Huckabee: With Lost Weight, I Could Be My Own VP
LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas. Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who has used his 110-pound weight loss to generate sympathy in a long-shot quest to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, today proposed to serve as his own vice president if elected.
Mike Huckabee
“A hundred and ten pounds ain’t peanuts,” Huckabee said to reporters outside his headquarters here. “If I lose maybe ten more pounds, you’re talking a Jimmy Carter, maybe even a Harry Truman.”
Harry Truman: Pound-for-pound, the greatest president of the 20th century.
Huckabee is touting the idea of dual office-holding as a way to reduce the federal deficit. The Vice President is paid an annual salary of $171,500, has an expense account of $10,000 and a $90,000 entertainment budget, lives rent-free in the Blair House and is entitled to free coffee refills in the White House cafeteria. Huckabee says he will forego all of these benefits if elected, and will also work nights and weekends for the presidential salary of $400,000.
John Nance Garner: He didn’t really say “spit”.
The vice presidency was once described as “not worth a warm bucket of spit” by John Nance Garner, who was thirty-second vice president from 1933 to 1941. On his last day in office his staff presented him with a silver bucket filled with spit, and Garner cheerfully admitted that he had been right.
Janet Huckabee: “Yes, those slacks make you look fat.”
The notion of dual office-holding came to Huckabee when he was admiring himself in the mirror in the first weeks of a low-carb bacon, heavy cream, egg white and belly-button lint diet. “I said to my wife Janet ‘Look, I’ve lost ten pounds!’,’ Huckabee recalls, ”and she said ‘Turn around, you’ll find it.’”
Lavoisier: “Do I smell popcorn?”
Under the First Law of Thermodynamics, first propounded by French chemist and teen pop star Anoine Lavoisier, matter can neither be created nor destroyed. As a result Huckabee’s “lost” weight remains available to perform the functions of the vice president such as attending funerals of third-world dictators and flying to natural disasters in which fewer than one hundred people die.
Other Republican contenders criticized the idea, saying it was essential to the nation’s security to have a different individual in each office. “If the president dies, the vice president takes over,” noted former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. “If the vice president dies the Speaker of the House takes over.” What happens, a reporter asked Romney in the hope of tripping him up on a question of constitutional law, when the Speaker dies?
“You go to Radio Shack,” Romney replied with composure, “and get a new one.”
Copyright 2007, Con Chapman
