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 COVER STORY
Another Man From Hope
Former governor Mike Huckabee shares some of Clinton’s talents, but is definitely his own man
BYRON YORK
Des Moines, Iowa
Mike Huckabee famously lost 110 pounds through a strict regime of diet and exercise, but on a visit to the Iowa State Fair he can’t get away without trying the local specialty known as pork chop on a stick. It’s not precisely what the name says — the stick is actually a protruding bone that makes a nice handle — but it’s a thick, meaty chop, and it makes a pretty heavy snack on an August afternoon with the temperature near 100 degrees. Still, politics is politics, and Huckabee, standing with his wife Janet in the shade of a tree near the Iowa Pork Producers stand, smiles as he poses for photographers and tells everyone how delicious it is. “We don’t believe in pork-barrel politics,” Huckabee says, “but we do believe in pork.”
It’s the day before the Iowa state Republican straw poll, and the former governor of Arkansas is running hard. If he does well, he’ll move a bit closer toward the first-tier contenders. If he finishes far back, he might be out of the race altogether. So he’s pressing for every vote he can, telling people he doesn’t have the money to pay their way to Ames, so if they get a chance to ride on another candidate’s bus — well, they should take it, and vote for Huckabee. “If you’re going to the straw poll tomorrow, remember, if you’re going to vote for me, the voting’s between ten and six,” he announces during a stop-by at the WHO radio booth on the fair’s main strip. “If you’re not voting for me” — a slight pause here — “don’t even show up!”
It works. The next day, Huckabee comes in a surprise second to Mitt Romney, who put millions of dollars into the contest and whose victory was a foregone conclusion. Of course the contest is flawed: National frontrunner Rudy Giuliani, candidate-to-be Fred Thompson, and the still-serious John McCain all skipped the event. But the straw poll is the first time actual voters express an actual preference, and Huckabee comes away a winner, leaving Ames with new energy, new prominence, and new financial strength.
But he also leaves with new questions. Like, who is this guy?
Taking a break from campaigning at the fair, Huckabee ducks into his campaign’s sleek black bus to meet me for a talk. Going through the issues that will determine the winner of the Republican nomination — the war, immigration, taxes, the economy, the courts, abortion — Huckabee emerges as an amalgam of conservative principles, pragmatism, religious faith, and solid executive talent. He speaks at length about his record in Arkansas, not only on the big issues but also on a bizarre episode — the case of a violent criminal Huckabee helped free, only to see him commit a murder — that will surely receive scrutiny should he continue to move ahead in the GOP race. If voters ultimately decide to pay close attention to Mike Huckabee, they’ll find a complicated, and sometimes surprising, man.
REVEREND MIKE
Huckabee was born in 1955 in Hope, Arkansas. Yes, that Hope, Arkansas, just like Bill Clinton. Nearly everywhere he goes, Huckabee tells crowds where he’s from, pauses for just a moment while it sinks in, and says, “But please, give us another chance!” Huckabee then tells them he is from a modest background. Paying the rent each month was a real struggle, and his father, a fireman, worked extra jobs repairing cars to make money. It was dirty work; Huckabee says the only soap he ever knew growing up was Lava, the gritty, grease-removing hand cleaner.
Huckabee was the first male in his family to graduate from high school. From there he went to Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, where he majored in religion, and then to the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. His first job was with the televangelist James Robison, and from there he moved on to become a minister at Baptist churches in Pine Bluff, and then Texarkana, Ark. During those years, he became a presence — and an accomplished performer — on local radio and television.
His new status brought with it an interest in politics, and in 1992 Huckabee ran for Senate against Democratic incumbent Dale Bumpers. He lost, but in 1993 he won a race for lieutenant governor, filling a vacancy created when Lt. Gov. Jim Guy Tucker moved into the governor’s office after Clinton was elected president. Three years later, when Tucker resigned after being convicted of fraud in the Whitewater investigation, Huckabee became governor. He was elected in his own right in 1998 and 2002.
Beyond the simple oddity of their both hailing from Hope, there are some similarities between Huckabee and Clinton. On the campaign trail, especially in extemporaneous remarks, both are astonishingly good speakers. Huckabee might even be better than Clinton; people in Arkansas still talk about the speech he gave in 1997 to mark the 40th anniversary of the Central High School integration crisis. Clinton was on the podium with Huckabee that day, and by all accounts Huckabee blew his doors off. Huckabee can be that good.
More substantively, Huckabee, like Clinton as a presidential candidate, seems almost totally oriented toward domestic issues. That worked well for Clinton in 1992, at the dawn of what is now known to be a holiday from history. But it could be a problem for Huckabee in a Republican primary race still shaped by the after-effects of September 11. Huckabee seems to realize the problem, and sometimes it appears to frustrate him. That comes out in the first question I pose to him: Do the crowds who come to see him ask much about the war in Iraq?
“No,” Huckabee says quickly. Like the other GOP candidates, Huckabee supports the troop surge and believes the consequences of a quick withdrawal would be disastrous. But he wants to talk about other things. “Among the Republican candidates, there’s really very little separation about Iraq, with the exception of Ron Paul,” he tells me. “And yet, we still go back through it over and over and over again, and I just never quite understood why we continued to plow the same ground when there were so many topics we never touched. Do you realize that in four debates we never had a single question on education? Not one. And two on health care, that I can recall.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, education and health care are two of Huckabee’s strengths. He has a solid record of improving Arkansas schools, and he has probably thought through the issues of health care more than any other candidate. Throughout his adult life, he has had a tendency to gain weight, and during his first years in the Arkansas governor’s mansion he was quite fat. When he was diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes in 2003, and his doctor told him he had perhaps a decade to live unless he improved his health, Huckabee took up running and lost those 110 pounds. These days, he proudly tells crowds he has run four marathons. When he proposes reorienting the health-care system toward prevention, as he does during a forum sponsored by AARP at the Iowa State Fair, a lot of people applaud.
Huckabee’s other strength, at least for strongly pro-life voters, is his position on abortion. He has been pro-life all along, and he seldom misses an opportunity to point out that other candidates have not been. When I ask Huckabee about his criticisms of Mitt Romney, he says he doesn’t doubt Romney’s sincerity, but believes the former Massachusetts governor’s 2004 change of heart on abortion will leave him open to charges of flip-flopping.
“There’s no doubt that the Democrats will use these changes of position in a general election,” Huckabee tells me. When it comes to the Supreme Court, Huckabee won’t discuss whom he might nominate, but adds: “I would say that it would be a type of justice like Scalia, who I think is probably the gold standard of the justices.”
On immigration, Huckabee is a strong advocate of a fence across the entire U.S.–Mexico border. While Congress debates guest-worker programs, Huckabee tells me, the most important problem is being ignored. “Seal the border,” he says. “Until you do that, you don’t have any control over how many people are coming in, who they are, and where they’re going.” At the same time, Huckabee has taken criticism for his proposal, as governor, to offer Arkansas in-state tuition to illegal aliens and their children. “I have always said you don’t punish a child for the crime of a parent,” Huckabee tells me. “Frankly, it’s in our best interest to try to get that child on to a higher level of education.”
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