Ever since losing the Republican primary to John McCain in 2008, Mike Huckabee has repeatedly been asked if he plans to make another run for the White House in 2012. And his answer has always been the same: "I don't know. Maybe."
As Huckabee made clear during his last try, he is not independently wealthy and actually had to take breaks from campaigning in order to deliver paid speechs in order to have any sort of income. He's now got several different projects that provide a nice living, but he'd have to give them up if he decided to run for president and once again find himself without a steady income.
Given these constraints and Huckabee's perpetually nonchalant "maybe I will, maybe I won't" attitude, he's frequently left off the list of possible 2012 GOP candidates ... and that apparently irks him to no end:
Huckabee, for one, is tired of being left out of the conversation and sounds increasingly like a candidate.
“I just don’t understand how it is that a person can read these polls day after day and the narrative is constantly everybody but me,” he told POLITICO. “Whether I do it or not, the fact is that if one looks at the overall body of information that’s available, nobody would be in a better position to take it all the way to November.”
Few politicians who have felt – as Huckabee did for a moment in 2008 – a real shot at the presidency pass on a second run. That Huckabee’s national footprint, along with his bank account, has grown only strengthens the rationale for a second shot.
“The polls are consistently favorable, putting me either at the top of every poll or right near it. It’s hard to ignore that, having swum in that water before when I barely registered in those very kinds of polls,” he said.
Huckabee said he’s never wavered in seriously considering a bid, and interviews with the former Arkansas governor and much of his small inner circle suggest that he may be more likely to run than is widely presumed – and has recently shifted toward considering it more seriously.
I, for one, welcome this development, as we've spent years chronicling Huckabee's myriad ties to radical right-wing activists and candidates and would hate to see all of that work go to waste.
