I wasn’t planning to do yet another post about Mike Huckabee, but this one’s too good to pass up.
There’d been quite a bit of buzz today about Huckabee dropping a proverbial campaign bomb today, the final hardest-hitting-ad-to-date smackdown against Mitt Romney, which ostensibly would curtail Romney’s momentum in the closing days before the Iowa caucuses.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the shoot-out. Marc Cooper reports from Des Moines:
In what is likely to be remembered as one of the more bizarre moments of this campaign season, embattled GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee renounced negative campaigning today by unveiling an attack ad to a ballroom full of reporters and dozens of TV cameras.
Standing before a banner reading “Enough is Enough” and flanked by five large charts attacking the record of rival Mitt Romney, a haggard-looking Huckabee said that the fight to win Thursday’s Republican caucus had gotten “out of hand” and “out of control” and that he would refrain from any more negative campaigning.
Huckabee told the assembled crowd of reporters, which I’ve been told was pretty big, that he and his campaign had already finished the attack ad, sent it local TV stations, and announced the press conference to unveil it … and then Huckabee had an epiphany this morning. “From now we will run only ads that say why I should be president not why Mitt Romney shouldn’t be president,” he said.
At which point, Huckabee showed the reporters the attack ad anyway, prompting what Cooper said was “loud gasps and laughter from the more than 150 reporters on hand.”
Marc Ambinder noted that Huckabee is presumably “hoping that gullible news executives will run the ad that Huckabee is too much of a saint for not airing — for free.” Of course, given the reported laughter in the room, that seems unlikely.
It gets worse.
Huckabee spoke surrounded by five placards on easels leveling the same attacks in print on Romney.
Asked to explain the pledge to stay positive with his decision to still show the ad and display the oppo, Huckabee said his staff hadn’t known of his decision until minutes before the event and that he only showed the negative spot to prove that he had actually cut one and had made this decision.
It’s the sort of gambit that will instantly trigger cynicism among the political class, especially given the confusion that surrounded the move.
Charmaine Yoest, a top aide to the former governor, said after the press conference that she didn’t know about Huckabee’s decision to not air the ads until shortly before the event and that there hadn’t been time to take down the signs.
But, surrounded by reporters in a hallway outside the conference room, she wouldn’t say exactly when she found out about the decision. “This is an evolving strategy,” Yoest admitted before leaving.
We’ve all seen some very cheap stunts over the years, but they’re not usually this cheap and not this transparent. Reporters covering the campaign have their faults, but they’re not idiots, and Huckabee just insulted their collective intelligence.
Joe Klein concluded, “That sound you hear rumbling out of Des Moines appears to be a monumental implosion.”