Pat Dollard

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Rumor has it she put in an application at the restaurant to be a waitress…no answer yet.

What happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas – especially if you’re the wife of a presidential candidate. Just ask Janet Huckabee, who attended a middleweight prize fight this past weekend in Las Vegas – where she stayed at the Hooters Casino Hotel.

That eye-opening combination – a title bout in Sin City, which celebrates gambling, drinking and all things wild, along with a hospitality chain favoring buxom waitresses in low-cut garb – could potentially shock the armies of evangelical conservative Christians who have made her husband, the former governor of Arkansas, the only remaining GOP opponent to party front-runner John McCain.

“I had a room at the MGM Grand,” she said, but canceled it when she believed she wouldn’t be able to make the fight. Plans changed, and “a friend had two rooms … it was the only thing, quite frankly, that was available because the fights were in town.”

In a highly charged 2008 presidential campaign, some political observers say Janet Huckabee’s news-making extracurricular activities are just the latest in a string of events that dramatize, as GOP strategist Karen Hanretty puts it, that “the larger story line in this campaign is candidate’s spouses as celebrities – whether it’s Jerri Thompson, Elizabeth Edwards, Cindy McCain or Michelle Obama.”

“This is the first election where we’ve seen the spouse (covered) as a celebrity … because for good or ill, spouses are a reflection of the candidate,” Hanretty said.

The week before GOP primaries in Wisconsin and Washington, “he’s in the Cayman Islands, giving a speech – and she’s at a pro boxing match in Vegas?” said a flabbergasted Hanretty. “It demonstrates that Mike and Janet aren’t serious about moving into the White House. … This is not a couple serious about leading the nation.”

(SFGate)