Huckabee

by Scott Lamb

As Huckabee celebrated his fiftieth birthday in late August (with sugar-free cake and no-fat ice cream, of course), Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of Florida, on its way to crashing into Louisiana and Mississippi. By the time it dissipated, Katrina had become one of the deadliest hurricanes and the costliest natural disaster in United States history. Within days of the event, evacuees fled the affected regions. By automobile, plane, and even foot, tens of thousands of people headed north, often without anything but the clothes on their backs. People on medication were suddenly without their supplies, or money and proper identification to get a refill. Children who had been preparing to start school in New Orleans or Baton Rouge were instead waking up on cots in places like North Little Rock or Birmingham.

  All told, an estimated seventy thousand people came on their own or were shipped to Arkansas for shelter and relief, increasing the state’s population by 3 percent in only five days.29 Huckabee immediately went to work, signing executive orders that temporarily waived policies or restrictions that were of benefit to normal life, but were hindrances during this time of crisis. Huckabee told the state government workers to prioritize “people, not paperwork,” taking care of the immediate need rather than worrying about whether or not a form had been filled out correctly.

  Huckabee recalled the tension felt between his office and the White House administration over how to handle the evacuee situation. “The way the Bush administration handled Katrina, they got a lot of grief,” Huckabee said. “They should have gotten a lot more. It was absolute incompetence. It was just disgusting. I had screaming matches with people at the White House over their unwillingness to let go. They wanted all the decisions to go to Washington first to be approved. On a conference call with Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security, I said, ‘Mr. Secretary, you don’t have enough people in Washington to approve what we’re dealing with here. You have no idea. So you’re going to have to trust us to get our jobs done and trust that we know what the heck we’re doing. We’re going to take care of our business, and if you don’t want to reimburse us, then don’t. But I’m not going to sit here and make people wait for eight hours in line to get some paperwork done so you can be happy about it.’ Gosh, it was so frustrating.”30

  One of the practical decisions Huckabee quickly made was to spread out the refugees throughout the state. He said that the federal approach was to send them all to Fort Chaffee in Arkansas for processing, but there wouldn’t be enough people in one location to handle the load. Huckabee decided that spreading out the children across the state meant no one school system would feel an undue burden, and no one hospital system would suddenly be overwhelmed with a surge in population. “We didn’t warehouse people in big facilities,” Huckabee explained. “If you put a bunch of people together like they did to five thousand people in the Astrodome, then if an infectious disease breaks out, you have five thousand exposures. If a fight breaks out, you have the potential for an absolute riot. You can’t control that kind of mass. You would have masses of strangers sleeping next to each other; how do you know who’s a sexual predator? There’s no privacy; there’s no way to put a family together. So we did things differently. We created little communities of care and concern—small units where people could form a community and have their needs met, and then get on with the next step in their life.”31

  When asked to explain how he had the wherewithal to handle this crisis, Huckabee deflected the idea that it took a genius or an Ivy League education. “I always look at a problem and ask, ‘How do you fix this?’ and I think God gives you a vision and wisdom,” he said. “Anytime you’re in a situation that’s so overwhelming, the first thing to do is to break it down into manageable little problems. When I had to deal with seventy-five thousand people, the first question was, where are there seventy-five thousand beds?”32 Huckabee said the practical solutions flow from asking the right questions. For example, once the seventy-five thousand beds came into focus, he remembered the great number of church-run campgrounds throughout the state. The next step was to make the calls, offer liability protection for the camps, and then get the evacuees rolling into them. It all seems like common sense, which is to say, it sounds like the kind of good decision making anybody could have, or would have, made. Except that not all leaders responded with measures of efficiency and compassion equal to that in Arkansas.

  “There’s a difference between educated people and smart people,” Huckabee said. “A lot of people are educated and not very smart. An educated person will try to figure out what studies show, what the empirical evidence is to answer a problem. But the smart person will just ask, ‘What will work?’ ”33

  Huckabee admits this commonsense “What will work?” approach came to him as part of his socioeconomic background. “When you grow up like I did, somewhat poor and in a redneck kind of world, then you learn to make due. You can’t just go out and buy what you need. So what will work? If I can’t have the ten-thousand-dollar solution, is there a ten-dollar solution? Honestly, I think a lot of it was watching my dad make things work that shouldn’t have worked. So I consider it a compliment to be called pragmatic because that means you’re going to get the job done. It may not be the conventional way, or the ideologically driven way, but you’re going to get it done, and it’s going to work.”34

  By the end of 2006, as Huckabee wrapped up his final term as governor, people continued to speculate about his viability for winning the 2008 GOP nomination for U.S. president. He had made many accomplishments in Arkansas to highlight his proven ability to lead, and political allies lined up to encourage him to pursue the White House. But he also had made enemies on both sides of the political spectrum, so Huckabee knew he would need every bit of help his friends could muster in order to win a campaign for president. And Huckabee never ran a race he didn’t think he could win.

  CHAPTER 27

  WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

  January 28, 2007–January 2, 2008

  Reporters drove over to our barber and asked Speedy, “How much do you charge Mike Huckabee for a haircut?” Speedy, now in his seventies, said, “Well, it depends. Normally fifteen dollars—unless I have to give him some political advice.”

  —RICK CALDWELL, FRIEND OF MIKE HUCKABEE

  ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 28, 2007, MIKE HUCKABEE SAT across the table from moderator Tim Russert for an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press.

  “The 2008 race for the White House has begun,” Russert said. “Sixteen candidates have already formed presidential committees. And this morning, it’s decision time for our guest, the former Republican governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee. Governor, welcome.”

  “Thank you very much, Tim,” said Huckabee.

  “Are you running for president of the United States?” asked Russert.

  “Tim, tomorrow I’ll be filing papers to launch an exploratory committee, and yes, I’ll be out there.”

  “Why?” asked Russert.

  Huckabee kicked off his campaign with these words: “I think America needs positive, optimistic leadership to kind of turn this country around, to see a revival of our national soul, and to reclaim a sense of, of the greatness of this country that we love, and also to help bring people together to find a practical solution to a lot of the issues that people really worry about when they sit around the dinner table and talk at night.”1

  After serving ten and a half years as the forty-fourth governor of Arkansas, Huckabee would spend the next fifteen months campaigning to become the forty-fourth president of the United States of America. But first, he would need to win the nomination of his own Republican Party, and the list of potential candidates was getting longer by the day. The first step to the nomination is winning the affections of people in a few key states: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina—it changes from election to election, but those are usually the important early ones. So Huc
kabee set off to campaign in these places, mostly concentrating himself in the cornfields and cities of Iowa.

  When his campaign ended one year later, Huckabee picked up his laptop and penned a quick book, Do the Right Thing, released just days after Barack Obama defeated John McCain.2 The book offers up a hearty serving of behind-the-scenes campaign anecdotes, fantastic material that makes for very enjoyable reading. There’s no reason to retell an entire year’s worth of anecdotes about eating pork-on-a-stick at Iowa fairs, drinking coffee in New Hampshire, or flying chartered airplanes through thunderstorms. So, leaving aside the chronicling of the “retail politics”—the shaking of hands, kissing of babies, and working of rooms, which Huckabee excels at—instead the focus here is on a few big themes that emerged during 2007. Particularly, the focus will be to explain reasons for Huckabee’s campaign loss.

  Six weeks after his announcement, an interviewer asked Huckabee for an assessment of the campaign. “It’s going very well and I think we’re gaining momentum . . . This is such a long, protracted presidential campaign.” Huckabee countered the notion of there already being front-runners—Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton—as declared by the pundits. “Right now the race is really sort of being framed by celebrity and money, but if those are the only two criteria to be president, then Paris Hilton would qualify as our next president.”3

  The ongoing war in Iraq hung large over the entire election season, only eclipsed at the end by the economic meltdown in the fall of 2008. In that same interview, Huckabee responded to a question about the current military strategies being employed by the Bush administration. Would Huckabee attack the policies of a sitting president from his own party? If not, did that mean he would cheerlead for the administration and lose credibility as an independent thinker? Huckabee diplomatically dodged both ditches. “I support the President’s right as Commander-in-Chief to make the decisions that he feels like will work and General Petraeus is the person in whom he has placed his trust and the Senate has given unanimous confirmation to him. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but let’s hope it does. I have to respect that he’s looking at information that I don’t have, and he has based this decision on those intelligence reports and the reports that he’s getting from his generals in the field.”4

  Huckabee then added the human element from his own experience as governor. “I have concerns that we are overextending our National Guard and Reserve forces. We’re asking so much of them that I fear we’re going to stress them to the point of really breaking the system. These are supposed to be citizen-soldiers, but in many cases, they’re now going for long, extended, and repeated deployments. That is a concern to me.”5

  The topic of Iraq would surface a hundred more times over the next year, and Huckabee’s answers remained precisely the same throughout: avoid direct criticism of the president or of the initial decision to deploy to Iraq, and emphasize the need to take care of our troops. In this regard, Huckabee played to his strengths (empathy and practical help for people in need) and minimized his perceived weaknesses (military and foreign relations experience).

  The debate season began on May 3 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. This first of nearly two dozen GOP debates featured ten candidates. Pundits took note of the visual spectacle of the crowded stage and began using the label “clown car” to describe the GOP nominating process.

  Being a debate champion since high school, Huckabee showed up at nearly every one of these televised debates. He especially enjoyed the setting of this first event, standing on a platform alongside Reagan’s Air Force One and in a building full of memories of the former president, who had died just three years earlier. Reagan’s shadow of influence continued to be cast over Republicans as they sought for his heir apparent. What exactly it meant to be “like Reagan” seemed open to endless interpretation, as different parts of his long political career would be either emphasized or diminished. Nevertheless, if there was one Reaganism nearly everyone still agreed on, it was his doctrine that conservatives win elections when they build a “three-legged stool” coalition: defense conservatives, economic conservatives, and social conservatives.

  Jerry Falwell, the patriarch of religious and social conservatism, died that same month. Huckabee could not break from the campaign trail to attend the funeral, but expressed his admiration for the man. He thought Falwell, and others like him, had been unfairly depicted in one-dimensional caricatures. “Critics and the media sometimes portray Dr. Falwell as a self-righteous and stuffy, closed-minded backwoods preacher. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In reality, he was one of the kindest, most genuinely humble, and compassionate human beings I’ve ever encountered. He had a trademark sense of humor, was a master practical joker, and treated the lowliest person in his presence with the greatest respect and concern.”6 During the 2008 campaign, Falwell’s son, “Jerry Jr.,” gave a strong endorsement to Huckabee.

  Columnists took note of Falwell’s passing as an opportunity to also sing a requiem for evangelical political engagement, the kind of activism the Moral Majority had kick-started thirty years earlier. Mark DeMoss, a public relations consultant for evangelicals and a former spokesperson for Falwell’s Liberty University, countered the idea that the movement was finished simply because it now lacked key frontline leaders. He admitted, however, “there will never be such a single, dominant leader of the movement again.”7 DeMoss would go on to endorse and advise Mitt Romney in the 2008 and 2012 elections, and as of March 2014, he had already signed on board with Jeb Bush.8

  If people thought Huckabee would get an automatic endorsement from every evangelical leader, they were gravely mistaken. For his part, Huckabee didn’t think he had a birthright claim on anyone’s support simply because of shared religious convictions. Even so, as he examined the other candidates’ often-liberal stances, past or present, on key social issues, he believed he had a strong chance to earn evangelical endorsements. He was wrong.

  Rather than finding any groundswell of evangelical support rushing in behind him, he kept hearing “soft endorsements” (public words of affirmation, short of a full endorsement) going out to Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, and John McCain. Even Rudy Giuliani found evangelicals ready to back him. Only Huckabee seemed to be left without early evangelical support.

  But the problem with some of these candidates was their problematic past stances on key social issues—they had flip-flopped around on the core concerns. And Giuliani hadn’t even flip-flopped, still preferring a pro-choice and pro-gay position. By contrast, Huckabee had never wavered on any of these issues in ten years as governor, and you could go back farther in his private life to document his complete consistency over the decades. But in spite of all this, even someone like Paul Weyrich—who had known Huckabee since the WFAA rally in 1979 and who was a personal hero to Huckabee—endorsed Mitt Romney in November 2007. Huckabee responded, “It hurts that he has accepted some misinformation as fact . . . I’ll bet in the late 70’s and 80’s Mitt Romney wasn’t listening to cassette tapes of Paul Weyrich speeches like I was.” The “misinformation” that Huckabee referred to was the idea that Huckabee left the Arkansas Republican Party in shambles.9

  So what was the problem? Huckabee wasn’t considered a “serious candidate”—he was labeled “unelectable.” Why support such a candidate and waste your time and resources? Worse, some evangelical leaders figured that if they came out in favor of Huckabee and he lost, then the eventual nominee might hold it against them and keep them from coming to his own table.

  Huckabee later wrote, “The days in which spiritual leaders like Falwell, Kennedy, and Bright had held fast to certain principles, drawn a line, and said, ‘Here I stand’ had passed. The ‘movement’ was no longer led by clear-minded and deeply rooted prophets with distinct moral lines; it had been replaced by political operatives who played the same game as any other partisan or functi
onary whose goal was to be included and invited.”10

  Huckabee thought of his mentor, James Robison, and the courage he had displayed in those 1978–1980 years. Robison had instilled in Huckabee a vision of boldness with words like these: “The prophets of old were rarely invited back for a return engagement. In fact, most of them were never invited the first time. They came to speak truth to power regardless of consequences.”11 Huckabee thought about Robison’s words during the 2008 election, as he “witnessed those who blurred the lines of prophet and politician,” he wrote. “One can be either or, but it’s really hard to be both.”12

  When Huckabee spoke to two thousand Christians at the Value Voters Summit in October 2007, he told them, “The other candidates come to you. I come from you.” The crowd gave him a standing ovation, one of a dozen he received during the twenty-minute speech.13 The evangelical rank-and-file who had the opportunity to hear Huckabee loved him, even as the evangelical leaders waffled around, looking for a better candidate.

  When asked to explain further why evangelical leaders tossed away their principles in favor of political expediency, Huckabee gave several reasons. First, “a prophet is not without honor except in his own country,” he said, quoting Mark 6:4, the Bible verse used to describe how Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth rejected him outright (NKJV). They had seen him grow up, so in their minds Jesus could not be the Messiah. In like manner, evangelicals had watched Huckabee for three decades—what made him think he was anything special?

  Second, Huckabee believed some evangelicals couldn’t envision their future importance as advisors to an administration who already understood their constituency. “It would prove that the president didn’t really need us to be an advisor to him on what our constituency was thinking.”14