MIKE HUCKABEE STORY: "FROM OUT OF NOWHERE..." - December 27, 2007

Every so often in US presidential primaries a candidate who was previously little-noticed or dismissed suddenly rockets up in the polls, throwing all prior expectations – and the strategies of other candidates – into uncertainty. In the final weeks before the 2008 primary voting begins in Iowa on 3 January, the surprise candidate is Republican Mike Huckabee. [1] While Barack Obama on the Democratic side is also showing momentum, this is no real surprise; since he entered the race a year ago he has been regarded as the leading contender against Hillary Clinton. Huckabee, in contrast, was relegated until a few weeks ago to the second tier of longshot GOP candidates. Even within that group he drew much less attention and buzz than libertarian maverick Ron Paul.

  
Huckabee is a Baptist minister, and Governor of Arkansas – the same position from which Bill Clinton reached the presidency.

By further coincidence Huckabee shares Bill Clinton's hometown, Hope Arkansas. For a Republican these are awkward echoes; Huckabee's joking response, "Give us a second chance," captures the disarming humor that he brings to the GOP race. Huckabee's rise in the polls, however, is only partly due to his charm; it also reflects the truism that nature abhors a vacuum. In contrast to the Democratic race, where Democrats are generally satisfied with their field and outlook, Republicans have been unhappy

with their candidates and worried about their prospects next fall.

  
Moreover, from the beginning the GOP race has been atypical in having no Establishment frontrunner. Historically the GOP has followed a custom that US political observers have come to call primogeniture. Party leaders coalesce early around a favored candidate, and Republican voters tend to fall into line, showing much less enthusiasm for challengers and mavericks than than do Democratic primary voters. In this race, however, the GOP leadership itself has been uncertain and divided, leaving no heir apparent.

 
Moreover, every leading Republican candidate has serious deficiencies in the eyes of many Republicans. Although John McCain's campaign fortunes have modestly revived, his maverick past leaves him distrusted by much of the GOP's core. Actor and former senator Fred Thompson's entry into the race was eagerly anticipated by many in a party still nostalgic for Ronald Reagan, but on entering the race he proved a lackluster campaigner, and his star faded. Longtime national frontrunner Rudy Giuliani has a strong image on security issues – which now appear less central as a campaign issue than a few months ago – but his libertine lifestyle and moderate social positions offend religious and social conservatives.
          

Mitt Romney's personal fortune has allowed him to self-fund his campaign at a time when Republican fundraising is very weak, but his many shifts on issues have raised doubts about him. Most seriously his Mormonism is a potential stumbling block to evangelical conservatives, who agree with Mormon social values but regard the Mormon faith itself as unorthodox at best and a cult at worst. Huckabee, as a Baptist minister, comes firmly out of the evangelical conservative wing of the Republican party – one of its chief voting blocs, and the one most dissatisfied with the other leading candidates. Religious conservatives have primarily fueled his sudden rise, both in Iowa (where they are particularly numerous) and nationwide.
Huckabee's style, however, contrasts sharply with the Old Testament wrath associated with earlier evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. While sharing their strict positions on issues such as abortion, he has not made these issues a major theme of his campaign. His beliefs emerge in quite different ways, as in using his own success in losing a hundred pounds by dieting (about 45 kg), both as a metaphor for restoring the nation's social fabric and as a model for his health care proposal, which concentrates on preventive care. Like Democrat Barack Obama, he implicitly offers to transcend deep divisions in American society, divisions they themselves embody – in Obama's case, the old division of race, in Huckabee's, the newer divide between religious and secular.
  

This is a message with great potential appeal to millions of Americans near the middle of the political spectrum, who share in some degree many of the social concerns of religious conservatives, but are uneasy with the traditional stridency of the Religious Right. The picture of Huckabee as a different sort of religious conservative is reinforced by his record in Arkansas, where he has governed largely as a moderate, concentrating on nuts-and-bolts policy concerns such as education rather than on saving the souls or reforming the morals of Arkansans.
  

Huckabee's sudden rise in the polls has naturally brought him into collision with the other candidates – especially Mitt Romney, who has seen his previous strong lead in the opening Iowa contest evaporate, recent polling averaging to about a 9 point Huckabee lead there. Huckabee riskily, if perhaps shrewdly, injected sectarianism into the debate by asking a New York Times reporter interviewing him whether it was true that Mormons believe that Satan is the brother of Jesus. (They don't.) [2]
  

Amid the ensuing furore Huckabee had to apologize, but the doubts had been put into circulation. Even evangelical Christians who don't believe that claim may be roused to a vaguer uneasiness about Mormon beliefs, sufficient to push them away from Romney. In response, Romney was compelled to give what he had previously avoided, a speech addressing the place of specific religious beliefs in politics. (The speech, generally well received, was modeled on Kennedy's 1960 speech to an audience of Protestant clergymen, at a time when electing a Catholic still evoked old fears of Papal influence.)
  

Questions about Huckabee have also begun to emerge from economic conservatives, challenging Huckabee's bona fides as a conservative. [3] In Arkansas he compromised with the Democratic-dominated state legislature on programs that included some tax increases, anathema to Republican economic orthodoxy. His campaign message has an element of populism, as in asserting that the US health care delivery system is "broken" – an admission that, to economic conservatives, provides an opening for a government-run health insurance system.
    

Economic conservatives are not a formally organized GOP voting bloc, as religious conservatives are, but a large segment of the GOP base is motivated primarily by the Republican economic agenda, especially lower taxes. Moreover, economic conservatives make up a large and influential share of the GOP intelligentsia, whose access to the mass media makes up for lack of formal political organization. At minimum these commentators provide ammunition to Huckabee's primary opponents – especially, again, Romney, a former businessman for whom economic conservatives are his natural core constituency.
   

A more serious problem challenge for Huckabee may be first the calendar, then finances. The Iowa caucuses are followed five days later by the New Hampshire primary. New Hampshire's GOP electorate has few evangelicals, and Huckabee still runs a distant fourth there. [4] After that his problem – assuming he wins Iowa – will be raising enough money quickly enough for the primaries that follow, especially "Super Tuesday" on 5 February, when about half the country will vote.
        

The traditional downfall of insurgent candidates who scored early victories has been campaign starvation during the long march that followed. The march this time is shorter – only four weeks from New Hampshire to Super Tuesday – but the cost of running a national campaign is enormous, and (unlike Obama on the Democratic side) at least until recently Huckabee had raised little money.
        

On the other hand, the compressed schedule might favor Huckabee by making momentum decisive. Presidential primary voters in both parties tend to fall in behind a winner, which is what has made Iowa and New Hampshire so important in nomination races. Rising poll numbers produce favorable news coverage, bringing in yet new waves of supporters. Momentum – Big Mo as it is called (ironically this expression was coined by former Texas governor John Connolly, who in 1980 won an early Republican presidential straw poll, but went on to win not a single convention delegate) – eventually dissipates, and can give way to second thoughts, but it might last long enough for the massive Super Tuesday vote to settle the nomination.
         

Both of the last two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, came "from out of nowhere" to capture the nomination and then the White House. In the modern Republican Party it has never happened; insurgent conservative Barry Goldwater won the nomination in 1964 but was defeated by Lyndon Johnson that fall. Yet the 2008 Republican nomination race has already been unlike any other in modern times, and on the eve of the Iowa caucuses Mike Huckabee may have as good a chance at the nomination, and the White House, as any Republican in the field.

Rick Robinson

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Author of the article holds B.A. degree in Economics from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and M.A. degree in English from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California . Mr. Robinson worked as a county-level campaigner in Dukakis (1988) and Clinton (1992) presidential campaigns. He presently works as a journalist and political commentator.

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