Mike Huckabee: Faith and Politics

FACING taunts that he would be an “easy kill” for the Democrats in the presidential election, Mike Huckabee, the surging Republican candidate, claims that he alone knows how to beat Bill and Hillary Clinton’s formidable political machine. He has already done it twice in his home state of Arkansas, he declares.

Huckabee’s sudden rise to the top of the polls for the Republican nomination in early-voting states, such as Iowa and South Carolina, has proved his popularity with conservative voters while raising concerns about his electability against the Democrats in 2008.

A former top aide to President George W Bush complained that Huckabee’s name was too hick for him to be president and there was no vacancy at the top for another poor boy from the same town as Bill Clinton. “Huckabee? You’ve got to be kidding me. Hope, Arkansas? Here we go again,” said Dan Bartlett, Bush’s former White House counsellor.

However, Huckabee, 52, a former Baptist minister and Arkansas governor, believes that his folksy charm, economic populism and sympathy for the little guy have already proved a winning formula with traditional Democrat voters.

“Bill and Hillary Clinton campaigned for every opponent I’ve ever had in Arkansas,” Huckabee said. “Nobody running for president knows their campaigns better than I do. I’ve faced the headwinds of their political machine in a Democratic state and defeated it.”

Huckabee also boasted a proven ability to attract black voters who might lean towards Barack Obama, another rising candidate who is running neck and neck with Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ national front-runner, in the same key states. Huckabee had won the support of nearly half the African-Ameri-can community for his governorship, he said, citing a CNN poll.

“I worked hard for it and governed in a way that matters to people. I spent 10½ years as governor of a state that was not of my party. I had to go after voters that are not traditional Republican voters,” Huckabee said.

Matt Drudge, the internet journalist, reported on his website, The Drudge Report, that top Democrats were holding back criticism of Huckabee in the hope that he would win the Republican nomination because he had a “glass jaw, and they’re just waiting to break it”.

At a time when concerns about Islamic terrorism and the war in Iraq are fading, voters are feeling freer to follow their hearts, fuelling a boom in support for Huckabee and Obama, two candidates who have placed little emphasis on national security.

Huckabee regards his rise as little short of providential. If a small boy can feed the 5,000 with two loaves and five fishes, then he can convert his cash-strapped one-man band into “Huck’s army”, the former pastor believes.

“We have what we need to win the entire nomination,” said Huckabee on an icy day in Des Moines, the capital of Iowa.

A few weeks ago, the beginning of his surge led to forecasts that he could make vice-president, but he is no longer ready to stop there. Insiders say his campaign mantra is “What’s next?”.

Last week he was speaking at a university hospital clinic where he retold the miraculous story of his precampaign transformation from “foodaholic” to marathon runner. He shed 110lb.

Inside the hall, medical students were eager to ask him about the relationship between his religion and politics, rather than awkward health questions about why he once wanted to quarantine people with Aids.

Huckabee says proudly that his faith defines him. At a campaign stop in a Native American-run gambling town, a virtual temple to mammon, I asked him what he thought of Tony Blair’s observation that if politicians go on about religion, “frankly they [voters] think you’re a nutter”.

He was mystified. “Is that a British phrase?” he laughed. “It would be utterly absurd not to talk about our faith. It’s one of the more refreshing things we get to talk about.”

His campaign is strewn with references to his Christian leadership – in unsubtle contrast to the Mormon faith of Mitt Romney, his chief rival for the votes of social conservatives.

Huckabee was obliged last week to apologise to Romney, who once seemed to have the nomination in Iowa sewn up, for asking in a magazine interview: “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”

If anybody confirms the stereotype that Republicans are obsessed with God, guns and gays, it is Huckabee. He wants schools to acknowledge that there are “different views from evolution” and says there are no primates in his family tree. He has vowed to oppose gay marriage until “Moses comes down with two stone tablets from Brokeback Mountain”, a reference to the gay cowboy film.

In New Hampshire, which goes to the polls on January 8, five days after Iowa, he has promised to go in “holding guns in both hands, blazing away”, since conservative voters there tend to be trigger-happy but secular. Just as important to his success, however, is his description of himself as a conservative “who is not mad at anybody about it”.

When I first met Huckabee in Iowa in May, he was tipped as a dark horse, but there was little evidence that he could go the distance. A friend had invited him to a meeting of school bandmasters in the hope that his skills as a bass player – he has a rock band, Capitol Offense – would create a rapport. The audience enjoyed his witty, self-deprecating talk but was baffled by his candidacy.

I ran into Huckabee later, sitting alone and unrecognised at the airport, waiting for his flight home. At the time, Fred Thomp-son, the actor and former senator, was preparing to enter the race, but his failure to excite conservative “values” voters has provided Huckabee with the opening he sought.

One of Huckabee’s secret weapons is his campaign manager, John “Chip” Saltsman, an experienced organiser from Thompson’s home town of Nashville, Tennessee. Huckabee’s campaign has shown the patient attention to detail that Thompson’s has lacked.

With no money to finance a conventional campaign – he has still spent only £2m, less than a third of Romney’s outlay on television advertisements alone – Huckabee outmanoeuvred his rivals by getting the faith-based home-school movement, the gun lobby and evangelical church groups in Iowa to use their organ-isational muscle on his behalf for free.

His stealth campaign burst into the open in late October, helped by two strong performances in televised debates and a catchy endorsement from the actor Chuck Norris, a martial arts black belt and star of Walker, Texas Ranger, a popular television show. Their YouTube advertisement about immigration generated 200,000 hits. “My plan to secure the border?” asked Huckabee. “Two words: Chuck Norris.”

It was a humorous way to address a problem that has left the Republicans looking the nasty party. Huckabee ventured perilously down the same road last week by enlisting the support of one of the founders of the Minutemen, a semi-vigilante antiimmigration group, and by promising to build a border fence with Mexico.

With success has come a barrage of negative stories: that he is a tax-and-spend liberal with questionable ethics and a habit of forgiving murderers. He was fined $1,000 by the Arkansas Ethics Commission for failing to report campaign payments to himself and his wife, and was accused of furnishing his home with a “wedding registry” of gifts.

When he was governor, Huckabee pardoned or commuted the sentences of more prisoners than his three predecessors (including Bill Clinton) put together. In one notorious case, Wayne DuMond, a rapist, went on to rape again and murder.

So far Huckabee has shrugged off the allegations as the revenge of panicky opponents and is hoping that the nomination will be settled before the dirt sticks.

The only rival to have viewed his rise with equanimity is Rudy Giuliani, the socially liberal former mayor of New York, who will benefit if Huckabee splits the conservative “values” vote. But Giuliani is rapidly losing ground to him nationwide.

Giuliani has one trump card: his reputation for fighting terrorism, based on his performance during 9/11. Huckabee has shown little grasp of foreign affairs, mumbling about the Palestinians that “there are a lot of options that involve other territory that doesn’t have to include the West Bank or the Golan Heights. There is an enormous amount of land in Arab control over all of the Middle East”.

Jimmy Carter, another southern Sunday-school teacher, was in the White House when Islamic fundamentalists seized power in Iran in 1979 and took hostages at the American embassy, marking the beginning of the end of his presidency. Huckabee’s ignorance of the Middle East may not bode well for his presidential prospects.

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