churchill world view by being raised by his father and grandfather in Kenya.

In verbal overdrive and with failing brakes, Huckabee wove an elaborate analysis out of this childhood in Kenya that Obama never spent.

Obama was born in Hawaii to a Kansas woman and a Kenyan man he hardly knew and whom his mother divorced. Then his mother married an Indonesian man living in Hawaii. Then the three of them lived in Indonesia from the time Obama was 6 until he was 10.

Obama did not set foot in Kenya until the 1980s, when he was grown.

Huckabee later apologized for what he called a mere misstatement, explaining that he had meant Indonesia, but said Kenya.

That doesn't make any sense, since Indonesians had no particular basis for resenting the British, but it is true that the names of both nations end in the sound of "yuh."

Instantly, many Democrats and Obama defenders were accusing Huckabee of having deliberately planted this smear in the minds of ever-pliable conservative nut cases.

That would be an elaborate tactic indeed, making an utter fool of oneself to leave the lunatic fringe with yet one more insane notion.

Presumably the purpose would be for Huckabee to fortify his right flank to advance his own forthcoming race for president, which, actually, I predict he will not make.

Now to that previously touted anecdote: When Huckabee was governor of Arkansas, I heard from legislators that he had told them that I parked in a state Capitol parking spot belonging to a corrupt Democratic senator.

It was not so. Once when the Legislature met on a rare Saturday, I parked in a reserved area unoccupied on weekends. Huckabee had seen my old rusted Chevy Blazer there.

When I challenged him, he said it was fair for him to say something false about me considering all the lies I had written about him.

I thought of that last week when Huckabee defended his absurd statement by saying no one criticized Obama when he said he had visited all 57 states. Huckabee has a tendency to justify himself by invoking the chip on his shoulder.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.