Mike Huckabee: Faith and Politics

THE Huckabees could be the most colourful first family to inhabit the White House. But don’t cross them: their guns are loaded.

Mike Huckabee’s wife, Janet, known as the “first tomboy” when her husband was Arkansas governor, has hunted rattlesnakes, tracked bears and used a sub-machinegun. “I have fired a grenade launcher and hit the target two or three times, so I think that’s pretty good odds for me,” she said.

When she ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state in 2002, she was accused of misusing state vehicles and troopers for her campaign.

“If it wasn’t for the grace of God, I’d have shot a few people already,” she said.

She has also jumped out of aircraft and jet-skied down the Arkansas River. When the governor’s mansion in Little Rock was being repaired, she and her husband lived in a mobile home in the garden.

Janet met Mike in school and married him at 18. Two years later she was diagnosed with spinal cancer. She was threatened with paralysis and infertility but Huckabee stuck by her.

“He had every opportunity to say, ‘You’re just way more than I bargained for’,” she said. They went on to have three children, John Mark, David and Sarah, who are all helping their father’s presidential campaign.

David, 26, was arrested last April for trying to carry a loaded Glock pistol through airport security in Little Rock. His father called it “just one of those stupid things”.

When David was a teenage Boy Scout he was accused of being involved in the killing of a stray dog that was stoned and found hanging with its throat slit. He is now responsible for his father’s campaign website, www.teamhuckabee.com.

The most charitable thing that Janet Huckabee has to say about her 30-year-old son John Mark is: “You tune into a radio and every now and then you’ll hit a frequency and think, ‘Man, I wish I could get that,’ and you don’t quite get it, but every now and then you get it. Well, John Mark is kind of like that.”

Sarah, 25, who works as her father’s field director in Iowa, says that when people criticise her father, she wants “to walk right over and punch them, but obviously I can’t do that”.

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