Sammon: "Huckabee Rising"

Politics
Meet the Next President: Huckabee Rising
Bill Sammon, The Examiner
Sep 13, 2006 5:00 AM

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Gov. Mike Huckabee says his prospects for winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 might actually improve if his own party takes a beating in the 2006 midterm elections.“Will it be a wake-up call to our party, that we’re going to have to retool the message — not the principles — but the message?” Huckabee muses in an interview with The Examiner. “And will the party start looking for new voices, the ones that aren’t so already established?

“If so, then a guy like me may have a moment,” he adds. “If they say, ‘Well, it’s just McCain’s turn,’ well OK. But I don’t think we’re going to go there.”

Although some polls suggest Sen. John McCain is the early front-runner in the GOP presidential sweepstakes, Huckabee says the Arizona maverick should not start measuring the Oval Office for drapes just yet.

“I have a hard time seeing him being elected president, just because I think, at times, some of his views have alienated very important segments of the Republican Party,” Huckabee says. “I’m not sure he can mend the fences with the evangelical wing of the party, the pro-life part of the party.”

But Huckabee himself risks alienating a significant segment of the Republican Party with his support for President Bush’s controversial guest-worker program, which would grant legal status to illegal aliens.

“Yeah, I know, and I think it’s one of those things where if people are going to make a decision based on the emotion of that one issue, my attitude is then go ahead and write me off now,” he says. “Because if you don’t write me off on this one, you’ll find something else later on you’re just as mad about.”

Take taxes, for example. While Huckabee has cut some taxes as governor, he has raised others, earning the ire of fiscally conservative groups such as the Club for Growth.

“Just because you’ve cut taxes a couple of times, that doesn’t justify raising taxes,” says Andrew Roth, the club’s director of government affairs. “One of the biggest components of the Republican Party platform is low taxes — and Mike Huckabee does not espouse that view.”

Huckabee says he supported the Bush’s tax cuts and wants to make them permanent. But he also says he wants to further “raise the threshold for paying income tax,” which would shift a greater tax burden onto middle- and upper-income earners — something Bush has been doing for years.

“The Club for Growth, for some reason, is all on my back, and I think, in part, because I had the audacity to challenge some of them — they don’t like that,” Huckabee says. “They like for you to just sort of bow and kiss their ring. And, you know, I’m not going to do that. I don’t care who they are.”

Huckabee’s willingness to cross certain members of his own party makes him something of a maverick in his own right.

“One of my complaints with Republicans in my own party is that, true or not, we’re perceived as the people whose tax policies do tilt toward the people at the top end of the economic scale, with disregard to the people who are barely making it.

“And I think it’s in many ways a legitimate criticism,” he says. “Certainly we communicate very poorly how our tax policies are going to help the family out there who are barely struggling to pay rent.”

When Huckabee was growing up, his parents rented a home because they could not afford to purchase one in the small town of Hope, Ark., where former President Bill Clinton was also born. If Huckabee succeeds in his White House bid, he would be the second Hope native and Arkansas governor to become president.

“There may be some Republicans who try to say, ‘We’ve had one other guy from Hope, we don’t need another one,’” Huckabee says. “But I think the average person is much smarter than that.”

Huckabee has an unusually keen understanding of the political threat posed to the GOP by Clinton’s wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is widely regarded as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. He says the New York Democrat, who spent years in Arkansas, has a “rock-star quality that she brings just by walking into a room and sucking the oxygen out of it.”

“If the Republicans go around licking their chops, hoping that Hillary’s the nominee because that will be an easy mark, they’re going to be making a huge mistake,” he says. “They underestimate her at their own peril.”

To a lesser degree, some Democrats are quietly saying the same thing about Huckabee, a dark horse candidate whose humble roots could blunt any Democratic attempt at decrying class warfare. Although he is not yet widely known outside of Arkansas, Huckabee has been an inspiration to many overweight Americans with his recent book, “Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork.”

In folksy, self-deprecating language, Huckabee tells readers of his lifelong battle with obesity and recent loss of more than 100 pounds after he began exercising and eating healthy foods. He now runs marathons.

“It certainly humanizes me to many people,” he says. “They understand that the struggle they’ve had — which is the struggle of so many Americans — is something I can honestly relate to.”

Huckabee has made obesity a major public policy issue because he believes the attendant health care costs are unsustainable.

“Too many politicians are talking about health care, not enough are talking about health,” he says. “The focus needs to be on health, not health care.”

Huckabee devotes so much energy to the health issue that he sometimes sounds like he’s running for surgeon general, not president. This has caused some critics to write him off as a sort of political novelty act.

“They want to ghettoize me as a single-issue candidate, but I’m not,” he says. “I would describe myself as a conservative who got there out of conviction, not out of birth, nor out of convenience.”

He adds: “I sort of am the antithesis of the stereotypical Republican. I didn’t grow up privileged; I didn’t grow up going to an Ivy League school; I didn’t grow up in a political family that was wired and connected.”

In fact, Huckabee began his career in communications and eventually founded several religious TV stations, an experience that made him both comfortable and articulate on camera. He also spent a dozen years as a Baptist pastor before deciding to get into politics in the early 1990s.

“I felt there were so many people making decisions in public policy who were sincere and well-meaning, but they didn’t have a clue as to what the real hurts of humanity were,” he says. “They thought they understood, but they really had never walked into a home where there was no heat. They’d never, ever set down with a family who had just had a complete loss to fire — with no insurance.

“They didn’t really know anyone like that. They’d read news stories. But it’s a different thing when you literally know those people.”

He adds: “For every social pathology there is, I can put a name and face to it. It’s not abstract to me. If someone talks about a 14-year-old girl who is pregnant and hasn’t told her parents, I’ve talked to her.”

Michael Huckabee
1955 » Born in Hope, Ark., son of a fireman
1973 » Graduates from Hope High School
1974 » Marries Janet McCain. The couple eventually will have three children.
1975 » Graduates from Ouachita Baptist University at Arkadelphia, Ark.
1976-77 » Attends Southwestern
Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas
1980-86 » Pastor, Immanuel Baptist Church, Pine Bluff, Ark.
1986-92 » Pastor, Beech Street First Baptist Church, Texarkana, Ark.
1987 » President, KBSC, a religious TV station in Texarkana
1989 » President, Arkansas Baptist State Convention
1992 » Loses first political race, a bid to unseat Sen. Dale Bumpers
1993 » Wins special election to become lieutenant governor
1994 » Re-elected
1996 » Succeeds Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, who resigns after felony conviction
1998 » Elected to another term as governor
2002 » Re-elected (term-limited to leave office in January 2007)
2003 » Diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, loses 100 pounds
2005 » Chairman, National Governors Association

Huckabees’ positions on the issues

Abortion
Pro-life. Would like to see Roe v. Wade overturned.

Evolution
Wants creationism taught in schools alongside evolution. Once said, “I do not necessarily buy into the traditional Darwinian theory.”

Health Care
Preaches exercise and healthy eating to counter obesity and attendant diseases, which he believes are creating unsustainable health care costs.

Immigration
Supports President Bush’s call for a guest-worker program that would grant legal status to illegal aliens.

Iraq
Supported the invasion; opposes a withdrawal timetable; critiques shortcomings in President Bush’s post-Saddam plans.

Taxes
Has cut some taxes in Arkansas, while raising others. Wants to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent, but increase the number of lower-income earners who pay no income tax.

What observers are saying
David Yepsen
Political columnist
Des Moines Register
PRO » “He slides from sort of being a preacher to a politician and back — with a combination of good conservative message and a lot of good humor.”
CON » “The question is can he raise the money? I just don’t know about Huckabee. You’ve got to have a pretty good grub steak.”

Charlie Cook
Editor
Cook Political Report
PRO » “He does not project that harshness, that edge, that a lot of conservatives, particularly on some of the social and cultural issues, oftentimes do.”
CON » “I can’t imagine how somebody wins the party nomination with, say, anything less than $150 million. And I don’t know where he’d get the first 10.”

Larry Sabato
Political scientist, University of Virginia
PRO » “His weight-loss crusade has just the right nonpolitical touch for independents.”
CON » “Dominant conservatives have some doubts about Huckabee, finding him to be too moderate on social issues and too willing to compromise on fiscal issues. And it might be tough for the GOP to swallow a nominee from Bill Clinton’s Arkansas.”