Mrs. Huckabee

I'm with Ross: I sure would have liked to have seen and heard more from Janet Huckabee this campaign season. Some wonderful highlights from Slate's profile of Mike Huckabee's wife:

Because back home, the Huckabees' empathy for the luckless is one thing that has never been in doubt: "Janet's very headstrong and, even more so than he, contemptuous of critics, and has a chip on her shoulder,'' says John Brummett, an Arkansas News Bureau columnist. "But if a tornado hits your house, one of the first people in your yard is probably going to be Janet Huckabee. And when Arkansas got evacuees from Katrina—and by all accounts Huckabee did masterfully—she decided, accurately, that these people were exhausted and the last thing they needed was to sit in line and be processed, when they could be processed on the bus." Then she got on the bus with some of them and pitched in on the paperwork.

[snip]

But the Huckabees also seem to relate to the have-nots because they know what it feels like to be looked down on. ...Both of the Huckabees grew up in modest circumstances themselves; Mike's dad was a firefighter with an eighth-grade education, and Janet McCain's single-parent home made her future husband's family look like the Bushes by comparison. According to Sitzes, after her mom had her fifth child, her father "shagged out and went down to Louisiana'' to work as an oil rigger, leaving Janet's mother to be the Horton in their family. She had a job as the Hempstead County clerk, but with five kids, money was so tight that their big treat of the week was buying a single large soda, putting a scoop of ice cream in it and sharing the one Coke float between them every Sunday night.

[snip]

In fact, in a country in which the Bushes were rewarded for acting down-home, and the Kerrys punished for being their windsurfing, polyglot selves, most of the criticism of Janet is so class-based, it would turn out to be great PR: She likes her pie, is middleweight boxing champ Jermain Taylor's biggest fan, and, with the help of her Baptist decorator, made a hash of the Arkansas governor's mansion, jettisoning draperies to let the light in and stowing antiques in favor of faux. She slams doors, packs heat, and, like most of us, will never be confused with Jackie Kennedy: "Janet is not White House material; I doubt she's learned which fork to use," says one of her Little Rock detractors, who was apolitical before Mrs. H. made him apoplectic. "She's such a big old horsy woman, she has no grace. I've seen her chew gum on television!" So it's a shame she doesn't give more speeches and interviews, because what a lot of Americans would say to a person of such poor comportment and little breeding is: Come and sit here, by me.

I don't care what they say, that lady has class.