Half a century ago, after the Supreme Court desegregation decision, an Arkansas governor named Orval Faubus stood in the doorway of Central High School in Little Rock with National Guard members to keep African American teenagers out. Now Mike Huckabee is doing a Faubus impersonation in South Carolina.

“You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” the former Arkansas governor told a crowd in Myrtle Beach yesterday. “In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole, that’s what we’d do.”

. . . If Huckabee believes he can win in South Carolina by going back to the past, he should take a look at the later career of Orval Faubus. A decade after the Little Rock standoff, he was managing the Li'l Abner theme park in the "Ozark Mountains, Dogpatch USA."