Mr. Arkansas appears to have kicked off his 2010 Presidential election campaign this week in a column in Esquire magazine.  The article is quite a flattering profile from a clearly liberal author (remind you of any recent Republican Presidential candidates?).  The author goes so far as to describe Huckabee as “the nicest guy in a political party of not-very-nice guys”.  You can read the whole articlehere.

So, besides courting the liberal wing of the mainstream media (if Esquire can really be said to count as “mainstream”), what else is Huckabee doing?  Apparently, touting his centrist credentials and attacking his potential opposition.  The article takes a brief look at his new book “Do The Right Thing,” and mentions that Huckabee “caused a mini firestorm by taking a couple of uncharacteristically harsh swipes at Romney, whom he considered phony and high-handed.”  Yeah, that’s real rich coming from Huckabee.

Meanwhile, his economic populism is out full force:

“I mean, I just want to scream,” he says, “especially at these guys at the National Review, The Wall Street Journal, who are supposed to be these bastions of conservatism. And how can they call Barack Obama a socialist when everything they’re doing in economic and monetary policy is classic socialism? I find it so hypocritical. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a terrible mistake to revert back to welfare, because what Democrats are doing is pushing welfare for all people who are working individually, while you’ve got people on the Republican side pushing welfare for the highest CEOs in the wealthiest corporations in America. It’s insane.”

It’s like deja vu all over again.  And, what Huckabee campaign-prep would be complete without a couple of knocks at one of his principle rivals:

“Now I must say I did not think that either the Charlie Gibson interview or the Katie Couric interviews were unfair. In fact, if anything, Katie Couric was extraordinarily gentle, even helpful. [Palin] just…I don’t know what happened. I can’t explain it. It was not a good interview. I’m being charitable.”

So there you have it.  Populism, centrism, courting the media, and a couple of shots at Romney and Palin who, while probably the two weakest of his potential competitors in 2012, are nevertheless people he will need to beat if he wants to run for the top job.  Is Mike Huckabee getting ready to run?

First Diary!

So with all the talk flying around about who will wind up being the next party chairman, there’s not a huge amount of discussion over where his priorities should be.  Yes, yes, I know, he should focus on getting the party back to its roots of small government, strong national defense, and family values.  I’ve heard it a hundred times, I know that much.  But the GOP Chairman is, in large part, a logistical commander as well as a strategic commander, and so I’d like your opinions on what the focus should be on in the next year and a half or so (I assume by the summer of 2010, messaging and strategy will be mostly out of the whoever’s hands, he’ll have to play with whatever deck he’s built himself by then.)  So getting right into it, the most likely options seem like:

The House: This would be the fiscal conservatism route.  Since all spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, control of the House would allow the us a great deal of control over Obama’s various plans for the economy. The problem is, it would cost a tremendous amount of money, possibly starving all of our other races.  Also, we’re a whopping 40 seats short of a majority right now.  That’s a lot to do in two years.  If we choose to take this strategy, most of our serious races would probably be in territory that is usually heavily Republican, so this strategy might not be particularly effective in terms of long-term party building.

Local Races: Redistricting occurs in 2010.  It’s been suggested that perhaps the best plan for the party is to invest its time and money into statehouse races (which the Democrats might not have the money to contest seriously if they’re running hard on the federal level).  Unfortunately, with multiple Republican-held seats in swing states coming up in the Senate, and almost 220 Democrats who won by 15 or more points in 2008 in the House, pursuing this strategy could result in yet a third (highly publicized of course) federal-level electoral drubbing.  On the other hand, conceding control of redistricting in places like New York and California to the Democrats will shove the few seats available in those states even further out of reach.  Meanwhile, Democrats control the House delegations from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin, to name a few; all States in which the Republicans could take the delegation with some hard work and focused redistricting.  This is the long-term, take-a-hit-now-for-the-benefit-later strategy.

Governorships: Focusing on taking back as many Governor’s mansions as possible would have two advantages.  The first involves redistricting, in obvious ways.  The second is that popular Republican governors can help immensely in recruiting and promoting candidates, as well as rebuilding the party’s national image by replacing Bush and McCain with people like Jindal and Sanford in people’s minds.  Unfortunately, Governors have less control over redistricting than the statehouses do, and this approach does nothing for us at the Federal level at all.  This is another of the long term strategies that could pay huge dividends in 2012 if executed properly in 2010, but that could lead to a bad result in 2010 except for in the targeted area.

Senate: The big kahuna.  Between Illinois and New York, the Senate looks like it’ll get some more Democratic-seat action then previously expected.  It might not be feasable to take it back, but given how many vulnerable Republican seats there are, I’d view picking up 1 or 2 seats as a win for the Republicans.  Focusing on the Senate, of course, has the most potential to turn out the base for one reason:  we can run on the Supreme Court.  Fact is, although 7 of the current Supreme Court justices are Republican appointees, Ford, Reagan, and the elder Bush all appointed a pro-choice justice (Reagan appointed two technically, but Sandra Day O’conner’s been replaced).  Obama is unlikely to be so ideologically forgiving of his nominees.  Running on a nationwide anti-judicial-activism message has considerable potential.  On the other hand, we are likely to accomplish very little actual forward motion in the Senate, the first job would just be to stop the Democratic inertia.

Everything At Once: This one is a real gamble, as we won’t really have the money to seriously compete in all the ways I listed above.  If it fails, it will fail spectacularly.  However, the strategy could work, and lead to another 1994, if the national landscape has shifted radically toward the Republicans.  This is not a decision that can be made in 15 months though, the groundwork for a campaign like this would have to start right now, and once started, couldn’t be undone.  Highest risk, highest reward of all the options.

So there you have it.  As for my own opinions, I tend to lean towards working the statehouses hard in this election, it’s hard to imagine any more backslide in the House, and we’ll make up ground in the Senate in 2012 when all the 2006 freshman come back up for reelection.  What are your thoughts?