CHAUTAUQUA–Let’s pick up where we left off 10 weeks ago.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has the character, leadership ability, experience, and ideas both to win the presidency and serve the American people well.

He’s a bright, fun, quick-on-his-feet, likeable, principled movement conservative who relates as easily to big shots as he does to the next person walking down the road and who can bring conservative-movement ideas to any diner, truck stop, and kitchen table in America.

Furthermore, he’s old enough to have had multiple decades of experience which he can bring to the White House in 2025.

Nevertheless, Huckabee–since that column ran 10 weeks ago–has foreclosed running for any office anytime ever again.

Which is unfortunate for the country, as he in effect demonstrated during his July 25 morning-amphitheater lecture at Chautauqua Institution.

Chautauqua didn’t invite him to address this topic, no one asked him about it publicly, and he didn’t publicly address it.

Yet during his visit to Chautauqua, he in effect proved these credentials and obviously impressed much of an audience filled with people from across the political spectrum.

It was that obvious.

Which brings us to the state of the 2024 presidential election.

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Let’s start with the state of the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Think of all of the things that the Democrat incumbent has done wrong. Here are just a few:

¯ Curtailing domestic energy production, which has stoked inflation–not only for energy but also for other goods and services–unlike any inflation the country has endured since the inflation of the 1970s that lingered into the 1980s. Here’s one way to think of it: How much do you pay for a few bags of groceries now, compared to what you paid for the same items in 2020?

¯ Opening the southern border, which has, among other things, allowed even more illegal and deadly drugs to flow into this country.

¯ Projecting weakness around the world in a way that has tempted Russia to invade Ukraine and China to (fill in the blank), and

¯ Demonstrating cognitive impairment–this is serious, not funny–that has further tempted not just America’s enemies, but also many enemies of ordered liberty, around the world.

With all of these and more, it’s conceivable that any leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination could be way ahead in the polls.

But the leading Republican candidate and the Democrat incumbent are for all practical purposes tied, with a significant number of those polled undecided.

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Why? You, faithful reader of this column, know one reason. You would have known it even if you hadn’t read it here 16 weeks ago: As many people across the political spectrum–including both supporters and opponents of his ideas–understand, the leading Republican candidate is his own worst enemy.

He has often said he’s not a politician. Which, to be sure, can have its advantages. It also has its disadvantages. Please consider, for example, his paradoxical penchant for being “too honest.” That phrase isn’t usually a criticism, yet it is here in this sense: Although he believes what he says, he says almost everything he believes, even when he should tone it down, if not just be quiet.

As you read in this column in November 2021: When this columnist attended a reunion at a school where he taught, one German staff member pulled him aside, and said of the person who has since become the leading Republican candidate:

¯ “Reden ist Silber. Schweigen ist Gold.” (Talk is silver. Silence is golden.)

¯ “Er schiesst sich selber ins Knie.” (He shoots himself in the knee.)

¯ “Er leidet an verbaler Inkontinenz.” (He suffers from verbal incontinence.)

With all of these and more, it’s conceivable that a Democrat incumbent could be way ahead in the polls.

But, again, the major political parties’ leading candidates are for all practical purposes tied, with a significant number of those polled undecided.

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One would think this tie would be triggering concern, if not setting off alarm bells, in both major political parties.

Whatever the best solution for each candidate and each major political party is, and even if the best solution for each candidate is to step up his game, one would still think the tie would be triggering concern, if not still be setting off alarm bells, in both major political parties.

Of course, there’s one way that the Democrat incumbent unfortunately can’t step up his game: Neither he, nor anyone else, can reverse his cognitive impairment. There may come a time when science will be able to reverse cognitive impairment such as his. But that won’t happen by 2024.

Meanwhile, let’s see which side–if either–first addresses, and then breaks, the tie.

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Under current circumstances, the 2024 presidential election is the Republicans’ to win and the Republicans’ to lose.

They can do either.

You just know they can do either.

You just know.

Dr. Randy Elf’s Aug. 20, 2020, Advocates for Balance at Chautauqua presentation, on “How Political Speech Law Benefits Politicians and the Rich,” is at https://works.bepress.com/elf/21