by Scott Lamb
Third, Huckabee said evangelicals can “fund-raise and justify their organization’s existence so much better if Hillary is the president or Barack Obama is the president. Frankly, even if Romney had won, because then they would say, ‘We need to represent evangelicals to Mitt Romney—he’s not part of us.’ But if a guy like me won, then they wouldn’t need to represent the evangelicals to me, obviously—because I am an evangelical.”15
Fourth, Huckabee factored in old-fashioned jealousy. He said, “There are people that don’t want anyone to rise higher than their ranks. This is an especially big deal among Baptists in the convention. They’re the highest-ranking figure in the Baptist world. So if a Southern Baptist becomes president, then he suddenly would become the highest-ranking activist—and the other guy is not.”16
Fifth, some Southern Baptists who had fought in the trenches during the “conservative resurgence” of the denomination did not support Huckabee because of his record in Arkansas. Not his record as governor, mind you, but his record as the president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. “I don’t know of conservative appointments he made, and I don’t know of any contribution to the conservatives,” one of the leaders told the press.17
In 2011, longtime Huckabee friend and fellow pastor Dwight McKissic decried this attitude:
I was shocked that SBC pastors, by and large, did not rally behind Mike Huckabee. The reason Huckabee did not get SBC support is that he was reportedly sympathetic and cooperative to the “moderates” while president of the Arkansas Baptist Convention. I publicly endorsed Mike Huckabee. Had Southern Baptists wholeheartedly and enthusiastically embraced Huckabee, he perhaps would be President today. Consequently, same-sex marriages, the Mexico policy, the Health Care policy that funds abortions and bailouts would not be moving into the mainstream and becoming public policy. But because of the SBC’s propensity to “strain out a gnat and swallow a camel,” we are now faced with these policy initiatives that most SBC pastors and pew-sitters disagree with.18
A final factor is that some evangelicals fear an evangelical White House would cause the media to get the false idea that everything the president did or said should be considered the “evangelical position” on the issue. Huckabee agrees that there isn’t an evangelical consensus on dozens of issues, and that having an evangelical as president wouldn’t change that fact. He said, “What should the marginal tax rate be? I don’t even see that there is an evangelical position on that or on many other matters on which Christians can disagree. Some people will approach it as if there is. And if you don’t have the same view that they do, you’re not just politically incorrect; you’re like an apostate.”19
After McCain lost to Obama in the fall election, numerous evangelicals came back around to Huckabee in private and told him they regretted not having supported his candidacy. Paul Weyrich, a founder of the religious right, made his mea culpa before Huckabee had even ended his campaign. Weyrich, who would die by the end of the year, was seated in a wheelchair when he addressed a group of his conservative peers who had assembled in March 2008 to discuss the mess that had become of the GOP nomination. As a group, they were not excited about McCain. Weyrich said, “Friends, before all you and before almighty God, I want to say I was wrong.” Journalist Warren Cole Smith reported what happened next as follows: “In a quiet, brief, but passionate speech, Weyrich essentially confessed that he and the other leaders should have backed Huckabee, a candidate who shared their values more fully than any other candidate in a generation. He agreed with [Michael] Farris that many conservative leaders had blown it. By chasing other candidates with greater visibility, they failed to see what many of their supporters in the trenches saw clearly: Huckabee was their guy.”20
Huckabee had only gotten a little help from his friends, and the result was a losing campaign.
Throughout the campaign Huckabee emphasized his blue-collar background and made populist sound bites like “People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off.”21
On May 15, the candidates headed to Columbia, South Carolina, for a debate in the state that would play host to a key early primary. In a round of discussion about budgets and runaway congressional spending, Huckabee made the audience burst into twenty seconds of laughter with this off-the-cuff zinger: “We’ve had a Congress that’s spent money like John Edwards at a beauty shop.”22 The joke, of course, was how Democratic senator and presidential candidate John Edwards had recently admitted to spending four hundred dollars on his haircuts—one haircut that is, not a year’s worth.
Reporters following Huckabee around didn’t get to see any four-hundred-dollar haircuts. He and Rick Caldwell had been going to the same Little Rock barber for years, even dating back to high school when he’d visit Caldwell there. The barber went by the name “Speedy.” He operated out of a small shop with two barber’s chairs and a sign stating the current price: fifteen dollars. “When he was running for president, he was still going to the same barber,” Caldwell said. “People started paying attention to where Mike Huckabee went to get his hair cut, especially after the Edwards fiasco. Reporters drove over to our barber and asked Speedy, ‘How much do you charge Mike Huckabee for a hair cut?’ Speedy, now in his seventies, said, ‘Well, it depends. Normally fifteen dollars—unless I have to give him some political advice.’ ”23
During the South Carolina debate, the moderator asked Huckabee a question about convicted rapist and murderer Wayne DuMond, a man who, when released from the Arkansas prison system, raped and murdered again in Missouri. The moderator in South Carolina asked, “[W]hen you became governor of Arkansas, you wrote convicted rapist Wayne Dumond, told him, ‘My desire is that you be released from prison.’ The parole board released him in 1999. The next year, he killed a woman in Missouri. Do you bear any responsibility for his release, sir?” Limited to thirty seconds, here is Huckabee’s 200-word response:
I wish that he hadn’t gotten out in light of what happened in Missouri. It’s one of the most horrible things, I think, that I’ll look back on, but I didn’t let him go. The parole board did. I actually denied his clemency, which was my official action. It was my predecessor who commuted his sentence and made him parole-eligible. It’s been used as a political weapon against me.
Do I regret having said that I thought that he had met the conditions for parole? I do, in light of what he did. But I don’t have foresight. I have great hindsight, like everybody does.
Here’s what I do know. I know that we live in a very dangerous world and we make tough decisions and we have to live by them. For 10-1/2 years as a governor, I made tough decisions and saw thousands of cases cross my desk every day. I wish I could have always made them perfect, but I can’t. If I’m president—and I hope I will be—I won’t be a perfect president, but I’ll be one who will do my very best to not repeat mistakes or to make them in the first place.”24
There are many extenuating circumstances related to the case of Wayne DuMond. Some of them are forensic and evidential, like DNA testing and clothing worn at the crime scene. Some of the factors appear to be political: the rape that landed him in jail was committed against a third cousin of then governor Bill Clinton. And even more politics entered into the story when a Baptist pastor with a radio show took it upon himself to champion DuMond’s case because he was sure the whole thing had been a set-up by the Clintons. A controversial book even came out about the case: Unequal Justice: Wayne Dumond, Bill Clinton, and the Politics of Rape in Arkansas, by Guy Reel.25
And, to make things more convoluted, the more this case gets discussed by people without experience in law or law enforcement, the more the terms like pardon, parole, and commute get thrown around incorrectly.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of pages of material available related to this case. The facts of how he
came to be released from an Arkansas prison have remained the same since DuMond was rearrested in Missouri in 2001. The story first became politicized in 2002, when Huckabee sought reelection as governor, and again in 2007, when he ran for president. Once Huckabee began gaining traction in the polls in 2007, Mitt Romney’s camp brought the DuMond case to the forefront of the campaign. Huckabee found himself on his heels.
A Washington Post columnist wrote, “Showing mercy can be hazardous to a governor’s political health, as Mike Huckabee is learning in Iowa, where his chief rival in the Republican presidential primary, Mitt Romney, is blasting the former Arkansas governor as soft on crime because he exercised his clemency power. . . . Justice is served only when it is a meaningful blend of responsibility and mercy.”26 That idea aligns with Huckabee’s own published understanding of what the DuMond case had been about, in his book From Hope to Higher Ground. Clearly, Huckabee believed the DuMond case involved elements of injustice—and the fact that DuMond committed later crimes did not, in Huckabee’s way of thinking, absolve him of the moral responsibility to be involved.
In addition, the collective decisions made by governors Bill Clinton, Jim Tucker, and Mike Huckabee all affected the chain of events—from the original crime to the deaths in Missouri.
Finally, in the process of interviewing Governor Huckabee for this book, he was asked about the DuMond case on two separate occasions, a year apart. His account of the case was identical in both interviews. What follows is a transcript of Huckabee’s response to the question about this case:
What frustrates me most about DuMond is that I can live with the raw facts of the story and whatever fault I have in the facts I can live with. What’s been frustrating is that the facts are never the story that’s told.
For example, I don’t know how many times I’ve read stories or headlines, “Huckabee Pardoned DuMond.” Number one, I didn’t pardon DuMond. I didn’t even parole DuMond, because governors in Arkansas don’t have the power to parole anybody. In fact, I didn’t even commute his sentence. I had one action with DuMond. One. I denied a commutation. He was commuted by Jim Guy Tucker while Clinton was still governor. Which means that Clinton’s staff and Clinton had to approve of the commutation. Nobody has ever talked about this, but I know how the commutation process works in the governor’s office, obviously, having been in the office ten and a half years. While Clinton was out of town campaigning, Tucker commuted DuMond’s sentence, making him parole eligible. Later, when I became governor, DuMond wanted me, and asked me and put in the request for me, to commute it to time served. Which meant he would have been immediately released, and he wouldn’t have to go back to the parole board. Because even though he was eligible for parole, the parole board had continually denied the parole plan. And so my decision was whether or not to commute to time served or not. I finally decided I would not.
I got accused of putting pressure on the parole board, which, if anybody would think about this for one second, they would realize how ludicrous this is. Not one member of that parole board was my appointee. They were Tucker, Clinton appointees . . .
So the whole DuMond thing has always frustrated me because I never let the man go. And one of the reasons I didn’t, by the way, was because if I’d commuted to time served, there wouldn’t have been any reporting process. He would have been able to—no parole reports or nothing. But even that wouldn’t have been a pardon. Pardon means your record is released.27
On August 11, Huckabee came in second place at the Republicans’ Iowa Straw Poll. This was considered a major victory because of how little his campaign had spent. First place went to Romney, who had spent about $1,000 per vote. Huckabee’s second-place finish cost him about $60 per vote. And fellow social conservative Sam Brownback came in third after spending about $150 per vote. The low-cost nature of the second-place finish was especially sweet to Huckabee because it fit with his populist and blue-collar way of thinking. “I was grinning for a week.”28
PBS sponsored a GOP debate on September 27, held at Morgan State University, a historically black university in Baltimore, Maryland. The event marked the first time a debate panel consisted entirely of “journalists of color”—Tavis Smiley, Ray Suarez, Cynthia Tucker, and Juan Williams. Huckabee earned praise simply for showing up, as McCain, Thompson, Romney, and Giuliani all skipped the debate. Empty podiums onstage marked their places.29
Later in the campaign, Huckabee picked up the endorsement of fifty African-American leaders. They cited his pro-minority record in Arkansas, but also praised him for his attendance at the September debate, noting that he was the only leading candidate who had bothered to come. “I would like to declare to those frontrunners who did not participate in that debate, that if you believe that America and Americans should trust you, then why did you not show up?” asked Dean Nelson, director of the Network of Politically Active Christians.30
When the Republicans met in Michigan on October 9 for another debate, Huckabee talked economics in a contrarian fashion, arguing against the prevailing positive mood of the day—contrarian, because the financial crisis and recession would not arrive until the summer of 2008. “A lot of people are going to watch this debate. They’re going to hear Republicans on this stage talk about how great the economy is,” Huckabee said. “And frankly, when they hear that, they’re going to probably reach for the dial. I want to make sure people understand that for many people on this stage the economy’s doing terrifically well, but for a lot of Americans it’s not doing so well.”31
Huckabee was right, although the nation would not discover just how weak their “strong economy” was until months after Huckabee ended his campaign. Reflecting back on that debate, Huckabee later told a reporter that he was considered “a complete idiot” for his prediction: “What bothered me more than anything was the disdain that I experienced from the elites: ‘Oohhhh, who does Huckabee think he is, speaking about the economy?’ They treated me like a total hick. A complete, uneducated, unprepared hick.”32
Further, some conservative groups with a focus on economic issues, such as the Club for Growth, had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars during the campaign to fight directly against Huckabee’s nomination. They attacked his record in Arkansas, accusing him of raising taxes and growing the size of the government. During the 2008 campaign season (and again in the pre-2012 months and now in the pre-2016 days), these groups had a near-singular focus of attack on Huckabee. Huckabee responded with statements like, “I’m not a Wall Street Republican, I’m a Main Street Republican” or “I’m not a country-club Republican. I never even set foot in a country club until the tenth anniversary reunion for my high school graduating class.”33 As for the Club for Growth, Huckabee said, “They are full of oatmeal”—employing one of those trademark Southern euphemisms. When, in 2006, the Cato Institute gave him an F on economic policies while governor, he said they “deserved an F on their grading capacity.”34
Huckabee’s pressing concern was whether Americans in poverty had any genuine opportunity to turn their own situations around in their lifetimes. Of special concern too was the plight of minorities who he believed were born with a ticket to jail printed on their diapers, given the economic realities of their childhood.
And Huckabee was concerned about the middle class—too much money to qualify for government entitlement but too poor to actually be able to fund their retirement or their kids’ college tuition. “I think there are a lot of people in the Republican Party who think that there is this total disconnect between fiscal responsibility and social responsibility,” he told an interviewer in 2006. “But these are not opponents. These are really elements that work together. . . . I get in trouble with my party because I’ve also spoken a lot about that we can’t ignore poverty, we can’t ignore the lack of health care available to people who are in the middle between if they’re really poor, they’re going to get it; and if they’re
really rich, they’re going to get it. But if they’re in the middle, they’re the ones you’ve got to worry about because they may eventually get it, but they’ll go bankrupt having it.”35
In November, the Christian Science Monitor called Huckabee a “conservative with a social gospel.”36 Others began to note that the “fusion of economic and social conservatives has been a ticking time bomb for nearly 30 years. Economic and social conservatism do not naturally fit together. Their fusion has been a marriage of convenience.”37 Into this tension, Huckabee was described as “a candidate who does not force [evangelicals] to choose between their social and economic views.”38
In October, Phyllis Schlafly, conservatism’s matriarch and one of the most important influences in Huckabee’s teenage political development, stated that Huckabee had “destroyed the conservative movement in Arkansas and left the Republican Party a shambles.”39 Of course, that opinion doesn’t bear up under the weight of the facts. Arkansas was 90 percent Democrat when Huckabee came into office, but it is now nearly all Republican in every statewide elected office.40 That is to say, since the day Huckabee became governor, Arkansas has gone from being one of the bluest states to one of the reddest. Certainly factors beyond Huckabee also played a hand in this turn, but it cannot be argued that Huckabee left the party a shambles.
The Dallas Morning News gave Huckabee its endorsement and praised his fiscal record as governor: “Mr. Huckabee established a respectable record of fiscal responsibility in Arkansas. Rather than run up deficits, he backed raising taxes to pay for needed infrastructure, health care, and education. That’s called prudence, and it was once a Republican virtue.”41
By the end of November, polls in Iowa showed Huckabee either closing the gap or ahead of Romney. “The numbers show we are climbing, especially in Iowa, but also nationally,” he said. “The more we get attacked, the more our numbers soar. This just proves that when you get kicked in the rear, you’re really the one out front.”42