If pessimism is not creeping on little cat's feet into Republicans' thinking about their 2012 presidential prospects, that is another reason for pessimism. This is because it indicates they do not understand that sensible Americans, who pay scant attention to presidential politics at this point in the electoral cycle, must nevertheless be detecting vibrations of weirdness emanating from people associated with the party. The most recent vibrator is Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who won the 2008 Republican caucuses in Iowa and reached that year's national convention with more delegates than Mitt Romney, and who might run again. Huckabee, now a Fox News host, was asked by Steve Malzberg, a talk radio host, this:
"Don't you think it's fair also to ask [Barack Obama] . . . how come we don't have a health record, we don't have a college record, we don't have a birth cer - why, Mr. Obama, did you spend millions of dollars in courts all over this country to defend against having to present a birth certificate. It's one thing to say, I've - you've seen it, goodbye. But why go to court and send lawyers to defend against having to show it? Don't you think we deserve to know more about this man?"
Huckabee should have replied, "I've seen paranoia, goodbye." Instead, he said:
"I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya. . . ."
Huckabee thereupon careened off into the (he thinks) related subject of Obama having sent back to the British Embassy in Washington a bust of Winston Churchill that Obama's predecessor had displayed in the Oval Office: ". . . a great insult to the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists."
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