Huckabee: A Likable Candidate Facing 'Presidential' Hurdle

WASHINGTON — Mike Huckabee marveled at being in the same sound studio at XM Satellite Radio headquarters where Paul McCartney and B.B. King had performed in the nation's capital.

"I'd rather listen to them than me," the former Republican governor of Arkansas admitted to the high school kids who had come to question him on XM's POTUS '08 program examining presidential candidates.

Indeed, while he is trailing only former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in polls of likely GOP caucus-goers in Iowa, Huckabee's personal high point in campaigning across the first-to-vote state may have been playing Steppenwolf's "Born to be Wild" and John Mellencamp's "R.O.C.K. in the USA" on bass guitar at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake. The historic venue, of course, was where Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens played hours before dying in a plane crash in 1959.

Music — like religion — goes to the soul of the Baptist preacher-turned-politician.

"Develop both the left and right sides of your brain," he urged the students from the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va. Art and music are as important as calculus and physics in your education, he stressed, recalling how he made them requirements of the Arkansas public school curriculum.

To most of America, Huckabee is best known as the candidate who lost 110 pounds and wrote a book about it — "Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork" — and later came up with one of the best one-liners in the seemingly endless drone of run-together televised campaign debates.

"We have a Congress that spends money like John Edwards at a beauty shop," quipped Huckabee, cracking up his Republican opponents a week after the Democratic candidate had been spent $400 on a haircut.

In national voter preference polls, Huckabee trails former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, Arizona Sen. John McCain and Romney in the race for the Republican nomination. But folks have taken a shine to Huckabee in Iowa.

"Huckabee has been well received by Iowa Republicans from the beginning of his campaign. He is a very good campaigner, relaxed and humorous. He connects well with his audience," said Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Iowa. "So it is not surprising that he has done better here than elsewhere in the country, even though he has not spent as much time in the state as many of his competitors."

Huckabee, a 52-year-old father of three grown children, vaguely resembles Jim Nabors and often comes across as more personable and less political than the other Republican candidates. An avid lifelong angler, for example, he was named the American Sportfishing Association Man of the Year in 1997 and has a lake stocked with bass named for him and his wife, Janet, near their hometown of Hope, Ark.

He believes Americans are ready for a president whom they would welcome as a next-door neighbor.

"People want to have a president they actually like," he said in an interview. "A lot of people didn't agree with Ronald Reagan's politics but they liked him."

So far, Huckabee has been the most likeable candidate, observed Newt Gingrich. But some political analysts wonder whether this quality will be enough to come out of the Iowa caucuses with momentum for the national race.

"Huckabee still faces two daunting challenges," said Squire. "The first is convincing Iowans that he can get the nomination. Even if they like him, Iowa Republicans may drift to other candidates who are seen as more competitive. The second challenge is convincing voters that he is presidential. Although Huckabee is often credited with being a better campaigner than his GOP opponents, several of the others look and sound more like a president is supposed to look and sound.

"The trick for Huckabee is to be presidential without sacrificing the qualities that voters find appealing about him," said the Iowa professor.

Another Candidate from Hope

Asked why he is running for president, Huckabee replied, "I love this country."

He described his beginnings as only a generation away from dirt floors and outdoor toilets.

"I am here today because people in the generation before me made incredible sacrifices to give me the life that I have," he told the students in the XM studio.

He was born Aug. 24, 1955, in Hope, Ark. Bill Clinton, that other "Man From Hope," had moved to Hot Springs nearly two years before Huckabee was born. Dorsey Huckabee, Mike's father, was a firefighter and backyard car mechanic. His mother, Mae, worked in the office of a local utility company. At the age of 10, Mike Huckabee joined the Garrett Memorial Baptist Church and, from then on, faith was an important part of his private and public life. He preached his first sermon at the age of 15.

He also worked on the air as a DJ and news announcer at Hope's only radio station — KXAR — and played bass in a rock 'n' roll band.

Janet McCain had known Mike Huckabee since the seventh grade, and they start dating in their senior year of high school. He was the first male member of his family to earn a high school diploma.

After their freshman year at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark., Mike and Janet were married. They were both 18 years old.

Just a year later, Janet was diagnosed with a rare spinal cancer.

"He had made a commitment to me in sickness and in health. And the test of that commitment came very early in our marriage," said Janet Huckabee in a telephone interview.

After surgery, she underwent radiation therapy. Unable to sit up, she lay down in the back car seat while her young husband would drive her for an hour to the treatments and then an hour back home again. He would prepare her lunch, then go to class and work in a part-time job.

"He passed the test 100 percent," she said.

She recovered slowly but went on to bear three children, sons John Mark and David and daughter Sarah.

Upon graduating, Huckabee went on to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth for a year. Once ordained, he was hired by television evangelist James Robison to be his director of communications. Then he became pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, Ark., and later of Beech Street Baptist Church in Texarkana. He also served as president of the Arkansas Baptist Convention.

"I wouldn't trade anything for my experience as a pastor's wife," said Janet Huckabee, calling it great preparation for politics. But while in the public eye, working with volunteers, "doing command performances," raising money, and performing other tasks common to both fields, she said, "My church really loved me and appreciated me and protected me. In the political world, people can't wait to knock you off that pedestal. That's the big difference."

Huckabee believes he had a "calling" to both the ministry and to politics. Holding public office is a part of his faith — not a separate path, he explained.

"I am ultimately responsible to a creator who knows everything I do," he told the students at XM.

In 1992, the Baptist preacher ran as a Republican against Arkansas' incumbent Democratic senator, Dale Bumpers, and lost. That same year, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton was elected president. Lt. Gov. Jim Guy Tucker was elevated to governor. Winning a special election to fill the vacant position, Huckabee became lieutenant governor — the only Republican holding statewide office at the time.

"A Republican in my state feels about as out of place as Michael Vick at the Westminister Dog Show," Huckabee observed recently on the campaign trail.

Nonetheless, Huckabee was re-elected as lieutenant governor in 1994 and became governor two years later when Tucker was convicted of fraud charges stemming from the Whitewater investigation. Huckabee was elected on his own in 1998 and re-elected in 2002. State law forbade him from seeking another term in 2006.

"I was the first governor in America to have a concealed-carry permit, so don't mess with me," Huckabee told the Conservative Political Action Conference in March.

Along with supporting the right to bear arms and posting the Ten Commandments in courthouses, Huckabee opposes abortion and gay marriage. The National Association of Evangelicals, claiming 30 million members, said Huckabee was the presidential preference in their October survey of evangelical leaders and he trailed only Romney in another survey at the Washington Values Voter Summit.

He supports a tax on consumption — the "Fair Tax" — to replace the current federal income tax.

"The average American is more afraid of an IRS audit than of getting mugged," he said.

He backs the conflict in Iraq but dislikes the term "war on terrorism." Terrorism is a tactic, he explained, used by "Islamo-Fascists" who want to destroy those parts of the world who disagree with their beliefs.

"We fight, in essence, a theological perversion," he told the students. "This is about whether you survive."

But he still has some explaining to do to conservatives in the campaign for the Republican nomination.

"Gov. Huckabee says he is a fiscal conservative," said Pat Toomey, president of the Club for Growth, an advocacy group promoting "pro-growth" economic policies and curbs on government spending. "But his ten-year economic policy record ... is mixed, at best," Toomey said in a statement.

While Huckabee did have to work with an Arkansas legislature controlled by Democrats, Club for Growth said state spending rose about 65 percent during his decade as governor and Huckabee supported several tax hikes.

In 2003, then-Gov. Huckabee was diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes and warned that he had to lose weight or face early death. He embarked on a regime of diet and exercise that led to the loss of 110 pounds in a year and the emergence of preventative health care as one of his signature issues.

"I had been trying to get him to control his weight for years. But he never exercised. Even as a teenager, he never exercised. In dodge ball, he would get hit first so he could sit down and not sweat," said Janet Huckabee, a lifetime athlete who played basketball, softball and volleyball as a schoolgirl. "But he did a complete lifestyle change. I'm very proud of him."

Even if it requires getting out of bed at 4 a.m., she said, her husband now runs several miles a day.

Noting Bill Clinton's talent with the saxophone, a visitor to Huckabee's campaign asks if all Arkansas governors are required to play musical instruments.

It's written into the state constitution, the Republican candidate jokes. But Huckabee said that he has never even jammed with the former president.

"But it's not too late," he added.