Will he or won’t he? Is he going to concede tonight in Texas or tomorrow in Little Rock, or ever? That was the question at the Mike Huckabee watch party in Irving, Texas, in the hour leading up to his speech as reporters scrummed around trying to catch the arm of an aide who could answer. For the whole day the answer was no, not tonight at least, maybe not even tomorrow. Even this afternoon, Ed Rollins was insisting to me on the phone that a concession was not in the offing tonight. But then an aide was quoted anonymously by NBC that “the handwriting was on the wall” and that a concession was imminent.
Ten minutes later Huckabee was on the stage, looking misty eyed with his wife Janet, and talking about … former Kansas City Royals baseball star George Brett, and how though his last out was an easy chopper to third, he ran as hard as he could all the way down to first base. Aha! So he was conceding. “It’s been a great journey,” Huckabee said. “I extended my congratulations to John McCain,” he told us, acknowledging that it looked apparent that McCain would get to 1,191 delegates tonight. But even tonight, Huckabee didn’t utter an explicit “It’s time to get out of the race” line. Still, it seems his 2008 political journey is over.
