Huckabee

by Scott Lamb

  Huckabee remembers being pained by one family in particular. He had performed weddings and funerals for them; he had supported them when they had trouble with the law and in medical crises. Yet their yard displayed signs for his opponent. While he could understand being philosophically opposed to voting Republican, he was stung that they would so openly work to defeat him when he had stood by their side through so much.13

  Huckabee had always known about the Arkansas Democratic machine, but now he saw it in operation up close and personal. Jim Harris recalled one campaign stop in a town in southeast Arkansas. Huckabee went there to hold a news conference and answer questions from the media, but the local paper didn’t show up. Not wanting to have wasted the time and gas spent for the trip, Huckabee drove over to the offices of the newspaper, accompanied by two reporters from other newspapers who traveled with him that day. They all walked in together and sat down, waiting to see the editor. But she wouldn’t meet with them—she didn’t even acknowledge they were in the building.

  “Huckabee said he was just going to wait until she came out,” Harris recalled.

  Finally she emerged and candidate Huckabee said, “I thought you might like an interview.” But Harris said the editor curtly replied, “We don’t do interviews,” and then abruptly turned around and walked back to her office. The other two reporters looked at each other and asked, “What newspaper doesn’t do interviews of candidates?” “This editor was so beholden to the Democratic ticket that she did not want to let her readers even be exposed to the message from the other side,” Harris explained.14

  Not everyone responded negatively though. Huckabee wrote about how an anonymous sender mailed him postcards featuring encouraging Scripture verses. Only after the campaign would he learn that the postcards came from a young wife and mother who had been a parishioner at Beech Street First Baptist Church in Texarkana.15

  The volunteer corps who made up Huckabee’s campaign gave it their best effort. Sims remembers putting up campaign signs all day long and even into the night. “Yes, at midnight, way out in the middle of wherever in Conway, Arkansas,” Sims said. “And Mike used to come by here and change clothes before going on to a next event. Whenever he came through Conway, he would run to our house and get freshened up.”16 Huckabee’s campaign lacked a touring coach bus or enough dollars to make constant hotel lodgings affordable. But, from his days as a Baptist pastor, he did have good friends in every town and city. If Huckabee were to become the next U.S. senator from Arkansas, the victory would be the result of countless sacrifices made by common, everyday people throughout the state.

  Huckabee said that his 1992 campaign strategy and messaging was “cookie-cutter Republican” in its approach: “You’re going to have a biographical spot. ‘Hello, I’m Mike Huckabee . . .’ And then you’ll immediately start talking about ‘Let’s cut taxes’ and ‘Let’s get the government under control’—all these issues that, quite frankly, all the Republicans already all believe. So you don’t move anybody.”17

  Huckabee also took his cues from the playbook of the national cultural wars being fought that year. As such, he utilized more right-wing rhetoric than was helpful for building a victorious voting bloc. That’s not to say he spoke words untrue to his real convictions at the time. But there seemed to be a lack of sophistication in his answers; even mere silence would have been more useful for explaining his positions on some subjects. For example, when responding to a written Associated Press questionnaire about the AIDS epidemic, he stated that government should “isolate the carriers of this plague. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crises it represents.”18

  That statement took on a life of its own and continues to be used by opponents to this day. Given that AIDS was perceived as a medical crisis almost entirely limited to the homosexual community, people caricatured his statement as latently homophobic. Huckabee’s comment seemed, to many, to be a recommendation that the government lock the gay community in concentration camps. He meant less than what critics say he said, but he has been walking back from that comment for over two decades now.

  In another example, Huckabee jumped into the national conversation over whether taxpayers should fund the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA had recently sponsored some artwork that nearly everyone—whether they liked the artwork or not—considered blasphemous to the Christian faith. In 1990, while Huckabee served as president of the Arkansas Baptists, the convention unanimously passed a resolution “in opposition to the policy of the National Endowment of the Arts in funding pornographic and anti-religious artistic presentations.”19

  The problem, however, was that Senator Bumpers was only nominally linked to the NEA funding battleground. Bumpers said the art was in poor taste but voted to continue the NEA’s funding. But the issue didn’t have a lot of traction with potential swing voters in Arkansas. Ironically, Huckabee is a big supporter of art education within the schools, and that positive message might have won him some support among middle-class voters concerned about the lack of a well-rounded education in the public schools. But instead of running on that positive message, his campaign painted Bumpers as a supporter of pornography.

  Max Brantley, an ardent critic of Huckabee through the years, said, “In that race, I thought he managed to pigeonhole himself as strictly a religious conservative—abortion, pornography, and the NEA funding.” As Brantley explained it, however, though Arkansans are overwhelmingly religious in practice, “it doesn’t necessarily follow that they’re kind of down the line on all the issues that the hard core religious right kind of take as a matter of sort of marching orders.”20

  Though it is doubtful that any path to victory existed for Huckabee, even one that moderated his rhetoric on social issues, it is a fair assessment to say that Huckabee never again ran for Arkansas office using the full script of the national culture wars. “In terms of public comments that are clearly derogatory toward gays and lesbians or persons with HIV/AIDS, most of those comments come early in his career,” author Jay Barth told the Boston Globe in 2007. “That is not to say he became a progressive on the issue, but he talked about them less.”21

  Huckabee won the spring Republican primary easily with more than 40,000 votes and 79 percent support over the challenger, David Busby. Clearly, he had a base of statewide support, stemming from his Arkansas roots and his Baptist convention presidency.

  Once he became the official nominee of the GOP, Huckabee traveled to California for an event at the Reagan Library, hosted by President and Mrs. Reagan. This was the first time Huckabee had been alongside Reagan since the August 1980 rally in Dallas. Could Huckabee “win one for the Gipper” in Arkansas?

  He didn’t. As the election results came in that night, the good news was that Huckabee had earned an extra 85,000 votes more than Hutchinson had done in losing to Bumpers six years earlier. The bad news, however, was that this was a historic day for Arkansas—the chance to vote an Arkansan into the White House. And based on the huge turnout at the polls, it appeared that nobody was missing their opportunity. Even though Huckabee received 100,000 more votes than Hutchinson had, he still lost by nearly the same 60 to 40 margin. Bumpers received 553,000 votes to Huckabee’s 366,000.

  The night of the loss, Huckabee thanked his supporters and spoke to their hearts, telling them that the fight had not been in vain. Then, after he left the cameras and crowds behind, he crashed—physically and emotionally. “That’s the lowest point I’ve ever seen Mike,” Sitzes recalled. “He had pneumonia, though hardly anyone knew. He was trying to be strong for everybody. But as soon as the election was over in Little Rock—across town from where Bill Clinton was celebrating—Mike traveled ba
ck to Texarkana and entered the hospital. I sat by his side. He told me, ‘I really thought I wanted to get into politics, but now I just don’t know if I like politics at all. I just don’t know.’ ”22

  Huckabee’s finances, not pneumonia, proved to be the greatest post-campaign concern for the Huckabees. They had burned through their life savings, which admittedly was not much, but now they had nothing. Without a job in hand and with a mortgage still to pay, financial stress ensued. “They almost lost their house,” said Sitzes. “They were broke; there’s no other way to put it. And to hear Hillary Clinton talk about being broke—what a joke. Mike and Janet were broke for real—everything was leveraged. It was not a good situation.”23

  As the Huckabees began to rebuild and figure out the next step of their journey, they still had to buy groceries. Huckabee took whatever work he could find. That’s when Huckabee bumped into the wife from the family of former parishioners who had put Bumpers signs in their yard. She approached her former pastor in the aisle and asked if he would be a reference for her in her job search. Huckabee remembers being too stunned to answer coherently, muttering something like, “I will do everything I can to help you,” while thinking, like you did everything to help my opponent. He said, “She had worked so hard to keep me from getting a job, and then had the audacity to turn around and ask me for help getting her one. Those were some of the tough moments.”24

  The Rolling Stones’ hit “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” sums up Huckabee’s feelings in the aftermath of the election loss. But, to paraphrase the Beatles instead, Huckabee knew he’d “get by with a little help from his friends.”

  Sitzes sat by his friend as the antibiotics did their work against the pneumonia. “We talked about all the pain of the election. But then I told him—and this is best friend to best friend—I said, ‘Mike, there’s a reason for all this. You’ll see.’ ”25

  CHAPTER 23

  EVEN THE LOSERS GET LUCKY SOMETIMES

  1993–1996

  We all know there’s a political machine. It runs over ordinary people. You’ve been the victim of it time and time again, but now it’s time to unplug the local machine.

  —MIKE HUCKABEE

  THE DESPONDENCY THE HUCKABEES FELT AFTER THE 1992 campaign loss did not last long. The same night that brought such joy to the Clinton family, sending Bill to the White House as the next president, also sowed the seeds for Huckabee’s future in politics. With Clinton moving out of the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, Arkansas, lieutenant governor Jim Tucker moved in and assumed the duties of the office. He had actually been doing many of those duties before that time anyway, as Clinton had been out of the state, campaigning for president, for at least an entire year, if not longer.

  Looking back on that period, Huckabee reflected, “I didn’t lose my fire, my zeal, I lost an election. But I’ve always said politics is a process, not a single event. . . . You have to look at this as something for the long haul. . . . Your goal is not simply to win an office, it’s to effect the change in policy that you want to see happen. And you can’t do that with one single election.”1

  In other words, if you can’t effect change with “one single election,” then an election loss is not a final loss. Put it behind you and look up to see the next opportunity coming. That sounds like a cheesy motivational poster, but Huckabee knows the truth of it from his 1992–1993 experiences.

  No sooner had the Huckabees put leftover Senate campaign posters into storage than Asa Hutchinson came to Huckabee with a proposition. Since Jim Tucker had moved up to the governor’s office, the lieutenant governor’s position sat vacant. Hutchinson appealed to Huckabee to declare himself a candidate for the special election to be held at the end of July 1993. Of course, whoever won this election would have to stand for reelection the next year, so even with a victory, this might only be a one-year gig. Plus, the likelihood of a Republican winning the special election was not very great. Arkansas had elected only one Republican to the position since the office was first filled in the 1920s. The Arkansas lieutenant governor and governor are elected separately in Arkansas, so it was possible for two different parties to fill the spots. The lieutenant governor is mostly a ceremonial office, presiding over the Arkansas legislature, giving commencement speeches, attending funerals, and so forth. The work and the pay were considered part-time. Lieutenant governors were not inclined to move their families to Little Rock, but would opt instead to set up an apartment in the city and simply commute back and forth. In other words, the job would involve days away from his family, for little pay and only a remote chance for the job to develop into a long-term vocational path.

  So Huckabee jumped right in and geared up for his second campaign in nine months. But what would be different this time? His competition was a Democrat named Nick Coulter, and the election seemed his to win or lose. “Oh, was it ever,” Huckabee said. “He was Clinton’s chief legal aid in the governor’s office. Harvard educated. Brilliant attorney. He was the Barack Obama, the heir apparent to Bill Clinton. The coming new generation, with all the money that the Clintons could raise—and they raised all his money for him right out of the basement of the White House. Clinton’s fund-raiser, Mark Middleton, was making calls every night to get Coulter’s money. He had millions—and this for a lieutenant governor’s race!”2

  Huckabee knew he would be unable to compete with the Coulter–Clinton fund-raising, so he got right to work mobilizing a grassroots campaign. But this time around, he had a secret ally in the fight, someone with a vast reservoir of Arkansas-based political knowledge and the desire to earn money.

  Huckabee tells the story of receiving a call from Dick Morris, a campaign strategist and advisor to the Clintons. “I picked up the phone and Morris said, ‘Look, I think you’re a fascinating individual and you have real potential. I want you to be in that lieutenant governor’s race, and I think I can help you win. I don’t agree with some of your positions, but that’s okay. I’ll make enough money off you, so I can live with it.’ ” Huckabee appreciated his candor, being just straight up about it all—that was refreshing. “So we talked and really hit it off. Here was a New York Jew and an Arkansas Baptist boy, the most unlikely odd couple you can imagine. It was a Felix and Oscar relationship to be sure. And we had great rapport. Dick didn’t try to change me. He didn’t tell me to stop being pro-life or to quit being so Christian. But he helped me take what I believe and what made me tick and turned it into election issues which would help me win.”3

  Morris ended up working for Huckabee in the 1993 campaign, and then in his reelection campaign of 1994 and reelection-for-governor campaign of 1998. Morris also led in Bill Clinton’s successful reelection campaign of 1996, after having the ear of the president more than anyone else did in 1995—according to George Stephanopoulos, who served in the White House at the time.4

  Huckabee won the July 1993 special election and became lieutenant governor. He did so by the slimmest of margins, beating Coulter 50.85 percent to 49.15 percent (151,502 to 146,436) —a margin of only 5,000 votes.

  Huckabee has never forgotten the lessons learned in that election. In analyzing the 1993 election, Morris said, “The mistake Republicans always make is that they are too much of a country club set. What we wanted to do was run a progressive campaign that would appeal to all Arkansans.”5

  In contrast to the cookie-cutter Republican ads and messaging Huckabee had used less than one year earlier, Morris worked hard to develop campaign advertisements that would depict Huckabee in a more moderate light, more in line with the values of Arkansas voters.6 Morris also taught Huckabee the principle of looking for the wedge issues. “Dick had the attitude that when you take a poll and find an issue with 90 percent support, that may not be an issue that you want to run on, because the fact that 90 percent of the people supported it doesn’t mean that it
actually means anything to them. They’re already either going to vote for you or against you,” Huckabee explained. “For example, the message ‘I’m going to cut taxes,’ spoken by every Republican in a campaign. Most of them don’t actually do it, but they all say it. In contrast, it’s better to look for the wedge issue.”

  Huckabee said a good example of this was Bill Clinton’s promotion of school uniforms as an issue in 1996. Why would a president of the United States care about school uniforms? The answer is that there were millions of mothers out there who had concluded that a school uniform would lessen the likelihood that her child would be bullied, picked on, or criticized for his or her clothing. This issue moved voters who were not necessarily going to vote for him prior to the wedge issue. “That kind of strategy was Dick’s genius,” Huckabee said.7

  Morris also changed the visuals. He depicted Arkansas as a state run by the Democratic Party. In one of the advertisements Morris created, an electrical cord can be seen being pulled out of the wall. “The message was simple,” Huckabee said. “We all know there’s a political machine. It runs over ordinary people. You’ve been the victim of it time and time again, but now it’s time to unplug the local machine.

  “The Democrats went nuts when that ad came out. Nuts,” Huckabee said. “They did not want to believe there was a political machine, but everybody knew it. I didn’t say it was Bill Clinton. You didn’t have to. Everybody knew.”8

  Going into election day, Morris had a good idea that Huckabee would win. He tells the story of how Dick spent the day in a room at the Camelot Hotel in downtown Little Rock. With pencils, notebooks, and a calculator in hand, Morris would receive bits of data sent in from polls throughout the state as they closed. Huckabee remembers that at 8:30 p.m., when only 15 percent of the precincts had reported, Morris congratulated him on the coming win. He even predicted that Huckabee would end the night with 51 percent of the vote. An hour and a half later, Huckabee told his supporters he was declaring victory. And yes, the prediction about the 51 percent was exactly right.9