(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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Prodigal Son [1]
['Ariel Levy']
Date: 2010-06-28
Given Huckabee’s strength in early polls and the current political environment, in which McCain needs Palin to campaign for him and established incumbents like Governor Charlie Crist, in Florida, are vulnerable to challengers like Marco Rubio—a Tea Party favorite whom Huckabee endorsed—it can be difficult to see why Huckabee feels so marginalized within his party. But he does not have the money to mount a serious bid for office. And he has failed to cultivate many of the people who do.
Huckabee described his fund-raising philosophy as “Look, you know I’m running. You want to help me for the right reasons? Then help me. If there’s got to be a quid pro quo, then keep your money.”
“In his nature, he is anti-establishment,” Kirsten Fedewa, who has been Huckabee’s communications director since 2004, said. “And the establishment is the ticket to the dance in the Republican primary; if you alienate them, you can’t get there.”
“The post-season coverage ended yesterday. This is the pre-season coverage.” Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
At a Republican debate on the economy in Dearborn, Michigan, during the fall of 2007, other candidates for the Presidential nomination spoke about quarterly growth and sounded notes of optimism. (“I see no reason to think we’re headed for an economic downturn,” Fred Thompson said. “If you look at the short term, it’s rosy.”) “They were all reading the R.N.C. talking points,” Huckabee told me. “I said, Well, if you’re sitting in the corner office with a nice view, yeah, the economy’s doing swimmingly well. But if you’re lifting heavy things and you’re out on the freight docks? People are working harder this year than they did last year, they have less to show for it, and they’re scared to death!” (Ron Paul was equally vociferous about the plight of the working class.) “I was predicting an economic downturn a year before it happened,” Huckabee continued. “For that, was I thanked or was I considered somehow the savant? No. I was considered a complete idiot. What bothered me more than anything was the disdain that I experienced from the élites: ‘Oohhhh, who does Huckabee think he is, speaking about the economy,’ ” he said, in an accent meant to suggest aristocracy. “They treated me like a total hick,” he added. “A complete, uneducated, unprepared hick.”
Huckabee is contemptuous of the “pompous patrician” wing of his party. “I grew up having a lot more in common with the people working in the kitchen than with the people at the head table,” he said. “I had to learn how to sit at the head table.” He likes to think that he represents “Wal-Mart Republicans, not Wall Street Republicans.” To him, someone who is conservative only fiscally is ethically impoverished. Huckabee has criticized the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney for his shifting position on abortion, and for promising to be better for gay rights than Ted Kennedy (which he decidedly did not turn out to be). There is a chapter in “Do the Right Thing,” Huckabee’s memoir of the 2008 election, called “Faux-Cons: Worse Than Liberalism,” in which he writes, “However wrongheaded Democrats might be, they tell you exactly what they’re going to do. The real threat to the Republican Party is something we saw a lot of this past election cycle: libertarianism masked as conservatism.”
But, while Huckabee is accusing other Republicans of being faux-cons, there are powerful conservative voices claiming that Huckabee is insufficiently capitalistic. In 2008, Rush Limbaugh said, “I don’t support repeated increases in taxes. I don’t support national health care, whether you call it a children’s program or whatever it is. I don’t support anti-war rhetoric. . . . And that’s Governor Huckabee.” (According to Limbaugh, Huckabee’s plan to abolish the I.R.S. and institute the so-called FairTax, which is based on consumption, “doesn’t stand a chance in hell.”) The libertarian Club for Growth—which Huckabee likes to call the Club for Greed—ran ads against Huckabee throughout the campaign, portraying him as “the tax-and-spend liberal Arkansas governor.”
In defiance of libertarian laissez-faire, Huckabee has extended his Christian vision to include the poor. “If there are a certain number of kids from single-parent homes who aren’t going to school and don’t have health care, you can say that’s not government’s job,” Huckabee told me. “Well, sweet and fine! But you know what? If the kid’s sitting outside the door of the hospital choking with asthma, do I sit there and say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t think, philosophically, government should get involved’? I’d much rather the kid get help than I sit around and say I’m so pure in my ideology.”
Prodded by the Arkansas Supreme Court and an eighty-per-cent-Democratic legislature, Huckabee oversaw a major redistricting of public schools when he was governor. “You could go to school in Rogers and get a great education or you could go to school in Eudora and not have a dog’s chance of ever coming out of there with anything but poverty,” he said. “So I pushed some decisions on school consolidation—which is about as popular as having your teeth taken out without the benefit of any anesthetic.” Huckabee considers these measures—which many people saw as suspiciously progressive—to be an extension of his pro-life beliefs. In “The Right Thing,” he writes, “To be truly pro-life means that we should be just as much concerned about the child who is eight years old and living under a bridge or in the back seat of a car.”
And yet, as governor, he also signed sixteen death orders. The difference, he argues, is between a society that condemns to death individuals who violate its codes and a single person who decides to kill another. In the first scenario, a society is making earthly rules. In the second, a person is playing God, and thus guilty of the worst transgression in Huckabee’s book, the sin of pride. (“Our mother would always say, ‘I’m not proud of you, I’m thankful for you,’ ” Pat Harris, Huckabee’s sister, told me.) But Huckabee doesn’t sound so sure. “I probably could be fine if we didn’t have the death penalty,” he said.
In Arkansas, Huckabee commuted the sentence of Maurice Clemmons, who went on to shoot four police officers in Washington last year. Given the same information he had then, Huckabee says, he would make the same decision. “When I looked at his case, I looked at a twenty-seven-year-old put away for a non-weapon burglary and an aggravated robbery. He had a sentence of a hundred and eight years,” Huckabee said. “People had murdered and gone to prison sentenced to less time than he had served; it made no sense. He was black, he was poor, he had a lousy defense attorney. It was a classic example of what can happen and the reason you empower governors to have clemency.” It’s a decision that would make a perfect weapon for his competitors in a Republican primary. “But do we really want people who only make decisions in their political lives that are in their own best interest?” he asked. “Frankly, I’m afraid that we might. The truth is, it could be the kind of thing that would keep me from ever being able to run.”
Huckabee said “the sad thing” was how much he loved campaigning—the constant stimulation, the endless opportunity to interact with people, the sport. “He’s incredibly competitive,” Rex Nelson told me. “Never overlook that. If Mike Huckabee were to sit down at this table and play me in a game of checkers, he would beat my brains out. He’s really, really, really competitive, to the point of competing against his staff, competing against his wife.” But Huckabee was discouraged by the last election, throughout which he felt relegated to the periphery by other Republicans with more money and less substance. “It’s almost like a reality show,” he said. “It’s who are we going to vote off the island? And you vote them off not because they’re not capable of leading the island but because you’ve found someone more entertaining.”
I couldn’t help thinking of a certain former governor of Alaska, and told him so. He wouldn’t say anything, but he stared at the floor and laughed ruefully, shaking his head.
A few months ago, Huckabee was eating lunch at Blue Fin, a restaurant in New York—a “city of flamboyant billionaires,” as he once called it—where he spends half of every week, taping his show. It has been an unexpected hit, and though many of the guests are low-profile or wacky (the psychic Kreskin has made several appearances), Huckabee has also had some big gets. On a recent episode, he politely discussed childhood obesity with Michelle Obama. “My view is that, if I host a show, the words ‘host’ and ‘guest’ imply something,” he said, setting his Loro Piana overcoat on the banquette. “If I were to have you in my home, I would treat you with a certain level of civility. When you walk in the door, I wouldn’t say, ‘Let me tell you about you and your crazy left-wing . . . ’ You would be, like, ‘I think I’m leaving now, this guy needs some therapy.’ So why would we do that in a public forum on television?” A bad host, he said, was someone like David Letterman. “I just found him to be the most detached and—I’m sorry to say this—arrogant jerk. He was not warm.” (Huckabee had no similar critique of his Fox colleagues, some of whom can be less than courtly with their dissenting guests.)
“Huckabee” has the aesthetics of a local-access show: the host ends every episode playing bass with his house band, the Little Rockers, which is composed of fellow Fox staffers. “What he does well is break the rules of cable news,” Bill Shine, the senior vice-president of the network, said. “The show is about him; it’s built around him, and not around the genre of cable news. Sometimes I look at the guest list and think, Wow, Neil Sedaka?”
Huckabee has been in broadcasting since he was fourteen, when the man who ran the local radio station in Hope gave him a job reading news and weather. Three years later, he took his wife-to-be, Janet McCain, on their first date, to a truck stop, after he covered one of her high-school basketball games for the station. Huckabee continued working in radio while he and Janet attended Ouachita Baptist University, in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, where he majored in religion. (They married after their freshman year.) When he became a minister, he set up a twenty-four-hour local cable station that aired his sermons. Huckabee has long “believed that part of my calling was to use the media as a communication vessel for the Gospel,” as he wrote in “A Simple Christmas.”
It was Huckabee’s ease in front of a camera that enabled him to stay in the 2008 Presidential campaign as long as he did. “In March of ’07, he said to me, ‘This campaign is going to be over before it starts,’ because he was dismally not raising money,” Fedewa said. “He was staying at Motel 8s.” At the end of 2007, Huckabee had raised less than nine million dollars, compared with Mitt Romney’s fifty-four million—which he augmented with thirty-five million of his own money—and Hillary Clinton’s hundred and seven million.
“It’s O.K. I didn’t marry you for your parking karma.” Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
To compensate, Huckabee gave nearly twenty television interviews every morning for four months, from the run-up to the Iowa caucuses until he left the race. “We estimate that was two hundred million dollars in free media,” Fedewa said. “The media was his base.” The strategy was to make Huckabee available to everyone, not just CNN and the 700 Club but “The Colbert Report” and Rolling Stone—“the shows that your opponents will be too scared to go on,” as Bob Wickers, one of Huckabee’s campaign consultants, put it. Huckabee is not uncomfortable around Democrats or comedians; he is as happy talking to Jon Stewart about abortion as he is interviewing Gayle Haggard about her marriage, as he did on a recent episode of his own show. And liberals tend to like him in return. Even if you find his politics repugnant, you can still find yourself drawn in by his relentless niceness. It doesn’t mean you’d vote for him, but it might mean you’d have him on your show.
Huckabee was elected lieutenant-governor of Arkansas in 1993. In 1996, Governor Jim Guy Tucker, a Democrat, resigned in disgrace when he was convicted of arranging nearly three million dollars in fraudulent loans. On the day Huckabee was supposed to be sworn in as Tucker’s replacement, Tucker called to say that he’d decided to appeal his conviction. Huckabee threatened to instigate impeachment proceedings if Tucker failed to step aside. In the midst of the ensuing crisis, Huckabee gave an impromptu report to the media and the citizens of Arkansas, an impassioned speech that effectively established him as the governor. In “Character,” he wrote that it was “as clear an example as I ever expect to see of God’s divine providence. It wasn’t my political skills or anything else of my own doing that had brought me to this moment. Only God could have done this.”
Huckabee told me about experiences he’s had with divine inspiration: “There’ve been times when a thought would come to me . . . and as soon as I wrote it or said it I stepped back and thought, Whoa, pretty darn good.” I asked how he knew he wasn’t just smart. “Well, nobody thinks that,” he said, laughing. “Haven’t you read the blogs? I’m a complete idiot. I’m not smart enough to run for President.”
Huckabee invokes God constantly. Yet he feels that his religiosity is overemphasized. “I’m not one-dimensional,” he told me. “I was the governor of Arkansas for ten years! The lieutenant-governor for three! To say that I stepped out of a pulpit last Sunday and said, ‘Hey, I think I’ll be President!’ No, I’ve paid my dues.”
Many people who have worked with Huckabee insist that his politics are influenced far more by pragmatism than by religion. Huckabee’s Presidential campaign manager, Chip Saltsman (who got into trouble after the election for distributing a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” to the Republican National Committee), said, “The ‘religion guy’ was foisted on him by the media. It was frustrating, a little bit. We got ‘former preacher’ as much as we got ‘former governor.’ ”
Huckabee had more executive experience than any other candidate, Republican or Democratic, in the 2008 campaign (with the exception of Tommy Thompson, who dropped out of the race after the Iowa straw poll). “And yet you didn’t hear a Chris Matthews saying, ‘Governor, I want to talk to you about your education policy; you did some innovative things,’ ” he said. “No. It was, ‘O.K., you were a Baptist preacher. Let’s talk about evolution.’ It’s, like, ‘Are you an idiot? Is that the only thing you can ask me?’ ”
When Wolf Blitzer pushed Huckabee to say whether he believed in evolution, at a debate in New Hampshire in June of 2007, Huckabee expressed exasperation that the question “would even be asked of somebody running for President—I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book.” He said that the question was unfair, because it “asked us in a simplistic manner whether or not we believed, in my view, whether there’s a God or not.”
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