Huckabee: Heading toward his last stand?

A trip to the Alamo may have been fitting for Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who has been counted out by everyone covering the GOP race. Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank offers a study of the candidate as he campaigns for votes in the upcoming Texas primary:

He then went out into the Alamo plaza and, besieged not by Mexican soldiers but by autograph seekers, traced a line between the defenders of the Alamo to his own battle against presumptive GOP nominee John McCain and the Republican Party establishment.

"I refuse to allow the establishment or the party bosses in Washington or anywhere else to tell us this is over," he said. "For me to pull out of the election before Texas gets to vote would not only be unacceptable, it would be inexcusable," he said. "It's not Republican, and it's not American."

What Sam Houston was to warfare, Mike Huckabee is to the photo op. In Iowa, he won the envy of his rivals when he invited the cameras to join him on a hunting trip. He went jogging for the cameras (to show his fitness) and played the electric bass guitar on Leno (to show his hipness). On Thursday, it was time to demonstrate his stick-to-itiveness -- and there's no better place for that than the Alamo, which just happens to be in Texas, one of the next big primary states.

"People sometimes think of the Alamo as a defeat, but it actually was the springboard to Texas's victory and independence," Huckabee explained in justifying his journey. Well, that's true, Governor; Houston made "Remember the Alamo" his battle cry when he defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto. But every one of the men guarding the Alamo in 1836 was slaughtered.

Still, there's nothing like a visit to the Alamo to put one's troubles in perspective. As an added bonus, the visit allowed Huckabee to play Col. Travis to McCain's Santa Anna -- and McCain, author of the immigration "amnesty" detested by conservatives, was once again on the side of the Mexicans.