Huckabee's sudden rise mirrors his past success
Mike Madden
Republic Washington Bureau
Dec. 18, 2007 12:00 AM
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Until a few weeks ago, Mike Huckabee was an unknown commodity to most of the country.
Not in Arkansas, though. As governor for more than 10 years, Huckabee kept a high profile in the state, whether he was pushing for highway improvements or exhorting his fellow citizens to lose weight.
In many ways, the Republican's lingering image here reflects how he is coming off nationally as he tries to maintain leads in the GOP presidential races in Iowa and South Carolina: He is well-liked by social conservatives and detested by fiscal ones, yet appreciated by both sides for his wit and charisma.
As lieutenant governor, he moved up to governor in July 1996 when Democratic Gov. Jim Guy Tucker resigned after a fraud conviction. Huckabee then won two terms of his own.
He left the statehouse in January and started what looked like a long-shot presidential campaign. Now, propelled by support from evangelical Christians in Iowa, Huckabee leads polls there and is second to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in most national surveys.
For those here who know Huckabee, his sudden rise in the GOP presidential campaign mirrors his career in Arkansas politics, where he blended social conservatism with economic populism and used his quick wit and roots as a Southern Baptist preacher to win over voters.
In the complicated logic of a wide-open GOP primary contest, Huckabee could help Arizona Sen. John McCain's attempt to revive his own presidential campaign.
If Huckabee beats former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in Iowa, McCain's aides believe, it would slow Romney's momentum enough to help McCain win the next primary in New Hampshire.
"Anything but a comfortable victory for Mitt Romney in Iowa throws big question marks," said Dave Roederer, McCain's campaign chairman in Iowa.
After months leading the polls in Iowa, Romney now is calling himself the underdog, trailing Huckabee even though he has poured millions of dollars into building an organization in Iowa.
Huckabee's views resonate in his home state, as well.
"The fact is that he placed himself squarely where most Arkansans are," said Janine Parry, a political-science professor at the University of Arkansas who runs the school's Arkansas Poll.
Parry noted that 55 percent of Arkansas voters last year said they still liked Huckabee, 10 years after he took office.
"(That's) pretty respectable, especially for anyone who's served more than six to eight years in public life," Parry said. "It's ample time for everyone to be disappointed in you at least once."
On the campaign trail, Huckabee, 52, talks frequently and proudly about his accomplishments here:
How he pushed for badly needed improvements to the state's highway and road infrastructure; how he expanded ArKids First, the state's health-insurance program for children in poor and working-class families; how he championed school reforms that consolidated several rural districts, although he disagreed with the Democratic Legislature about the final shape of that plan.
He occasionally was more liberal than his current campaign positions. On immigration, he pushed to allow in-state tuition for some illegal-immigrant kids who graduated from Arkansas high schools, although he lost that fight. He recruited the Mexican government to open a consulate in the state, and he opposed a Republican bill in the Legislature that would have denied health care for undocumented immigrants.
Still, throughout his tenure, Huckabee was a Republican governor in a Democratic state, with a constitution that limited the power he could wield on his own. That left him with a narrow margin in which to operate.
"He was a pragmatic conservative, not an ideologue, and I saw that as his strong point," said Rex Nelson, a former Arkansas political journalist and Huckabee's spokesman for most of his gubernatorial term. "He didn't just run for office; he was able to govern once he got into office."
Some of Huckabee's pragmatic politicking infuriated the Republican base in Arkansas, especially his support for various tax increases that helped fund some of the improvements he advocated.
Huckabee campaigned aggressively to raise taxes on diesel fuel and gasoline to pay for road projects, a sales-tax increase to improve state parks and a tax on nursing homes to cover Medicaid shortfalls. Although his campaign touts the 90 taxes he cut overall, the state's tax revenues increased during his tenure by almost $500 million.
"He thinks about government as running a business, and he needs more revenue to run his programs, and he doesn't think twice about increasing those taxes," said Patrick Briney, head of the Arkansas Republican Assembly, a conservative group that has been loudly critical of Huckabee's tax record.
The Club for Growth, a national anti-tax organization, also has blasted his policy, buying hundreds of thousands of dollars of anti-Huckabee advertising in New Hampshire and other key primary states.
In debates and in stump speeches, Huckabee's jokes and one-liners have helped him attract attention on the presidential trail. He also employed wit during his days as governor.
Critics say, though, that he frequently took disagreements personally and that he could flash a temper that so far hasn't appeared much in his national campaign.
He once ordered his press office to take the Arkansas Times, a Little Rock alternative weekly paper, off the list for press releases. He called conservative Republicans who differed with him about financial issues "Shiites," implying they were radicals.
"If you did not agree with him on a policy issue, he took it personally," said Randy Minton of Ward, Ark., a former GOP lawmaker who was one of Huckabee's critics. Minton campaigned for Huckabee during elections in the 1990s but split with him about taxes.
Huckabee mostly shrugs off such attacks, saying the taxes were necessary to pay for popular programs. His allies point out that Minton and other critics are so conservative that they are marginalized in Arkansas politics, something on which analysts agree.
"This is the scrutiny that I've been going through since I first put my name on the ballot in 1992. And for me, it's sort of like, 'Gosh, do they not have anything new?' " Huckabee said last week while campaigning in Iowa.
Among Arkansans, the affable nature Huckabee displays on the campaign trail mostly helped keep him popular.
"He's like a common guy," said Ron Platzer, 65, a salesman from Hot Springs, Ark.
Reach the reporter at mike .madden@arizonarepublic.com.
Tuesday, 18 December 2007
Sunday, 16 December 2007
How did this Happen?
(National Review Online)
This column was written by Michael J. Petrilli.
Mike Huckabee made news - and history - Tuesday when the New Hampshire affiliate of the National Education Association endorsed him for president in the upcoming primary - the first time it ever recommended a GOP candidate. (It picked Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side - no surprise there.) His support from teachers stems partly from his policy views (opposition to vouchers and support for art and music education, which he calls “weapons of mass instruction”) and partly from his outreach efforts (this summer he addressed the NEA convention - the first Republican presidential candidate ever to do so - plus he met personally with the New Hampshire union).
But that doesn’t fully explain Huckabee’s appeal to teachers. After all, he also supports policies that they oppose, such as teacher testing and abolishing tenure. While he’s expressed reservations with No Child Left Behind, he hasn’t proposed scrapping it, as the unions would prefer. And while “reaching out” to strange bedfellows can make headlines, it rarely yields endorsements.
The Huckabee-teacher connection reveals something about politics that is likely to transcend New Hampshire: Teachers, like Huckabee, tend to be culturally conservative and economically populist. And they like these views packaged in an optimistic, positive message. To the degree that people like to support candidates whom they can relate to, Huckabee is a natural fit for the teacher vote.
First, consider teachers’ values. The conventional wisdom says that most teachers are die-hard liberals, trying to foist a secular worldview on their hapless students. But research doesn’t show that. Consider their views on homosexuality. According to an article by scholar Robert Slater which appeared in a recent issue of Education Next, teachers aren’t terribly tolerant. Only thirty percent of teachers believe that homosexual relations “is not wrong at all,” compared to over 40 percent of the general college-educated population. Furthermore, greater numbers of teachers attend church regularly than other Americans: 37 percent go at least once a week, compared to 26 percent of the general population. Many teachers are cultural conservatives - just like Huckabee.
At the same time, teachers earn a modest income compared to other college graduates. (This is where the conventional wisdom is right.) Their average income of about $49,000 is roughly $10,000 more than the national average for all workers but about $10,000 less than nurses and accountants earn and less than half the pay of lawyers. Huckabee’s class warfare, anti-big business language resonates with many teachers. His focus on kitchen-table issues, his personal history of coming from meager means, and his “I feel your pain” rhetoric is thus tailor-made for this group.
Finally, teachers are positive - about their work, and about life. According to April’s job satisfaction survey published by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, educators express a high degree of job satisfaction and happiness. Only clergy, physical therapists, firefighters, and artists express more satisfaction on the job. And remarkably, special education teachers are happier than everyone but clergy, firefighters, travel agents, and architects. (Elementary teachers and education administrators aren’t far behind.) Thus, the stereotype of a smiling, caring kindergarten teacher seems closer to the mark than a caricature of an angry NEA delegate at the Democratic National Convention. And there’s a good chance that happy, satisfied people will respond well to a positive, upbeat message - Huckabee’s stock in trade. His line at the CNN/YouTube debate (defending his support for in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants) that “we are a better country than to punish children for what their parents did” no doubt resonated with these legions of smiling teachers.
It also has not hurt that, as governor of Arkansas, he increased spending on education (something most teachers love). Huckabee is a self-styled “paradoxical conservative” - fiscally liberal, economically populist, and culturally conservative. He will say that he is both pro-life and pro-poor. Outside of the Christian Right, this may not sell well with rank-and-file GOP activists. But it does strike a chord with teachers, many of whom are also “paradoxical conservatives.”
Will any of this matter in 2008? Perhaps not; most teachers are registered Democrats, so their support may not do Huckabee a lot of good in the primaries. But if he makes it through to the general election, it’s conceivable that he could steal a lot of their votes from the Democratic candidate. And that could make a big difference to the outcome; there are three million teachers, after all. In a close election, a major swing to the GOP could be a deciding factor. Teachers like Mike - and if Huckabee is to make a truly serious run at the White House, he will need them more than ever.
By Michael J. Petrilli
Reprinted with permission from National Review Online.
This column was written by Michael J. Petrilli.
Mike Huckabee made news - and history - Tuesday when the New Hampshire affiliate of the National Education Association endorsed him for president in the upcoming primary - the first time it ever recommended a GOP candidate. (It picked Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side - no surprise there.) His support from teachers stems partly from his policy views (opposition to vouchers and support for art and music education, which he calls “weapons of mass instruction”) and partly from his outreach efforts (this summer he addressed the NEA convention - the first Republican presidential candidate ever to do so - plus he met personally with the New Hampshire union).
But that doesn’t fully explain Huckabee’s appeal to teachers. After all, he also supports policies that they oppose, such as teacher testing and abolishing tenure. While he’s expressed reservations with No Child Left Behind, he hasn’t proposed scrapping it, as the unions would prefer. And while “reaching out” to strange bedfellows can make headlines, it rarely yields endorsements.
The Huckabee-teacher connection reveals something about politics that is likely to transcend New Hampshire: Teachers, like Huckabee, tend to be culturally conservative and economically populist. And they like these views packaged in an optimistic, positive message. To the degree that people like to support candidates whom they can relate to, Huckabee is a natural fit for the teacher vote.
First, consider teachers’ values. The conventional wisdom says that most teachers are die-hard liberals, trying to foist a secular worldview on their hapless students. But research doesn’t show that. Consider their views on homosexuality. According to an article by scholar Robert Slater which appeared in a recent issue of Education Next, teachers aren’t terribly tolerant. Only thirty percent of teachers believe that homosexual relations “is not wrong at all,” compared to over 40 percent of the general college-educated population. Furthermore, greater numbers of teachers attend church regularly than other Americans: 37 percent go at least once a week, compared to 26 percent of the general population. Many teachers are cultural conservatives - just like Huckabee.
At the same time, teachers earn a modest income compared to other college graduates. (This is where the conventional wisdom is right.) Their average income of about $49,000 is roughly $10,000 more than the national average for all workers but about $10,000 less than nurses and accountants earn and less than half the pay of lawyers. Huckabee’s class warfare, anti-big business language resonates with many teachers. His focus on kitchen-table issues, his personal history of coming from meager means, and his “I feel your pain” rhetoric is thus tailor-made for this group.
Finally, teachers are positive - about their work, and about life. According to April’s job satisfaction survey published by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, educators express a high degree of job satisfaction and happiness. Only clergy, physical therapists, firefighters, and artists express more satisfaction on the job. And remarkably, special education teachers are happier than everyone but clergy, firefighters, travel agents, and architects. (Elementary teachers and education administrators aren’t far behind.) Thus, the stereotype of a smiling, caring kindergarten teacher seems closer to the mark than a caricature of an angry NEA delegate at the Democratic National Convention. And there’s a good chance that happy, satisfied people will respond well to a positive, upbeat message - Huckabee’s stock in trade. His line at the CNN/YouTube debate (defending his support for in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants) that “we are a better country than to punish children for what their parents did” no doubt resonated with these legions of smiling teachers.
It also has not hurt that, as governor of Arkansas, he increased spending on education (something most teachers love). Huckabee is a self-styled “paradoxical conservative” - fiscally liberal, economically populist, and culturally conservative. He will say that he is both pro-life and pro-poor. Outside of the Christian Right, this may not sell well with rank-and-file GOP activists. But it does strike a chord with teachers, many of whom are also “paradoxical conservatives.”
Will any of this matter in 2008? Perhaps not; most teachers are registered Democrats, so their support may not do Huckabee a lot of good in the primaries. But if he makes it through to the general election, it’s conceivable that he could steal a lot of their votes from the Democratic candidate. And that could make a big difference to the outcome; there are three million teachers, after all. In a close election, a major swing to the GOP could be a deciding factor. Teachers like Mike - and if Huckabee is to make a truly serious run at the White House, he will need them more than ever.
By Michael J. Petrilli
Reprinted with permission from National Review Online.
Friday, 14 December 2007
Hucks History
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."
___
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.
___
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."
___
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.
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."
___
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.
___
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."
___
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.
Thursday, 13 December 2007
Tuesday, 11 December 2007
Sunday, 9 December 2007
Mike Surges for 12 Point Lead in Iowa!
According to a new McClatchy-MSNBC poll, Mike Huckabee has surged to a 12 percentage point lead over Mitt Romney among Republicans in Iowa!! Read more....
http://www.kansascity.com/445/story/396249.html
http://www.kansascity.com/445/story/396249.html
Huckabee Stands Strong on Religious Questions.
Huckabee Stands Strong on Religious Questions
When asked recently on MSNBC's "Hardball", why he and other GOP candidates keep expounding their views on religion, his answer was simple: Because journalists keep asking about them. (Read More Below)
Huckabee Won’t Be Baited on Religion
FROM NEWSMAX
Dec 9, 07
When Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee was asked why he and other GOP candidates keep expounding their views on religion, his answer was simple: Because journalists keep asking about them.
During a Huckabee appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” host Chris Matthews asked the ordained Baptist minister: “Why are you Republican candidates submitting to religious vetting about your belief in the literal nature of the Bible? Why put up with those … questions?”
Huckabee responded: “Well, Chris, when guys like you quit asking it, we’ll quit answering it. But the fact is, we get asked these questions in the debates, and if we evade them, if we act like we’re not going to answer them, then we’re going to get hammered for being unwilling to address the questions that are put to us.”
Matthews pressed on: “But these are religious test questions. They’re not about public policy.”
Referring to the most recent GOP debate, Huckabee shot back: “I would love for us to be asked questions about education and healthcare and energy independence. Unfortunately, those were the questions that nobody did ask us…
“I didn’t get to pick the questions. If I did, I promise I’d have picked some different questions for me and for the other candidates as well.”
Huckabee also told Matthews there should be no “religious test” for public office or even a requirement that a person has to be religious at all.
“I’d rather have a person serving in Congress who’s an avowed atheist, who’s honest about it,” he said, “than a person who tries to pretend he’s a Christian when he doesn’t live like it and he’s filled with hate and venom and anger toward people.”
When asked recently on MSNBC's "Hardball", why he and other GOP candidates keep expounding their views on religion, his answer was simple: Because journalists keep asking about them. (Read More Below)
Huckabee Won’t Be Baited on Religion
FROM NEWSMAX
Dec 9, 07
When Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee was asked why he and other GOP candidates keep expounding their views on religion, his answer was simple: Because journalists keep asking about them.
During a Huckabee appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” host Chris Matthews asked the ordained Baptist minister: “Why are you Republican candidates submitting to religious vetting about your belief in the literal nature of the Bible? Why put up with those … questions?”
Huckabee responded: “Well, Chris, when guys like you quit asking it, we’ll quit answering it. But the fact is, we get asked these questions in the debates, and if we evade them, if we act like we’re not going to answer them, then we’re going to get hammered for being unwilling to address the questions that are put to us.”
Matthews pressed on: “But these are religious test questions. They’re not about public policy.”
Referring to the most recent GOP debate, Huckabee shot back: “I would love for us to be asked questions about education and healthcare and energy independence. Unfortunately, those were the questions that nobody did ask us…
“I didn’t get to pick the questions. If I did, I promise I’d have picked some different questions for me and for the other candidates as well.”
Huckabee also told Matthews there should be no “religious test” for public office or even a requirement that a person has to be religious at all.
“I’d rather have a person serving in Congress who’s an avowed atheist, who’s honest about it,” he said, “than a person who tries to pretend he’s a Christian when he doesn’t live like it and he’s filled with hate and venom and anger toward people.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
