Kerry Howley

I’ve got a quick profile of political diva Mike Huckabee in the first issue of Politics (formerly Campaigns & Elections):

Pick an issue – any issue – being debated in the as we approach the 2008 elections, and Mike Huckabee can find a way to tell you that it won’t matter until we collectively slim down. Education? “Kids can’t learn,” he told Charlie Rose in November, “because they’re sick.” The economy? Obesity “will bankrupt this country,” he said in the same interview. The War on Terror? “National security,” he told me in November, “isn’t going to mean much if we have a generation of kids so physically incapacitated they can’t go to war.”

As campaign strategy, weight maintenance talking points are weirdly effective. Issues like global terrorism, failing public schools and the fragile economy are diffuse, impersonal, seemingly uncontrollable. In an election cycle where all of these issues figure prominently among Republican primary voters, Huckabee intimates that Americans can help allay their greatest anxieties by choosing salad over bacon. In the able hands of a former pastor, a story about overcoming obesity becomes one of shame, sacrifice and redemption.

Like everything else with Mike Huckabee, this is personal. Back in 2003, during a meeting of his cabinet in the Arkansas State Capitol, then-Gov. Huckabee famously began the session by smashing his prodigious frame though an antique chair. A lesser fat man would have simply tried to forget the incident. Huckabee dropped 110 pounds and wrote a diet book recounting the experience in excruciating detail. “If I can do it, anybody can!” he writes in “Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork.”