Republicans without demons?

In his new role as an election commentator for Fox News, Mike Huckabee will need to beat what he pulled the other day in Japan, where he was giving speeches for hire.

At a news conference in Tokyo, Huckabee did that thing he does from time to time, which is pretend to reach for the high ground.

He said, "Republicans will make a fundamental if not fatal mistake if they seek to win the election by demonizing Barack Obama."

Fox is going to be paying him for deeper insight and more honesty than that, one would think. Republicans have no chance other than to demonize Obama, and Huckabee well knows it.

This was approximately as disingenuous as that day in Iowa when Huckabee called a news conference to declare his moral objection to his own negative television commercial. He pronounced that he would not dare air this commercial, owing to his own high principle.

Then he played the ad for the assembled reporters, just so he could show them what he was too good to show them.

John McCain and the Republicans will lose if this campaign is about issues. They only mismanaged the economy and mismanaged the hurricane and mismanaged the budget and mismanaged the war and mismanaged the hunt for Osama bin Laden and mismanaged the world.

They also will lose if the campaign comes down to a cult of personality. Obama has personality and McCain not so much. Character? Yes. Personality? Different thing. Obama draws thousands. McCain draws dozens.

Republicans will beat Obama the same way they beat Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, which is by deploying arms-length groups that give their nominee deniability while they smear the Democratic candidate and paint him as someone to be feared on account of being culturally alien to supposed mainstream American values.

They desperately tried it on Bill Clinton, too, in 1992, putting out the word that Clinton ventured to Moscow on a travel visa when he was supposed to be studying as a Rhodes Scholar in England. Clinton got elected anyway, and, fortunately, his problems turned out to be of a sex-addiction rather than a commie-sympathizing variety.

Isn't anyone else getting these e-mails lately? Some call Obama a Muslim and terrorist sympathizer. Some call him a member of a frightful Afro-centric Christian sect that hates America. Some call him both and invite you to pick your favorite fear.

Some cite his color and are simply racist, often with supposed humor. Some call him the son of an African deadbeat father and suggest that he has a bad gene or divided national loyalty.

Some depict him as the son of a wildly liberal white woman and sound an alarm that he'll socialize medicine and give in to Iran and do Lord knows what else.

Isn't anyone else listening? You're hearing only two things these days. One is disdain for the unholy mess the Republicans have made. The other is dread that Obama may be some kind of weirdo.

There's your election. The Republicans hold only the one card, the weirdo card. And now Huckabee is pontificating in Japan as if holier than thou that Republicans ought to stick to higher-minded things

Some are saying, I'm sure, that Democrats do this same thing to Republicans and that Democrats demonized Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Ken Starr.

But it's arguable whether most of those Republican fellows just mentioned jump-started themselves toward demonizing. And we could argue, too, about the difference between demonizing someone and fomenting fear of them.

But it's not arguable that Republicans have been better at whatever you choose to call it, at least in recent presidential campaigns.

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