Today Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, Baptist preacher, and news commentator, announced he is changing his name.
“Nobody remembers a name like Huckabee, and besides I’m tired of jokes about a low-growing shrub,” said Huckabee.
The once chubby governor decreed that henceforth he would be known as Michael Chuckleberry.
“It sounds more upbeat and light hearted,” said Chuckleberry. “Plus it has an air of dignity and legitimacy.”
Speculation is rife that Huckabee changed his name in anticipation of the upcoming 2016 presidential race. Chuckleberry, running under his birth name, won the 2008 Iowa primary with strong support from conservative, backwoods fundamentalist Christians.
Holding a Bible and denouncing other GOP candidates as “the Devil’s handmaidens,” Huckabee garnered 35% of the “race of the GOP midgets” in the Iowa Republican caucus. His supporters at the time justified the lopsided vote because he said he “would not overstay his welcome,” and true to his word, he caught a plane back to the South immediately after the vote.
Winning celebrity endorsements from Chucky Cheese and the White Citizens Council, Huckabee had a modicum of success campaigning against “political correctness” and for taking the country “back to Christ.” Known in political circles as a throwback to the ante-bellum South, Huckabee clashed repeatedly with Mitt Romney over whether Christians would choose the traditional version of a white-robed Heaven with harps and streets of gold, or getting their own planet when they die, as Romney believes.
“Romney only has empty promises of heaven,” Huckabee declared, “while I offer chickens and eggs, geese and ducks.”
Some observers continue to question whether Chuckleberry will actually run for president. When he declined to challenge Obama in 2012, he was making millions a year for airing his views on the correlation between the nation’s waistline and God, opening malls, advertising low cost refrigerators and marketing his own line of self-help books.
“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t (run for president),” Chuckleberry told this reporter. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”