by Scott Lamb
Or consider the opening lines of Ross Douthat’s column, “Huckabee’s Amateur Hour,” from December 2007. He wrote, “When I interviewed Mike Huckabee last month, the most amusing detail of the whole experience came when his (lone) aide murmured to me, apologetically, that the governor was running late to the interview because he needed to iron his own suit for a speech that afternoon.” Douthat, a conservative to be sure, saw symptoms of amateurism in that Huckabee only had one aide, and that a presidential candidate was running late to an interview, not on account of something important, but because he had “to iron his own suit.”10
The same idea was conveyed in the opening sentence of a New York Times profile, written just before the Douthat column. The author, Zev Chafets, wrote, “Mike Huckabee walked into the lobby of the Des Moines Marriott at 5:30 a.m. on December 3, deposited an armful of dirty laundry at the desk and checked to make sure he was being credited with Marriott Rewards points toward his next stay.”11
Such testimony of frugality might make a group of Baptist deacons happy—“Lord, You keep our pastor humble, and we’ll keep him poor”—but nobody wants to hear this kind of anecdote about their candidate for president. People say they want a president who is a normal, everyday person. A candidate who hasn’t bought his own milk or driven her own vehicle for a decade seems out of touch. The populist wants a candidate who shops the clearance rack at Kohl’s or JCPenney, but the elitist wants to vote for the guy wearing the Brooks Brothers tie. The elitist side of that equation is exactly what Chafets was driving at by making these the opening lines of his profile. Chafets was saying that Huckabee wasn’t as legitimate as the leading candidates, with staff to iron their suits, handle their dirty laundry, and fiddle with counter clerks about hotel reward points.
Huckabee is honest about money—he’d rather have zilch than to have strings tied to a contribution. Democrats and Republicans alike can be guilty of selling their opinions and their names for a checkbook.
In December 2007, Randy Minton and Jim Holt, two former Republican members of the Arkansas legislature during Huckabee’s administration, traveled to Iowa to criticize Huckabee’s gubernatorial record in Arkansas. They went on the air with influential conservative radio talk host Jan Mickelson to debate two other pro-Huckabee Arkansans. Most people can’t afford to take off work and pay for such an excursion from their own pockets. Apparently, neither could these two, because they each received five thousand dollars for their travels.12 On-air, they were asked, “Who paid for your trip?” Their answer: “Ron Paul.”13
Or, in South Carolina, Huckabee perceived that Romney was buying endorsements of key evangelicals. “When some of the evangelicals endorsed Mitt Romney, you just wonder how big of a contribution did Mitt make to them to get that. Mitt gave a lot of contributions to people and suddenly—amazingly—he got endorsements. From leaders who were so conservative. It was hard for that not to be distasteful to me because I saw a lot of people who I thought a lot better of that I thought just totally sold out. Total sell-out.”14
Huckabee absolutely had to win South Carolina on Saturday, January 19. He didn’t. Mitt Romney had not campaigned much in the state, opting to spend his efforts to win that day’s contest in Nevada. Romney won Nevada easily, but also tallied 15 percent of the South Carolina vote after all. But it was Fred Thompson who hurt Huckabee’s chances. Thompson had been an early favorite of many evangelicals who considered him both conservative (enough) and “electable,” whereas they doubted Huckabee on one or both of those counts. Thompson polled poorly, and some speculated he was going to drop out before Iowa. Despite their denials, Huckabee remains convinced that McCain was the reason Thompson stayed in the race. “McCain convinced him to stay in,” Huckabee said. “They both tried to play like that didn’t happen, but members of both of their teams admitted that’s exactly what had happened. They had made a deal and Fred stayed in. He stayed on the ballot in order to take some votes from me.”15
It also snowed in the wrong places. You can’t plan an entire presidential campaign around the weather working out right. But, in the strategy book of the post-Iowa Huckabee campaign, South Carolina mattered the most. Donations would either skyrocket or dry up based on whether Huckabee could secure a win there. On the day of the primary, the citizens living in the pro-McCain regions of South Carolina woke up to the sunshine. In the pro-Huckabee regions, it snowed.
When the votes were counted, McCain had 147,686 (33.2 percent) to Huckabee’s 132,943 (29.8 percent) and Fred Thompson’s 69,651 (15.6 percent). Thompson dropped out of the race three days later. Huckabee told MSNBC, “The votes that he took essentially were votes that I would have most likely had, according to the exit polls and every other analysis.”16
“Not winning South Carolina really hurt us,” Huckabee said. “That was the beginning of the end, even though we still fought and still won states beyond that. If we’d won South Carolina, it would have made a huge difference.” When asked if he might have won South Carolina if he’d had an extra million or two to spend there, Huckabee said, “Even without the two million dollars. If Fred hadn’t been in it still and it hadn’t snowed in Greenville—those two things killed us.”17
Charles Krauthammer analyzed the loss in South Carolina, and essentially the entire campaign, using an argument about Huckabee that has stuck to this day: “Mike Huckabee is not going to be president. The loss in South Carolina, one of the most highly evangelical states in the union, made that plain. With a ceiling of 14 percent among non-evangelical Republicans, Huckabee’s base is simply too narrow. But his was not a rise and then a fall. He came from nowhere to establish himself as the voice of an important national constituency.”18
Huckabee maintains that he was, and is, more than just a candidate for the evangelical voting bloc. And he argues that if it were true that he “got the evangelical vote,” then he would have won the nomination. “I hear many times this notion that ‘Huckabee got the evangelical vote, but that’s all that he could do.’ I keep telling them, ‘No if I’d really had the evangelical vote, I’d have been the nominee. No, the problem was that I couldn’t get enough of the evangelicals behind me.”19
After South Carolina, but especially after Romney’s concession on February 7, the pressure began to mount for Huckabee to follow suit and concede the nomination to McCain. “It would take a miracle for him to win the Republican presidential nomination, but former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee isn’t going away, at least not yet,” wrote columnist Steven Thomma on February 13.20
“They thought I should have gotten out and just handed it to him,” Huckabee said. “I had a personal conversation with McCain staffers and, ‘Look, guys, my whole life I’ve never been a quitter. I wasn’t raised to be a quitter. If I had been a quitter, I wouldn’t have gotten where I am today. So you can beat me, knock me to the floor, make me where I can’t get up; I get that. I can handle being defeated, but I’ll never be able to live with myself if I just gave up.”21
On February 23, Huckabee appeared on Saturday Night Live for the “Weekend Update” skit. In a hilarious and humble bit of self-deprecating humor, Huckabee came to “explain why he has yet to concede” to Seth Myers. “I’m not a math guy. I’m more of a miracle guy. So, at this point, I’m going to focus on the miracle part.” The punch line was that after Myers had finished the interview, Huckabee didn’t notice the obvious cues to exit the stage.22
The idea that Huckabee should end his campaign shifted quickly from comedic to serious, however, and even prompted a call from the White House. “I got a call from the President of the United States, from George Bush himself. He didn’t just say, ‘Get out.’ He said, ‘Hey Huck, just kind of calling, seeing what you’re thinking. Where do you think this is going?’ I said, ‘Well, Mr. President, I can’t honestly say I know where this is going, but I know what my thinking is. When McCain gets enough delegates t
o claim it—and he hadn’t done that yet—then, as I’ve said all along, I will accept that and endorse him. But I can’t quit. I’ve gotten this far by gutting it out. My whole life I’ve had to fight as the underdog.’ ”23
Campaigns hit a candidate with stress and challenges every day for months on end—a marathon of pressure, not a sprint. When you put a campaign on a tight budget and ask everyone from the candidate on down to be frugal (some might even say miserly or cheap), then eventually tensions boil high and outbursts happen. But the aides, staff, and volunteers for Huckabee paint a different picture of what it was like to work for him. “Huckabee really is the same person behind the scenes that he is in public,” Charmaine Yoest said. It’s not that he’s perfect and not that he doesn’t lose his temper or anything like that, but he really is a man of integrity. Mike was always very even tempered. He handled the stresses on the campaign with real graciousness and he was very disciplined—sticking to his running and his schedule. There weren’t the wild swings you sometimes see with people who have that outgoing personality necessary in today’s culture. When ambushed by reporters, I never saw him lose his cool. He always maintained a graciousness and a dignity about him.”24
Iowa and Texas held their primaries on March 4, and if McCain won either of those states, it was game over for Huckabee. McCain won both. Huckabee called and congratulated the senator on an “honorable campaign” and promised “to do everything possible to unite our party, but more importantly to unite our country.”25
In his concession speech to his supporters, Huckabee employed an anecdote from baseball, which explained why he had stayed in the race as long as he did. Huckabee said,
George Brett was one of the greatest baseball players of all time. And in his career for the Kansas City Royals, he was asked, when he was nearing the end of his career, how he wanted his last play in the major leagues to go. Well, everyone assumed that he would say that he wanted to hit a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth to win a game, perhaps even a World Series. He surprised all of the sportswriters, because what he said was, “I want my last play at bat to be that I hit an easy [out], just one bounce to the second baseman, and they throw me out at first. But I was running as hard as I could toward the bag when they got me.” And he said, “Because I want it to be said of George Brett that, no matter what, he played his best game, he gave it his best, all the way to the very end.”26
As he closed the speech, which closed his campaign, Huckabee looked to the future:
We aren’t going away completely. We want to be a part of helping to keep the issues alive that have kept us in this race. . . .
Neither Janet nor I have the words to say, “Thanks.” We can only thank you with hopefully our future actions, that we will work hard for our country, we will work hard for our party and the nominee, because we love this country and that’s why we got in.
And until our country is all that we hope and pray it to be, we won’t be able to walk away completely.27
CHAPTER 30
DREAM ON
March 5–November 4, 2008
Let me say that, as much as I appreciate this magnificent opportunity to speak tonight, I’ve got to be honest with you. I was originally hoping for the slot on Thursday night called the acceptance speech.
—MIKE HUCKABEE
STEVEN TYLER, THE LEAD SINGER FOR AEROSMITH, RECALLED the source of inspiration for the band’s original hit “Dream On.” As a three-year-old, he would lie under the legs of a grand piano while his Juilliard-trained father practiced. “That’s where I got that ‘Dream On’ chord-age,” he said.1 Released in June 1973 (the month after Huckabee graduated high school), the song is still played on radio stations every day.
Nestled in the lyrics of this rock classic is Tyler’s philosophical truism that losses can prepare you for winning. That illustrates the road Huckabee traveled during the next eight months of 2008, between Huckabee’s loss in the primaries and McCain’s loss in the general election. Like other Republicans in the second half of the twentieth century (Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush), Huckabee lost a presidential primary. Did he learn from the experience?
Even though he had conceded that his campaign was over, Huckabee was hardly out of the media spotlight yet. McCain still needed a vice president running mate. Would he pick Huckabee? If so, would Huckabee accept? After working so hard to beat McCain (Romney had already dropped out in early February), would Huckabee now be a good sport and help the Republican Party defeat the Democrats in the fall election?
Pundits varied in their speculations on who McCain would choose as his running mate. By June, however, McCain’s trailing poll numbers indicated he needed to shake things up and energize his campaign by choosing somebody unexpected. Columnist David Greenberg said McCain “would do well to bolster his own reputation as a maverick by choosing someone like Colin Powell or Mike Huckabee.”2
In May, columnist Robert Novak wrote that McCain was having “a problem of disputed dimensions with a vital component of the conservative coalition: the evangelicals.” Novak questioned Huckabee’s loyalty to the GOP team: “The biggest question is whether Mike Huckabee is part of the problem or the solution for McCain. Some U.S. Christians are not reconciled to McCain’s candidacy but instead regard the prospective presidency of Barack Obama in the nature of a biblical plague visited upon a sinful people. These militants look at former Baptist preacher Huckabee as ‘God’s candidate’ for president in 2012.”3
For his part, Huckabee had been vocal and energetic in his support for McCain, but some whispers indicated he was “capable of playing a double game.” Novak, using confidential information he said had been supplied to him from a “credible activist in Christian politics,” wrote that both Huckabee and conservative leader Michael Farris had spoken privately about the idea of Obama being a “plague-like presidency.” In other words, if the nation wanted Obama and his terrible policies, let the nation get what it wants. Novak asked the men if this was their position and “both denied advocating that an Obama presidency should be inflicted on the country.”4 Columnist Ross Douthat countered Novak, writing in the Atlantic that “given the ample primary-season evidence that Huck has a major-league man-crush on the presumptive GOP nominee, I’d like to see a little more evidence before I ‘embrace the concept’ that the Arkansas Governor might be part of McCain’s ‘Christian problem.’ ”5 Farris was clear about his reservations concerning McCain: “I am concerned about what judges [McCain] may name, and the test will be who he selects for vice president.” Farris said Huckabee would be his choice for vice president, but added, “I understand he is not under consideration.”6
But was there anybody in McCain’s camp pushing for a Vice President Huckabee? After all, the two men had genuine respect for each other and certainly had been a common enemy against Mitt Romney in the primaries. Was VP Huckabee a possibility? “I think a lot of people assumed that I was on his short list, but I was not,” Huckabee said.7 “You’ve got to remember, McCain’s inside circle included Steve Schmidt, a big pro–gay marriage guy.” Schmidt, whose sister is a lesbian, gave support to Log Cabin Republicans in September 2008 and led the 2013 fight to overturn California’s Proposition 8. Huckabee felt that some of McCain’s people “were real arrogant” and “they didn’t feel that I was in their league.” Also, the resentment that Huckabee had remained in the race as long as he did didn’t help.
“I never got even a contact,” Huckabee said. “I think I could have brought something to the table, but McCain wanted to pick Joe Lieberman to be vice president, the Democrat senator. In his mind, that would be a game changer.” Huckabee, like most of the state leaders of the GOP, respected Lieberman, but would have balked at the idea of a bipartisan ticket. “He’s a very wonderful man. Good man. An honorable man in every way, and I like him and respect him. On defense and national security, he is a
hawk and a conservative. But on virtually everything else, he’s a liberal—Gore’s running mate in 2002!”
Everybody understood that except John McCain, and he continued to insist that people would be okay with it. His advisors insisted that picking Lieberman ran the risk of splitting the GOP, just two weeks away at that point. “And understandably so,” Huckabee said. “I mean, we’d been out there working hard to get a Republican elected. For him to turn around and say, ‘I’m going to give a Democrat a job a heartbeat away from a seventy-two-year-old man, who has had cancer.’ Picking a Democrat to be on the Republican ticket would be disastrous in every way.” Finally, McCain gave up the fight, took Lieberman off the table, and scrambled to come up with another secret weapon for the campaign. Enter Sarah Palin.
Having won eight states and four million votes in the primary, Huckabee had earned the right to address the Republican National Convention meeting the first week of September in Minnesota. He addressed the convention and brought them to tears, laughter, and applause. Some even said Huckabee’s speech was a highlight of the convention.
Robert Lehrman, author of textbooks on political speechwriting, analyzed Huckabee’s convention speech as an example for his readers. Lehrman wrote, “Sitting through a presidential nominating convention feels different than watching it in prime time. Most of the two hundred or so speeches at each are largely ignored by the audience. There’s no guarantee that a defeated candidate will excite delegations caught up in their own politicking. But during his ten-minute speech, the crowd interrupted Mike Huckabee twenty-three times with laughter or applause—and not just by his home state.” Lehrman concluded, “In ten minutes Huckabee used antithesis eleven times, litany four times, and nine of the other schemes and tropes covered in the previous chapter [of his book The Political Speechwriter’s Companion]. He didn’t need to know the classical names for any of them. He knew something more valuable: how to use them to relate to his audience.”8