Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, this campaign season’s “come from behind” contender, is now moving swiftly to try to broaden his political support and get enough wins to show he’s more than a creature of media hype, rising poll numbers or limited regional appeal.
The first big tipoff was when he hired Ed Rollins, as veteran Republican consult, favorite TV talking head, and considered the mastermind behind Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide re-election. Rollins made it clear to reporters that he had looked at the field, knew many of the candidates and the only one who excited him in terms of ability to communicate and vision was Huckabee.
And now the work for Huckabee truly begins. Slate notes:
Mike Huckabee is spending the weekend in New Hampshire to try to reach Granite State voters who have bucked the trends and not fully embraced the Southern Baptist minister. New Hampshire is the only early primary state where Huckabee’s poll numbers haven’t risen dramatically in the past few months. As a result, he’s making his second swing through the state this month and bringing Chuck Norris along with him. Huckabee spent three days in New Hampshire in November. By the end of the weekend, he will have already spent six days there in December.
Barack Obama brought Oprah along with him in the face of increasingly shrill attacks by Hillary Clinton’s camp. Now Huckabee brings Karate-king Norris with him.
Is this a sign of a bare-knuckles Republican campaign that is to follow?
Politicos (read that former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, actor Fred Thompson and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg) often ponder for real or ponder for show before they seize on a historical political delicacy plopped on their plate by history (and fate?). And by waiting, the delicacy gets cold and inedible.
It seems like Huckabee doesn’t want to make the same mistake and he’s moving swiftly. The Chicago Tribune:
With his 14th visit to New Hampshire this weekend, Huckabee, a Baptist preacher and former Arkansas governor, is trying to build on his inordinate success in Iowa and pick up momentum against a more competitive Republican field. To remain in contention for the GOP presidential nomination, Huckabee needs to show that he can broaden his appeal not just to New Hampshire but nationally as well.
He’s also trying to expand his campaign, which is suddenly under pressure from all the attention, to a more national operation. Friday, Huckabee announced that veteran Republican strategist Ed Rollins would take over as national chairman of his campaign in an attempt to do just that.
New Hampshire poses a special challenge for Huckabee, who is polling in the single digits in the state, trailing former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
“It’s going to be very, very difficult for him to get over the hump in a state like New Hampshire that has essentially no socially conservative voters to speak of,” said Andrew Smith, a University of New Hampshire political scientist and pollster.
Iowa’s strong contingent of Christian conservatives seems drawn to Huckabee’s background as a folksy preacher. But if Huckabee can sell himself in this first-in-the-nation primary state, it is likely to be through sheer force of personality as a wisecracking candidate who feels voters’ pain and is willing to say so in often-colorful terms.
That’s part of the reason why Rollins went with Huckabee: politics in 21st century American isn’t just about position papers, organization or reading a resume of experience to voters. More and more, in culture heavily-influenced by talk radio, cable talk shows and, increasingly, weblogs, the skill with which a message is delivered and the personality of the politician IS factored into consideration by voters. And personality and message delivery could actually, in some cases, trump content.
Meanwhile, in another sign of how Huckabee is separating himself from the GOP pack, the Arkansas Governor today parted company with the Bush administration on foreign policy in an article in Foreign Affairs:
Mike Huckabee, who has joked about his lack of foreign policy experience, is criticizing the Bush administration’s efforts, denouncing a go-it-alone “arrogant bunker mentality” and questioning decisions on Iraq.
Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor now running for the Republican presidential nomination, lays out a policy plan that is long on optimism but short on details in the January-February issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, which is published by the Council on Foreign Relations. A copy of his article was released Friday.
“American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out,” Huckabee said. “The Bush administration’s arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad. My administration will recognize that the United States’ main fight today does not pit us against the world but pits the world against the terrorists.”
In one specific criticism, Huckabee said Bush did not send enough troops to invade Iraq. And he accused the president of marginalizing Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, who said at the outset of the war that it might take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to control Iraq after the invasion. “I would have met with Shinseki privately and carefully weighed his advice,” Huckabee said.
Do all of these moves this mean that Huckabee is a shoo-in and will be the nominee? Hardly.
He is now being painstakingly-scrutinized by the news media for possible past ethical lapses. And some conservative Republicans are inching towards declaring that their party has created a political Frankenstein’s monster by now allowing the Religious Right to effectively use Christian faith to determine a candidacy (by that standard, Mormon Mitt Romney does not have a chance).
Wall Street Journal columnist and former Ronald Reagan writer Peggy Noonan seems stunned by a development that a head of lettuce on a shelf at Stop-and-Shop supermarket in New Haven, CT could have seen coming:
The Republican race looks — at the moment — to be determined primarily by one thing, the question of religious faith. In my lifetime faith has been a significant issue in presidential politics, but not the sole determinative one. Is that changing? If it is, it is not progress.
Mike Huckabee is in the lead due, it appears, to voter approval of the depth and sincerity of his religious beliefs as lived out in his ministry as an ordained Southern Baptist. He flashes “Christian leader” over his picture in commercials; he asserts his faith is “mainstream”; his surrogates speak of Mormonism as “strange” and “definitely a factor.” Mr. Huckabee said this summer that a candidate’s faith is “subject to question,” “part of the game.”
He tells the New York Times that he doesn’t know a lot about Mitt Romney’s faith, but isn’t it the one in which Jesus and the devil are brothers? This made me miss the old days of Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man,” in which a candidate started a whispering campaign that his opponent’s wife was a thespian.
Noonan’s piece, which needs to be read in full, also says this:
Christian conservatives have been rising, most recently, for 30 years in national politics, since they helped elect Jimmy Carter. They care about the religious faith of their leaders, and their interest is legitimate. Faith is a shaping force. Lincoln got grilled on it. But there is a sense in Iowa now that faith has been heightened as a determining factor in how to vote, that such things as executive ability, professional history, temperament, character, political philosophy and professed stands are secondary, tertiary.
But they are not, and cannot be. They are central. Things seem to be getting out of kilter, with the emphasis shifting too far.
However, acknowledging the importance of faith and kow-towing to religious interests to the exclusion of viewing the American polity to an entity in which it serves everyone if the point is to aggregate interests — as opposed to aggravate opposing interests — is different from the trend within the GOP in recent years. The Terri Schiavo fiasco would never have occurred under Ronald Reagan’s GOP …or even the first George Bush’s GOP.
So now there seem to be several issues at play in the Huckabee political saga:
#1 Whether he can show he is catching on like wildfire or is a political flash in the pan. Primaries are notorious for the big winner who eventually fizzles.
#2 Whether some of his past comments that may not reflect his present beliefs (or DO but he has to soften them) chase some Republicans away. Will conservatives who balk jump on the bandwagon anyway, if he shows he’s winning and his poll numbers go up? The whole history of the Bush administration and the GOP shows that many Republicans are willing to shove their copies of Barry Goldwater’s Conscience Of A Conservative under the rug and read poll numbers and adopt Rush and Sean’s rationalizations instead.
#3 Huckabee is a rising candidate which means the press hasn’t really gotten to him yet. He’s in the Candidate Rising stage of reportage. The next would be Candidate Stumbles, if he does, then Candidate Fizzles, if he does. And then Candidate Stages Comeback — if he does.
HERE’S A CROSS-SECTION OF OPINION ON WEBLOGS (there is much more on the web than this, but this is a taste):
—Right Voices looks at an article Huckabee wrote in Foreign Affairs and declares:
The man is not smart enough to run a campaign, let alone the country. This is pandering and I’m not buying it. From the moment he started rising in the polls, I’ve been uneasy, but this article made my decision..
–John Cole has a roundup. He writes:
It really is pretty awesome watching the Republican panic about Mike Huckabee set in, especially as he moves ahead in the polls in several states….Enjoy your new GOP, folks. And here is something else to think about- are the evangelicals going to support Romney or Giuliani if you do manage to trash Huckabee enough to secure the nomination for them? Will the eye for an eye crowd learn to forgive and forget? Have fun!
—Riehl World View calls Huckabee “A Clinton in Reagan’s Clothing.”
If the Republicans choose to follow that path, they’re well on their way to Huckacide.
Huckabee moves his lips and Jimmy Carter comes out of his mouth…Mark my words: there will be no President Huckabee.
Someone also needs to implore Huckabee’s Evangelical supporters in Iowa and elsewhere to seriously reconsider what they seem on the verge of doing — electing a generally left-of-center nominee simply because he agrees with them on abortion, guns and a few other social issues. As someone who considers himself an Evangelical, I can assure you that I support the Evangelical position of the aforementioned issues. Other candidates running in the primary support the Evangelical position and have the added benefit of holding strong, right-of-center positions on the most important issue of our time — national security. In my case, Mitt Romney is the ideal candidate because his conservatism reaches into the realm of social, economic and foreign policy issues. Huckabee only passes one-third of this important three-pronged test.
I fear that a Huckabee nomination would ultimately dilute the Republican position on national security issues and thereby erode the biggest and most important distinction between the parties. This will dispirit the Republican ranks and dampen turnout in the general election.
Rollins has the skills to move Huckabee’s campaign beyond Iowa and New Hampshire which he desperately needs. Huckabee is going up against better known, and better financed candidates and he needs a man like Rollins to help.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.