Laid Back

Is he using his moment in the limelight wisely? His New Year's Eve shenanigans certainly gave cause for wonder. On Monday morning, a couple of hours before Huckabee's trip to the barber, reporters gathered in a ballroom at the Des Moines Marriott to get their first look at a new TV ad the former governor had filmed over the weekend. The clip, which would have been Huckabee's first negative ad of the campaign, was set to push back against Romney, who has saturated Iowa's airwaves with millions of dollars in attack ads aimed at the former Arkansas governor. The ads, which have gone largely unchallenged, have eaten into Huckabee's once-sizable lead in the state, putting the two basically neck-and-neck heading into Thursday's caucuses.

As reporters filed in for the press conference, nothing seemed amiss. Huckabee staffers tested the room's audiovisual equipment to make sure it would work come show time. The stage backdrop seemed to indicate that Huckabee planned to follow through on what aides promised would be a pushback against his rivals. "Enough is Enough," it read, while signs along either side of the stage broadcast conflicting quotes from Romney on issues like taxes, abortion and guns.

Yet when Huckabee showed up, all bets were off. The former governor took the stage and, with his wife Janet at his side, announced that he wouldn't be running the ad after all because he didn't feel right about going negative. "We are now committed from now through the rest of the caucuses that we will run only ads that talk about why I should be president and not why Mitt Romney should not," he said. "The tipping point was this morning. I just realized that this is not how we run our campaign in this state. We have run it positive. We have gotten here by being positive."

But then he did just what he had said he wouldn't do. In a room full of reporters and cameras from nearly every major news organization in the country, Huckabee decided to show the ad that just moments before he had promised never to run. "I know that some of you are up saying, 'Well did you really have an ad?' Well, I'm going to show you the ad. You'll get the chance to find out," Huckabee declared. Reporters in the room, nearly dead silent with shock up to this moment, looked at each other and started laughing. In the back, Huckabee aides looked pained.

Privately, aides insisted that Huckabee's last-minute epiphany went down just as he said. The former governor had announced his decision to his top staffers less than an hour before his press conference was set to begin. Not everybody agreed with the move. One strategist associated with the campaign told NEWSWEEK, "What happened today … I just can't explain it. I don't get it." Was it foolish? Or fiercely clever, given Iowans' famous aversion to negative campaigning?

At the barber, Huckabee tried to explain his decision-making, telling reporters that he'd just realized that going negative wasn't worth it. "It's never too late to do the right thing," Huckabee said, as his barber gingerly snipped at bits of hair atop his balding head. With every snip, shutters flashed like lightning. More than 50 reporters and photographers had shown up to document the event.