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Opinion: Mike Huckabee, writing a new book, gets bus time with John McCain

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So let’s say you decide to run for president and you surprise some people and win in one place. Call it Iowa. But in a bunch of other places you don’t win. And then you win a few more. And you don’t have that much money. And you only have a fraction of the necessary delegates to earn your party’s nomination. Let’s call it the Republican Party.

But every other candidate drops out, except for the candidate who’s clearly gonna win, and one other loopy old guy with a dozen delegates. So you keep at it, building national name recognition for the future. Then, you have to give up. And like a loyal soldier you endorse the winner.

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How do you make a winning lemonade out of those losing apples?

Write a book. And so former radio host-preacher-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has signed to write a book about his experiences as a loser and his views of the GOP’s future, of which he’d like to be a leading part, say, maybe in 2012.

Huckabee spent today toodling around parts of Arkansas on the Straight Talk Express, getting a few hours of facetime with the guy Huckabee wouldn’t mind running with as vice president, Sen. John McCain.

McCain was already finishing up his second national campaign tour for the November election, the go-places-that-wealthy-guys-in-suits-don’t-usually-go swing, while his two possible Democratic opponents keep going after each other with millions of primary dollars.

Riding along the highways that his state administration helped rebuild, Huckabee said an unusual thing. He....

....defended Sen. Barack Obama against charges by many that he was closely associated with the extremist views of his retired pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Huckabee said it’s ‘a little bit presumptuous to ever assume that just because the pastor says something on the pulpit that everyone in the pew agrees with it. That’s rarely the case.’ Of course, Obama says he wasn’t actually in a pew when the most controversial things were said.

Maybe Huckabee’s Wright views will also show up in the new book, which will be published by Sentinel, a conservative imprint of the Penguin Group, which is also publishing Donald Rumsfeld’s upcoming book. The advance price of Huckabee’s book was not disclosed.

But the publication date was. It’s Nov. 18, which just happens to be two weeks after the presidential election.

So, in theory, if McCain continues his remarkable comeback from last summer’s political oblivion by picking Huckabee as his running mate and they happen to win on Nov. 4, putting Huckabee one heartbeat away from replacing the oldest man to ever be inaugurated U.S. president, 14 days later Sentinel could have a pretty good seller on its hands.

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But that probably never even crossed their minds.

-- Andrew Malcolm

Photo Credit: AP

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