Fishing. Polly J in the UK: 09/12/2007

Huckabee: Another Overachiever From Hope
By NANCY BENAC – 1 hour ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — Mike Huckabee's first day as Arkansas governor is remembered most for the Four Hour Crisis.
Five minutes before Huckabee was to be sworn in, the disgraced outgoing governor, Jim Guy Tucker, tried to wriggle out of his promise to resign.
For the next few hours, the state flirted with a constitutional crisis as Lt. Gov. Huckabee and Tucker, the governor who had been convicted of two felonies in the Whitewater investigation, jockeyed for control, and the people of Arkansas watched in horror.
Huckabee, a Republican, stood tough; he went on statewide television and threatened to call a special legislative session to have the Democratic governor impeached. Behind the scenes, he worked with Democratic legislators to coax Tucker to quit. An anxious afternoon ended when Tucker scribbled a note of resignation, salve for what Huckabee had described as an "open, oozing sore."
Democrats and Republicans alike praised Huckabee for handling the 1996 standoff with grace and grit. And thus did he begin an improbable path that has taken him from accidental governor to Flavor of the Month on the presidential campaign trail.
Huckabee, a fireman's son from tiny Hope, Ark., is hoping to follow the footsteps of his hometown's most famous overachiever, former President Clinton.
Smart, funny and articulate, he is the happy candidate whose campaign has vaulted out of obscurity after being largely ignored for the first year of this drawn-out presidential contest. His rise in the polls has been accompanied by new scrutiny of both his policies and personality, and by predictions that he will fade under the klieg lights.
The rap from his critics: He's too flip, too weak on foreign policy. Quick to turn on someone he thinks has crossed him. Some think there's still too much of the preacher in the politician, and get queasy about a candidate who raised his hand when GOP debaters were asked who didn't believe in evolution.
But Huckabee, 52, has made a habit of confounding skeptics.
When Huckabee, a Southern Baptist, felt the call in high school to pursue the ministry, his older sister, Pat Harris, remembers that local folks sadly shook their heads and said, "Gosh, what a loss. He could've really been something."
Two decades later, when he decided to give up his hugely popular ministry for a life in politics — as a Republican in Democratic Arkansas, no less — the reaction was the same.
"Talk about some upset folks," says Harris, "when you resign your church and tell them you're going into politics, that just didn't sit well at all." And, she adds, "nobody whines any better than a bunch of church people."
As governor, Huckabee surpassed expectations again on an altogether different matter when he put himself on a diet and managed to drop 110 pounds.
Now, the self-described one-time "sofa spud" is a 6-foot, 180-pound marathon runner, and he sees parallels in politics.
"Running marathons trained me for more than running 26.2 miles," he told The AP last week as a new poll put him atop the Republican field in Iowa. "It also gave me a real good understanding that just because somebody runs out in the early miles and does real well does not necessarily mean they're going to finish."
"I would watch as many people half my age would run by me with a smirk at mile 6 because they were so fast and just whizzing past. About mile 18, they were on the ground and holding their cramped muscles and screaming and not finishing. I tried not to smirk — but I did go by and think about them as I passed."
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Huckabee is 9 years younger than Bill Clinton. So by the time he followed the future president's tiny footsteps into Miss Mary's kindergarten in Hope, Clinton had long since moved on to Hot Springs, Ark.
However, both men have drawn heavily on their early years in their campaigns. Huckabee styles himself as something of a political hybrid, a conservative populist.
He often tells people that his family was only "a few pocketsful of change" away from poverty. His stump speech reminds voters that he is the first male in his bloodline to finish high school, let alone college. His mother, he says, was a generation away from dirt floors and outdoor toilets.
But the kids didn't feel poor. Mike and sister Pat had plenty of battered-and-fried Southern cooking to eat, got their share of toys at Christmas and had their birthday parties right on schedule.
The Huckabees weren't really a churchgoing family, but sometime in grade school their mother, Mae, started taking Mike and Pat to services. Their father, Dorsey, "was the kind of daddy that got us off to church and stayed home," Harris remembers — that is, until Mike began doing some of the preaching.
Huckabee stood out early. At 14, he was an announcer for a local radio station; at 15, he felt a spiritual "awakening;" by 16, he was preaching Sunday sermons; at 17, he was president of the student council and governor of Arkansas Boys State, a civic program for outstanding students; by 18, he was an ordained minister.
As a high school senior, even his sideburns were outsized — stretching all the way to his jawline. This was the '70s, after all.
But Huckabee was no radical.
Tomye Power, who taught Western civilization to college-bound seniors at Hope High, even now remembers Huckabee as having "a generally conservative view of what the government should and shouldn't do," even if he didn't necessarily yet label himself a Republican.
He was already a showman, too, playing the lead in "Flowers for Algernon" his senior year, playing guitar in a rock band on the weekends.
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Huckabee married Janet McCain, his high school girlfriend, at 18, and finished Ouachita Baptist University in two and a half years, rushing through to hold down tuition costs. In 1977, he dropped out of a Baptist seminary to work for Texas televangelist James Robison, helping to coordinate his Billy Graham-style crusades and television program. One of the first things Robinson did was buy the young man some better suits.
In 1980, 25-year-old Huckabee helped with logistics for a rollicking appearance in Dallas by Ronald Reagan before more than 15,000 cheering evangelicals, and came away with a powerful impression of the evangelical movement's potential.
"I don't think he ever forgot that," said Robinson. "He's told me that that impacted him as much as anything in his life."
Huckabee soon had adoring parishioners of his own. After filling in as a guest preacher in Pine Bluff, Ark., Huckabee was recruited to stay on.
"We all fell in love with Mike," says 83-year-old Martha Bobo. "Our church was in dire need of some good preaching." Bobo and her husband used their feed truck to help move the Huckabees to Pine Bluff. There, and later in Texarkana, Huckabee drew on both his preaching and media skills to revitalize the church and establish a community TV station.
It made the young guitar-playing preacher something of a local celebrity.
Even people who'd never set foot in the church, Harris recalls, would call Huckabee when they were in trouble; they'd seen him on TV.
Huckabee says his time as a minister is what sets him apart from other presidential candidates, giving him "cradle to grave" perspective on the struggles of ordinary Americans. He had dreamed about going into politics as a boy, and now, after 20 years in the ministry, he was feeling the tug again.
In 1992, at age 37, with three kids and a mortgage, he left the ministry to run for the Senate against Democratic incumbent Dale Bumpers.
"I don't think there were many people who understood," says Harris. In their view, she said, "Politics tend be nasty, ugly and dirty; you couldn't be a born-again Christian and want to wallow in that."
Huckabee's answer: "Everybody wants to eat off a clean plate, but nobody wants to do the dishes."
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Huckabee lost that race badly, receiving 40 percent of the vote. But an unusual domino effect nonetheless put him on the political fast track to become governor within four years:
_Tucker, the lieutenant governor, moved up to complete Clinton's gubernatorial term when Clinton became president.
_Huckabee won a special election to complete Tucker's term, and later was re-elected lieutenant governor.
_Huckabee moved up when Tucker resigned the governorship after his conviction in the Whitewater investigation.
Huckabee was only the third Republican governor in Arkansas since Reconstruction, and Democratic legislators didn't make it easy for him. Nor, they complain, did he make it easy for them.
Despite partisan tensions, Huckabee was elected to two full terms and compiled a solid record of achievements: expanding health insurance coverage for poor children, implementing education reforms, reducing welfare rolls. He served as chairman of the National Governors Association and led the Education Commission of the States.
All this while still displaying a refreshing sense of humor and claiming the distinction of being the only sitting governor with his own rock band, Capital Offense, which he describes as "a bunch of middle-aged people playing classic rock 'n' roll and living the dream of musicians." He showed his down-to-earth credentials by living in a mobile home — albeit a triplewide — on the lawn while the governor's mansion was under renovation.
And he did himself no end of good — physically and politically — with his dramatic weight loss, which he recounted in an exclamation point-filled 2005 book titled, "Stop Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork." It's got the classic before-and-after photos on the cover, and plenty of brutally honest fat stories inside.
Including the time an antique chair collapsed beneath Huckabee's weight during a Cabinet meeting, "like a scene from a Three Stooges film."
Huckabee's good at working without a net, with easy ad libs and campaign oratory that does the preacher in him proud.
"People take themselves too seriously," he says.
But sometimes his freewheeling style gets him in trouble. He's joked about being on a concentration camp diet, called Arkansas a "banana republic," dismissed "wacko environmentalists." When hit with a string of ethics complaints, he shrugged off questions about some of the presents he'd accepted by promising not to accept nuclear devices as gifts.
Democratic Arkansas legislators, meanwhile, complain that Huckabee expected them to bring about his "accomplishments" but was loath to share credit, quick to nurse grudges, and didn't hesitate to back out of deals that didn't suit him. Even some Republicans would talk about who'd been "thrown under the bus" lately.
"He can sure make lots of folks believe in him — until they really get to know him," said former state Rep. Dennis Young, a Republican-turned-Democrat who says he gave Huckabee his first campaign contribution but later tangled with him over how to revamp the state's vehicle tax system.
The sentiment is echoed by Democratic state Sen. Percy Malone, who says Huckabee is "very charming, very engaging, very good, but don't cross him. ... If somebody disagrees with him, he'll attack them."
Republican state Sen. Gilbert Baker counters that Huckabee did remarkably well in a difficult political environment. "You can't look at the accomplishments without saying Huckabee was very engaged," he said.
Baker allows that the governor was not one to wade deep into details with opposition Democrats, but he adds: "You govern the way that your personality dictates and your unique circumstances require. I could see where they would say he was detached because he wasn't down there all the time."
Huckabee himself acknowledges he can be wary. He once told an interviewer, "It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you."
Which is exactly what his Republican opponents are intent on right now.