- Brian Chilson
- OF DOUGHNUTS AND MEDIA DOMINANCE: Talk of Mike Huckabee leads us, inevitably, to Little Rock’s new Dunkin’ Donuts.
- NY Times
- Q&A: Mike Huckabee got featured one-page interview in last Sunday’s New York Times.
Florida media mogul Mike Huckabee gets some typically unflattering attention in the American Spectator, a Club for Growth-oriented conservative publication that has long ripped the former Arkansas governor. An extensive article remarks on the disappearing buzz about Huckabee’s assault on the conservative talk radio primacy of Rush Limbaugh. It spins Huckabee as the “Titanic of talk radio,” with hype matching that given the great ocean liner before its fateful sailing. Mixing metaphors, the writer also compares Limbaugh to a James Bond villain, still supreme despite Huckabee efforts to topple him.
Well, Governor Huckabee has now been on the air for three months. It would seem fair to ask the obvious questions:
Where has all the Huckabee-challenging-Rush buzz gone?
The writer chooses not to count as buzz last Sunday’s New York Times magazine interview with Huckabee. As he notes, it was mostly about Huckabee’s support for Mitt Romney, his bitter rival in 2008, and had only a glancing reference to the Limbaugh competition. But it did have this winning passage between Andrew Goldman and Huckabee:
Could it possibly be true that you have never, ever tried alcohol in your life?
That’s true, other than communion wine in Europe. But I’ve never, ever tasted beer.
You’ve never cracked open the hotel minibar and thought to yourself, Well, I’m out of town, what the heck?
No. It’s really not a religious reason. When I was younger, someone said, “Here, try this,” and handed me beer, and I smelled it, and I thought, Gee, that smells horrible. And they said, “Well, you have to develop a taste for it.” When they said that, I said, “All of my senses tell me to reject it, but you’re telling me that I have to keep doing it over and over till I get to the point that I’m convincing myself that I enjoy it?” Now, have I ever been tempted to break into a Krispy Kreme doughnut store in the middle of the night? Oh, yeah. God help us if I had a minibar stocked with cheesecake and chicken-fried steak. Dangerous.
Which reminds me of Brian Chilson’s spread of photos on Facebook of the new Dunkin’ Donuts on Cantrell Road. I’m still a Shipley’s man. This may be another issue on which the guv and I can’t find common ground, but I think we could discuss the topic amiably with some mutual enthusiasm. I guess we can’t do it over a pitcher of PBR draft, however.
