by Scott Lamb
A major profile of Huckabee, titled “My Favorite Nut Job,” appeared in Rolling Stone magazine earlier in the year. The author, Matt Taibbi, had spent an afternoon with Huckabee and seemed surprised to discover any redeeming qualities. Taibbi headlined his objective journalism with this zinger: “Mike Huckabee is a charming, funny economic populist who seems to genuinely care about the poor. He’s also a full-blown Christian kook.” He wrote, “I can almost see him as president. . . . Then I woke up and did some homework that changed my mind. But I confess: It took a little while. Huckabee is that good.”43
With vocal critics mounting up on the left and right, Huckabee knew if he were going to get through, he’d need a lot of help from his friends. Enter Chuck Norris.
In what became some of the most-talked-about commercials of the election cycle, Norris and Huckabee sat next to each other and gave mutual endorsements, or “HuckChuckFacts” as they were called.44 “My plan to secure the border? Two words: Chuck Norris.” “There’s no chin behind Chuck Norris’ beard. Only another fist.” “Mike Huckabee wants to put the IRS out of business.”
Huckabee made an ill-advised, off hand comment to Zev Chafets in an interview for an important New York Times profile in December. Chafets wrote, “I asked Huckabee, who describes himself as the only Republican candidate with a degree in theology, if he considered Mormonism a cult or a religion. ‘I think it’s a religion,’ he said. ‘I really don’t know much about it.’ I was about to jot down this piece of boilerplate when Huckabee surprised me with a question of his own: ‘Don’t Mormons,’ he asked in an innocent voice, ‘believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?’ ”45
The quote went viral, with accusations that Huckabee was attacking Romney’s Mormon faith. Huckabee quickly backtracked off the statement and apologized to Romney, though he said the question was a genuine one—prompted by inquisitiveness, not slander.
Republicans met in Miami, Florida, on December 9 for one of the final debates of 2007. Given the large Hispanic population in Miami, the topic of immigration was sure to be discussed. The chairman for Huckabee’s Florida campaign, Marco Rubio, had signed on early because, as he would say, “For those of us who consider ourselves to be Reagan conservatives, Mike Huckabee is our best chance to win the nomination. People are looking for genuineness and sincerity in politics. He has those qualities as well as the positive leadership skills needed to run our country.”46
During the debate, Huckabee explained his position on immigration, emphasizing both the rule of law but also a hand reaching out to those in the shadows: “The first step is a secure border, because otherwise nothing really matters. But I do think the pathway has to include people going to the back, not the front of the line. There can’t be an amnesty policy because that’s an insult to all the people who waited, sometimes, ridiculously, for years, just to be able to make the transition here. . . . When people come to this country, they shouldn’t fear. They shouldn’t live in hiding. They ought to have their heads up because we believe every person ought to have his or her head up and proud.”47
This chapter utilized the GOP debates as a springboard to talk about several key themes that emerged during the 2007 pre-primary campaign season. Of course, campaigns are about much more than debates. But even among the sharpest critics of Huckabee’s content, most people admitted that it was in the debates where Huckabee added credibility and gravity to his campaign by his superior performance. As he had done at Boys State three decades earlier, he differentiated himself by his communication skills and personal winsomeness. “The debates were a key factor in our gaining support,” Huckabee said. “Because despite the pitiful amount of time I was given compared to some of the other candidates, my answers were obviously coming straight from my heart and not from a very carefully and cleverly rehearsed committee of consultants.”48
In a year-end article titled “Top Ten Best (and Worst) Communicators of 2007,” communications expert Bert Decker ranked Huckabee as number one. He wrote:
A few months ago Huckabee was almost an unknown. Now he is a front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination, and probably the fastest rise ever from relative obscurity to the cover of the weekly newsmagazines. Governor Huckabee is open in style, authentic, natural and amazingly great at thinking (and speaking) on his feet. He tells stories and connects with people. Powerful tools when you have to build trust and credibility visually, quickly and mostly through TV. And powerful tools for a leader. Although he has a conservative constituency, they alone could not get him this far this fast. It is his communicating.49
Would Huckabee win in Iowa? If so, would he go on to secure the GOP nomination and run against Hillary Clinton, at that time still the candidate to beat among the Democrats? Would the country give the Republican Party its third White House in a row, something the nation seems very reluctant to do? Would Huckabee pick up where George W. Bush left off?
For some people, Huckabee’s campaign boiled down to this: a formerly fat, likable Southern Baptist preacher with a stupid name who also came from Bill Clinton’s town and also was the governor of Arkansas. Paradoxical. Unelectable.
The early days of 2007 had begun with Huckabee in California at the Reagan Library. On the night before the Iowa caucuses, Huckabee flew back out to California to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. “Folks, up until a few weeks ago, my next guest was an also-ran with a funny name in the Republican campaign,” Leno said. “He still has a funny name, but now he’s near the top in the national polls. He’s neck-in-neck with Mitt Romney in Iowa, and the caucus there will be held tomorrow. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mike Huckabee.”50
CHAPTER 28
WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS
January 3, 2008
You know, I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to love a state as much as I love my home state of Arkansas. But tonight, I love Iowa a whole lot.
—MIKE HUCKABEE
MIKE HUCKABEE WON THE 2008 IOWA CAUCUSES BY A MARGIN of 10,000 votes (40,954 to 30,021) over Mitt Romney. Fred Thompson came in third. If only for one glorious night—the first night of voting and the most important night in Huckabee’s strategy—he and his team could belt out the rock anthem “We Are the Champions.”
In the game of “historical alternatives,” it is fun to ask the question, what if those numbers had been reversed and Huckabee had placed second behind Romney? After having campaigned so hard in the state, what if he did not win?
Would Huckabee have won any other states? Probably not, because the money would have dried up. After all, half of the $16 million Huckabee raised in his 2008 campaign came in the door after his Iowa victory. Without the win he would not have seen that spike in donations. And without the influx of money, he could have still hung on through Super Tuesday on February 5, but probably would have dropped out after that, even as Romney did.
But then what? Without Iowa and the subsequent other victories (seven states, 4.2 million votes, 20 percent of the vote total), would Huckabee have been considered an early front-runner in 2012 (though he didn’t actually run)? Would he have come back around for the 2016 election? It’s hard to say for sure, but probably not.
Would he have written his bestselling books, or would he have landed a popular television show—and the radio work too? The answer here is yes, given his skills behind the camera, microphone, and keyboard—though they may not have been as lucrative.
All that to say, the trajectory of Huckabee’s life over the past seven years was largely determined by what happened on the third day of January 2008.
Standing before a packed room of supporters, Huckabee looked over his shoulder at his wife, Janet, smiling as she had on the day they married. Then he turned and looked over his other shoulder at . . . Chuck Norris, who was smiling like the time he fought Superman on a bet (the loser had to start wearing
his underwear on the outside of his pants).
“You know, I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to love a state as much as I love my home state of Arkansas,” Huckabee said. “But tonight, I love Iowa a whole lot.”1
Exit poll results showed that 33 percent of voters said “candor” was the quality they most wanted to see in a candidate. The man whom friends describe as “Mr. Says What He Means and Means What He Says” rode that sentiment all the way to victory that night, and he’d never forget the feeling of that moment. Analysts also credited Huckabee’s work ethic, which prompted him to court national press, invite reporters along for his morning runs, and appear on morning talk shows every day in the week before the vote.
To be sure, the Iowa win was a team effort. His daughter, Sarah, had directed the Iowa campaign, living in the state for months before the caucus. Bob Vander Plaats, state chairman for the campaign, had worked tirelessly for the effort, alongside what Ed Rollins called a “volunteer army” of homeschoolers, farmers, preachers, and college students. Huckabee advisor Charmaine Yoest bragged on their army, saying, “Our ragtag band of activists beat their group of super volunteers.” She also emphasized the important factor of voters actually seeing and listening to Huckabee, rather than just reading about him. “We always knew our goal was for people to hear him speaking,” Yoest said.2
Huckabee’s media man, Bob Wickers, gave praise to the Christmas-themed television ad they had run in Iowa. “You can’t underestimate the importance of the Believe ad,” Wickers said.3 This was the ad some people called “the floating cross” commercial, due to the positioning of a bookshelf in the background, which resembles a cross.
Huckabee, grinning from ear to ear, continued his post-caucus celebration speech to his supporters:
I think we’ve learned three very important things through this victory tonight. The first thing we’ve learned is that people really are more important than the purse, and what a great lesson for America to learn. Most of the pundits believe that when you’re outspent at least 15 to 1, it’s simply impossible to overcome that mountain of money and somehow garner the level of support that’s necessary to win an election. Well, tonight we proved that American politics still is in the hands of ordinary folks like you and others across this country who believe that it wasn’t about who raised the most money but who raised the greatest hopes, dreams and aspirations for our children and their future.4
The idea that a mountain of hard work could overcome a molehill of campaign money would soon be put to the test. Though the win in Iowa brought on a deluge of donations, everything is relative. The deluge was eight million dollars, or about the same amount that Romney had just spent getting beat in Iowa. Unfortunately, for the Huckabee camp, money would play the biggest factor in the remaining sixty days of the campaign.
Huckabee concluded:
G.K. Chesterton once said that a true soldier fights not because he hates those who are in front of him, but because he loves those who are behind him. Ladies and gentlemen, I recognize that running for office, it’s not hating those who are in front of us. It’s loving those who are behind us.
Now we’ve got a long journey ahead of us. I wish it were all over tonight, and we could just celebrate the whole thing. But, unfortunately, if this were a marathon, we’ve only run half of it. But we’ve run it well.
And now it’s on from here to New Hampshire, and then to the rest of the country. But I’ll always be wanting to come back to this place and say, wherever it ends—and we know where that’s going to be—it started here in Iowa.5
CHAPTER 29
IF I WERE A RICH MAN
January 4, 2008–March 4, 2008
I spent my life raising money for both church, charitable causes, as well as political. I don’t mind doing it, but I darn sure want to look someone in the eye and if I’m going to ask them to contribute something, that it’s because we really need to make the contribution.
—MIKE HUCKABEE
AS HUCKABEE EXPLAINS IT, THERE ARE FOUR THINGS YOU need if you are going to succeed in either politics or the pastorate: “You have to have a message. Secondly, you have to motivate volunteers. You have to be able to understand and work with all types of medium to get your message out, and you’ve got to raise money.”1
Huckabee is correct on all four counts. But as “Huckabee 2008” left cornfields and hogs behind and journeyed into states not named Iowa, that last item would begin to reveal the major weakness of his campaign. Mitt Romney spent $7 million on television ads in Iowa alone.2 Huckabee, though going an entire month longer into the primaries than Romney, only spent $16 million on his entire campaign. Of course, neither man won the nomination, proving Huckabee’s point: you have to have all “four basic things” in order to be successful.
One of the most successful movies of the 1970s was a screen adaptation of one of the most successful Broadway plays of the 1960s. Audiences loved Fiddler on the Roof for its musical score, comedy, and poignant reflections on life, love, and freedom—all set in the context of a humble Jewish community in tsarist Russia. In one particularly humorous scene, Tevye, the poor yet philosophical milkman who served as the lead character, sang an answer to the question, how might my life be different if I were a rich man?
Sixty days is all that separated Huckabee’s victory in Iowa from his campaign-ending concession speech after primary losses in Texas and Ohio on March 4. How might the remainder of the Huckabee 2008 campaign have been different if Huckabee had had a few more million in his campaign coffers?
For starters, more money wouldn’t have made any difference in New Hampshire, which polls told him he had no chance to win. Pundits gave him credit for trying though, and he even won the support of the influential Ruth Griffin, then in her eighties, who for forty years had been on the receiving end of endorsement-seeking candidates. She had met Ford, Bush, and Dole in her living room, and now it was Huckabee’s turn to ask for her support. Griffin gave him the endorsement and sent out thousands of postcards to tell her friends about the governor from Arkansas. Griffin appeared at a rally with the Huckabees and Chuck Norris a few days before the primary and read her favorite poem, “Somebody Said It Couldn’t Be Done”—figuring those lines summed up what she thought of Mike’s underfunded but plucky campaign. Griffin also took a liking to Janet Huckabee, telling reporters, “Have you ever seen her? She’s 6 feet tall! She’s very nice.”3 In the end, John McCain walked away with 37 percent of the vote to Romney’s 31 percent and Huckabee’s 11 percent.
Huckabee fared no better in the Michigan primary on January 15, once again coming in third place (16 percent) behind Romney (39 percent) and McCain (29 percent). It is doubtful that more money would have helped Huckabee win in the state Romney’s father had governed. On the other hand, for lack of funds to charter an airplane, he had missed a key opportunity to meet the state’s Republicans gathered at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island the previous fall.4
Why did Huckabee struggle to raise money? One might argue that donors didn’t give because they didn’t think he was electable—no use throwing good money after a losing campaign. While that may explain some of it, another part simply was Huckabee’s reticence to ask rich people for their money. It is hard to have genuine blue-collar roots—and be proud of them—while also begging wealthy people to give you their money. Huckabee had stated that his parents gave him “a legacy of believing that character and integrity are more valuable than wealth and that what we possess is less important than what kind of people we are.”5 If that was the case, then why should he grovel for money from the wealthy? At best, it felt degrading. At worst, the money came with strings attached, as the candidate could become beholden to the moneyed class who put them in office. Huckabee simply doesn’t like any of that business.
Another factor that impeded Huckabee was his frugal ba
ckground. “I know a lot of people would raise millions of dollars for no particular purpose just because they could,” he said. “You know, I spent my life raising money for both church, charitable causes, as well as political. I don’t mind doing it, but I darn sure want to look someone in the eye and if I’m going to ask them to contribute something, that it’s because we really need to make the contribution.”6 It’s one thing to spend state tax revenue on bridges and books, but could the son of Dorsey Huckabee raise and spend a half billion donated dollars to promote himself into his next job?
When asked, “After the Iowa caucuses, do you think you might have won if you had an extra twenty million?” Huckabee responded, “I think less than twenty. I think if we’d had five million.” Janet Huckabee added the reminder, “The whole campaign was run with eighteen million dollars.” He corrected the figure, “The amount was sixteen million, less than half of which was raised before the Iowa caucuses. Half of all the money we raised came in the final five and a half weeks.”7 It’s no wonder then that when Huckabee was asked in 2015 if he planned to run again, he said he’d first have to see if the money was there for him—up front. He said, “I don’t want to jump in a pool that doesn’t have any water in it. It doesn’t make for a very pleasant swim.”8
During the campaign, the lack of money often brought peripheral mockery—jeering at Huckabee for small symptoms of the shoestring campaign.
For example, once when Huckabee didn’t know about a breaking news item that had dominated the airwaves that day, a columnist wrote, “The Huckabee campaign needs to get a subscription to a newspaper or somehow find a way to let the candidate know what the biggest political story of the day is. Maybe someone can take a peek at CNN once a day?”9 Huckabee’s volunteer army performed miracles and the paid staff was tireless, but when they were stretched too thin, perceived weaknesses would be noticed and attacked. In this case, it was a weakness in the research department. To be fair, that might have been the only news item Huckabee had been slow in hearing about during the entire campaign. But perception is often greater than reality.