Amen Brother Brumment

The assessment of Huckabee’s nicenesss and decency is about 75 percent on target. It’s operative three out of every four days, give or take.

It’s usually interrupted on that fourth day by his ethical blind spot, hypersensitivity to criticism, general tackiness and hyperbolic counter-offenses. All perhaps were formed and influenced by his pulpit career, which nourished a sense of entitlement and made him accustomed to moral praise.

He can be metaphor-addicted and obsessed with the idea of himself as martyr and victim. Arkansas becomes a “banana republic” if Democrats are turning out black votes.

He thinks he’s funny. Sometimes he is. Sometimes he’s inappropriate.

He did a creditable British accent the other day in relating a conversation with Keith Richards about the pardon he gave the Rolling Stone for that old Fordyce arrest. When an obese radio talk show host in Iowa told Huckabee that he drinks water to lose weight, but has to get to get up to go to the bathroom every 20 minutes, Huckabee replied that that was better than going to the bathroom every 20 minutes, but not getting up to do it. Huckabee allowed as to how he’d rather see Scarlet Johansson topless than Vladimir Putin.

Maybe Huckabee can improve his niceness ratio. With those three children out of college and with a better salary as president or vice president, Huckabee might be less inclined to keep his hand out to undisclosed benefactors. That class-based chip on his shoulder might even disappear, unless it festered like Nixon’s.

Huckabee is a laudably accomplished lower middle-class son of small-town Arkansas. He genuinely is compassionately conservative - which is to say moderate - about the disenfranchised and underprivileged.

As governor, he was brave on immigration and school reform. He sincerely champions art and music education for kids. The weight loss and emergence as a marathon runner - those provide evidence of admirable will and discipline.

He made public-private partnerships work when the state got an influx of Katrina evacuees.

Huckabee’s tragically turning Wayne DuMond loose revealed his contradiction: He was compassionate toward the castrated man’s plight, but thoroughly paranoid and over-reactive in deeming through partisan blinders that DuMond was a victim of Clintonian Delta corruption.

Hillary probably is altogether rougher and tougher, actually. On those three days, that is.

But she’d better watch out on the fourth.