The Other Man from Hope

...And as he makes his campaign stops, Huckabee takes care to assert his conservatism...

...She's much more ideological...

...What are the odds of that happening again...

...On judges, he says he would appoint judicial conservatives like Antonin Scalia, whom he calls "the gold standard" for judging...

...But the president's chief failure, Huckabee says, is one of rhetoric: "One of the most important roles a president plays is that of communicator in chief," and yet Bush has failed "to communicate very effectively" on not only Iraq but also other issues as well...

...And he underscores that the "first job" of the president "is to protect the American people," which, he emphasizes, means protecting the country against "fanatic jihad-ists" who are waging "a theological war" against us...

...He says the war was only one factor, and the real reason was that "we lost touch with basic issues of governing...

...On energy, he declares that we need "to produce our own energy sources" and quit our dependence on foreign sources...

...At some point he will have to go after those running ahead of him...

...It will be made, if not by me, then by many Republican activists...

...But should Huckabee fail on his own terms at Ames, that wouldn't necessarily constitute a rejection of his message, he says...

...That's low, very low, but still better than the 1 or 2 percent most second-tier candidates are pulling...

...Why, Mike Huckabee...

...At the time, he was only 21...

...The second thing that stands out about Huckabee is that there is, as he puts it, "less of me"—110 pounds less, to be exact...

...His accomplishment also gives him standing to make his case about health care—about the need to prevent health problems later by changing behavior now...

...And on the question of the Supreme Court's overruling Roe, he's emphatically for it...

...On the stump Huckabee talks about the length of the tax code—some 177,000 pages...

...But Immanuel Baptist Church in Pine Bluff asked him to preach one Sunday, and Huckabee, who had been ordained while in college and served as pastor of a small Baptist church in Arkadelphia, agreed...

...Huckabee's chance of breaking through at Ames will depend on whether substantial portions of Iowa's large population of social conservatives, most of whom are frequent churchgoers, turn out for him...

...Republicans underestimate her at their own peril," he says...

...This asset is not lost on his aides, one of whom came up with a bumper sticker declaring, "I Like Mike...

...A classic case, he told me, was Bush's handling of embryonic stem cell research...

...As he told me, "You can't fake losing 110 pounds...

...Iowa, which Huckabee has visited more often than any other state, certainly offers an opportunity for the GOP to come to its senses, in Huckabeean terms, and start showing, well, its liking for Mike...

...Huckabee makes this point everywhere he goes, and this warm sunny day in late July finds him, after Muscatine, in Washington, Ottumwa, and Mt...

...This is a soft approach, and it may not achieve, by August 11 in Ames, the "level of momentum building" necessary to raise the money he needs to stay in the race...

...That he once was a pastor seems to diminish the need Huckabee might feel to discuss, as other candidates have, aspects of his faith or his "faith journey...

...He would be the first ever former pastor of a church to be president...

...But the point is . . . people want . . . vertical leadership, which they expect to lead up and not down...

...At Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, where he finished in two years and three months with a degree in religion, he worked on-air 40 hours each week at a local radio station...

...Pleasant...

...He has moved up a bit in recent polls, and the RealClearPolitics Average (which includes the unannounced Fred Thompson) shows him now in fifth place in Iowa, with 3.8 percent...

...He cites the AP's interpretation of a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll saying that no top-tier candidate—not Rudy Giuliani or John McCain or Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson—did better than "none of the above...

...I got into politics because I'm pro-life"—I asked him whether he's prepared to make the argument that it would be wrong for a pro-life party to nominate a presidential candidate who is not pro-life, such as the current frontrunner, Rudy Giuliani...

...John Lindner of Georgia and Neal Boortz, the Atlanta talk-show host...

...On the No Child Left Behind law, he states his agreement with its general thrust and would make only minor changes...

...One is his apprehension about how voters may react to his being from Hope...

...Losing as much as Huckabee did, indeed turning around his health and life prospects, is a real accomplishment...

...He explains how, growing up in a very blue county, he became a conservative "by conviction" when he was a teenager...

...Imagine how many interests would want to keep the code so long and, for that matter, so complicated, and also how many would want to keep the IRS in business...

...That has weakened his ability to lead, in Hucka-bee's view, and to produce effective government...

...Be that as it may, the AP-Ipsos poll, when compared with an earlier one, does suggest more uncertainty among Republicans regarding who their nominee should be, and Huckabee would take that as a sign of what he says he sees on the campaign trail—increasing dissatisfaction among Republican voters with the top-tier candidates...

...It would be the best chance Republicans have to win...

...Pausing, Huckabee announces, "Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am 'none of the above.'" Laughter fills the spacious room at Green's Tea, which offers a splendid view of the Mississippi...

...We could eliminate the IRS, he adds, since the government no longer would collect taxes...

...But then I realized that the flat tax . . . was a tax on productivity, which is not the way you stimulate entrepreneurial activity...

...Huckabee has written—"every word of it," he told me—From Hope to Higher Ground, one of those books in which a politician tests out an idea, in this case "restoring America's greatness," as the subtitle says...

...The crowds have been good, he says, with positive reaction afterwards...

...There is competition for these voters, especially from Sam Brown-back, who is aggressively seeking the support of pastors...

...In truth, Huckabee may have a better chance of being picked as a running mate than winning the GOP nomination...

...Huckabee says he doesn't have to win at Ames, but he does have to show "a level of momentum building...

...Huckabee has staked himself to an ambitious domestic policy goal, one worthy of a president...

...This is the Republicans' straw poll, which George W. Bush won the last time it was conducted, in 1999...

...In 1980 he returned to Arkansas and started a communications business...

...Huckabee's sign-up sheets—on which you indicate whether you're going to participate in the straw poll—have a place where you can write down your church or church affiliation...

...By that he means "people are confused as to why it is we are Republicans and what it is we are supposed to do to get elected...

...I really believe our country needs leadership that can not only articulate something we believe in," he told me, "but get it done as well...

...It's an inspired choice...

...None of the above" was not an actual option someone could pick, but "don't know" and "not sure" and "none" were, and the percentage of Republicans choosing those options, which the AP story added up and characterized as favoring "none of the above," was the largest...

...He stresses the sanctity of human life and calls for protecting it from the moment of conception...

...The net result of being elected is not to talk about what the right thing is but to do what's right...

...To Republicans who ask whether "we were thrown out [of power] because we were too conservative or not conservative enough," Huckabee says that's the wrong question...

...On the stump he describes the great America that was his growing up in Hope, Arkansas: He was the first male "in my entire family ever to graduate high school," and he attributes his achievements to his parents, who, wanting "something better for me," worked multiple jobs, making "enormous sacrifices...

...As he explains the concept in his speeches, the fair tax would replace all current taxes on productivity with a consumption tax of 23 percent on all goods and services (education being the lone exception...

...Probably the best preparation I ever had to be a governor was to be a pastor of a local congregation," he says...

...The one big idea Huckabee advances on the stump is the fair tax...

...The third thing about Huckabee is that he's a former Baptist minister...

...But he doesn't name them...

...He points to a tendency to prefer "posturing" to governing, and he sees the failure to constrain spending as evidence of a party failing to live up to its own beliefs about governance...

...On Iraq—a subject that generates only one or two questions at each event—Huckabee supports the surge, and opposes any timetable for pulling troops out, and he accuses Democrats of playing politics...

...Huckabee wants his audiences to know that he doesn't have "several different views" on right to life, say, or taxation or same-sex marriage...

...he was sports editor during the week and a disc jockey on the weekend...

...We weren't enough 'up.' We were way too much 'down.'" Here Huckabee is speaking in a vocabulary that assumes the listener is acquainted with what he calls "vertical governing," which is treated in his book and which he actually explains on the trail...

...The results offer an early measure of organizational strength and candidate appeal, and past winners have almost always prevailed in the caucus, held in January...

...My answer is: Give us one more chance...

...It could mean that "we just didn't have the resources" to do much better...

...People are saying, 'I'll be there at Ames, I'm with you, you're the guy I'm going to support...

...Where the debate should have been over whether the government should fund the research, Huck-abee says, it instead became one of whether you supported research and curing disease—the funding question aside...

...We're fighting people who don't care if it takes a thousand years...

...Nothing will engender more support for her than being perceived as a bully of a guy attacking this woman...

...He said he will eventually be ready to challenge Giuliani on those grounds...

...His reputation with the Arkansas press for a thin skin, not apparent in his southeastern Iowa visits, will be reviewed...

...He cites "inattention" to public corruption and "utter incompetence as to . . . the simplest things government should do, such as getting bottles of water to people stranded on bridges on Interstate 10 in the aftermath of a hurricane [Katrina] and a flood...

...Huckabee has also set for himself a major task that would surely test the capability of his rhetorical presidency: passage of the fair tax...

...After six years at Immanuel, he became senior pastor of Beech Street First Baptist in Tex-arkana, a church of 2,500 members...

...It's a concept he defines with reference to his ten-and-a-half years as governor, in which capacity it was, as he said at Green's Tea, "not my luxury to just simply make speeches and tell people what to do...

...Indeed, Huckabee believes, as he proceeds to tell the crowd here at Green's Tea, that there is a "crisis in our Republican party...

...On the campaign trail, he meets it head-on: "There was another guy from Hope, Arkansas, who ran for president," he says...

...To become the greatness president, Huckabee will first have to win the nomination of his own party, and that can't happen, by his own reckoning, unless the GOP comes out of its fog...

...On the war on terrorism more broadly, he says we have to be in it for the long run: "What people don't understand is what we're up against...

...On August 11, as many as 30,000 Iowa Republicans will gather in Ames on the campus of Iowa State University and vote for the person they'd like to see as their party's nominee...

...He makes reference to his years as a Baptist pastor in ways intended to put people at ease, in case they're not...

...And thus to keep him in the race...

...In fact, Huckabee rejects the latter term on the ground, as he told me, that compassion isn't a matter of political ideology but is related to "your spirit and heart...

...He cites the Tenth Amendment as a bulwark against an overweening federal government...

...Senate in 1992...

...His mistakes include not sending in more troops at the outset...

...But right now, before Ames, before he either crashes or takes off, Huckabee can take a moment to ponder a presidential race a year from now in which his party seems likely to face someone he knows perhaps better than any other Republican contender does—Hillary Clinton...

...He cites passage of legislation to fund an overhaul of interstate highways in Arkansas and of a bill ensuring clean air indoors, and enactment of an amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman...

...Huck-abee has identified this as a critical weakness of the Bush presidency and thinks he could do better...

...Huckabee became governor in 1996 when Jim Guy Tucker was forced to resign as a result of his conviction in Whitewater...

...In any case, it would spell an end to a campaign that from the beginning has been a long shot...

...The Other Man from Hope Mike Huckabee, the likable longshot in the Republican presidential race By Terry Eastland Muscatine, Iowa I-^w- ere in this small but engaging river city, I known for its watermelons and sunsets, M Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and now a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, wants the two dozen Iowans seated around him in Green's Tea and Coffee to know that he's "leading" in the polls...

...In any event, Huckabee knows that he can't maintain that approach if he remains a candidate...

...After a year and a half at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, he left to become communications director for a ministry headed up by the evangelist James Robison...

...She's extra disciplined, very focused, extremely intelligent, very different from her husband, who was a true pragmatist...

...He lost that race, but won his next, for lieutenant governor in 1993...

...She said she was going to Ames to vote for him...

...And so, as he told a crowd of 60 assembled in Central Park in downtown Ottumwa, "I want us once again to believe that the greatest generation is not the generation that's already come but the generation that's not been born yet...

...This fact about Huckabee—his lesser being—does seem to make people at least notice him...

...In an interview aboard his rented Winnebago, Huck-abee—who is 51, has been married to Janet for 33 years, and has three grown children—says his strategy is to stay in the race as long as it takes for the party to figure out its "purpose and direction" and realize that the top-tier candidates would disappoint as president and that he is the best choice...

...During his early campaigning in Iowa, he says, people asked him about the fair tax...

...They've been at it for longer than that...

...But I'm appalled when people are so personal in their attacks on her...

...Huckabee knows that he may not do well enough to raise the money for a campaign that so far has reported $1.3 million in contributions—dwarfed by the $35.4 million reported by Giuliani and the $34.5 million by Rom-ney (and that doesn't include Romney's own contributions to himself...

...But Huckabee envisions a scenario in which even fifth place would be okay—"if fifth is not much different from fourth and second is not much different from fifth...

...But I wasn't familiar with it...

...Don't hold that against me, all of you non-Baptists," he told the crowd in Ottumwa...

...Because he stresses his pro-life credentials at every stop—"I didn't become pro-life because of politics...

...Will Americans want it to happen again...

...I had to do things...

...He was asked back, and in a matter of months he was named interim pastor and then senior pastor...

...There was, of course, another man from Hope, Arkansas, who became president of the United States...

...On specific issues, Huckabee says that the immigration bill failed because it didn't "take care of the first test of a real immigration policy, which is having a secure border...

...Huckabee says he read it twice and was persuaded...

...He concedes that "people think of me as a pastor who became a political person...

...That great America, however, is one that Huckabee believes has slipped away...

...they were leaning, more would have named a candidate...

...The poll Huckabee cites doesn't really bear the interpretation that the wire service gave it...

...He was hoping to run for office eventu-ally—"I had been a little political animal as a kid growing up...

...What Huckabee wants is a finish strong enough "for me to go to donors and say there is a reason to contribute to this campaign...

...Mike, of course, would like to be like Ike, who was twice elected president...

...Huckabee is offering what might be called "results conservatism...

...The rhetorical presidency, a subject studied by political scientists, is the basis for many Americans' understanding of the presidency...

...He states his preferences for "less government, not more" and "lower taxes, not higher...

...On health care, he argues that the country needs to shift from an intervention-based system to one based on prevention...

...It's what the president says, and also—though to a lesser extent—what his aides say...

...It would be so simple to administer, he says, that "a seven-year-old running a lemonade stand would be able to figure it out...

...Aides say that Huckabee is gaining support in heavily Republican northwest Iowa and also in places in the northeast...

...He criticizes Roe v. Wade as having "imposed an unconstitutional concept of privacy" upon the country...

...He has been reported as saying he needs to finish at least in fourth place...

...In our interview, I asked Huckabee about the party's confusion...

...It'd be a great race," says this man from Hope...

...Not only do you have rhyme, but the three words echo the slogan of a Republican (Dwight D. Eisenhower, in case you asked) whose nickname was "Ike...

...It's confused as to what happened last year and the shellacking we took at the polls...

...When I asked Huckabee whether he had anyone serving as his religious outreach coordinator—as some other candidates do—he looked at me, puzzled, and then said, "In my case, I am the coordinator...

...Huckabee's results conservatism is not to be confused with President Bush's compassionate conservatism...

...By "America's greatness" Huckabee means a great America, one of hope and optimism, of generational improvement in both material and moral terms...

...The president failed to define the terms of debate, he says...

...And one of the polls used in the RCP Average is Mason-Dixon, whose June survey had Huckabee ahead of John McCain, 7 percent to 6 percent...

...He insists on understanding marriage in traditional terms, as the union of a male and a female...

...He lost the weight five years ago after his doctor described to him what the decade he had left to live would be like if he stayed at 300 pounds...

...It's an inevitable argument...

...With John McCain and Rudy Giuliani having decided not to participate in the straw poll, fourth place seems within reach, since, assuming a first place finish by Mitt Romney, as most political observers do, Huck-abee would be competing for one of three places with Sam Brownback, Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo, and Tommy Thompson...

...This is startling news, since Huckabee has never polled above single digits in any survey...

...As for white evangelical Protestants in particular, who are overwhelmingly Republican, Huckabee doesn't have to "reach out" to them—because, as he sees it, "I am these people.'" Huckabee may not have the right message or he may not be the man for his message...

...There would be a fourth if he'd brought along his bass guitar and his band, Capital Offense, which plays "only songs people readily recognize . . . the hits people grew up with...

...In other words, if the second, third, fourth, and fifth-place finishers are bunched together—and also, Huckabee adds, if, in their bunching, they are not very far behind the man in first...

...I was judged on whether or not the roads got better or worse, whether the schools got better or worse, whether jobs improved or declined, whether wages got better or worse, whether we took better care of our natural resources or didn't, whether taxes went up or down, whether the cost of government got better or worse...

...Huckabee says that while his huge weight loss "is not necessarily a qualification for president," it is "indicative of a person who can set goals and who can actually accomplish them...

...The implication is that some of his competitors do...

...Huckabee told me he became a fair-tax proponent after first being attracted to the flat tax...

...Presumably, if the pollsters had pushed respondents on which way Terry Eastland is publisher of'The Weekly Standard...

...His campaign could soon lie limp as a spent balloon...

...So he bought The Fair Tax Book: Saying Goodbye to the Income Tax and the IRS by Rep...

...He filled that pulpit for six years, too, leaving Beech Street to finally enter politics, as the Republican candidate for the U.S...

...At age 14 he took a job with a 1,000-watt radio station in Hope...

...A few hundred more years won't matter...

...People ask me all the time: Do you really believe that another unknown, obscure governor born in Hope, Arkansas, can become president of the United States...

...But Huckabee proceeds to explain...

...Huckabee was reelected governor in 1998, winning the support of 48 percent of black voters, according to CNN's exit polls...

...I know deep down that I meet the criteria for what I think the Republican base is looking for in a candidate and frankly what the American people are looking for in a president...

...He has been a frequent guest on national talk shows, winning generally high marks for his appearances...

...In fact, he got into "communications" early in life and worked in a variety of speaking capacities before he ever ran for public office...

...And who would compete against her without bullying her or—the other danger he sees—condescending to her...

...My scale quit at 280," he quips...

...Huckabee says he "got things done" as governor, working with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, because he went to the people of his state "to communicate why those things were important...

...The conservative part is fundamental because it identifies where governing, for him, must be grounded, in terms of philosophy and ideas...

...In Washington, during the Q&A at the Pizza Ranch (though pizza is not a Huckabee-approved food), one woman brought up the fact that she'd especially wanted to be at the event because, battling her own weight problem, she had just read Digging Your Grave...

...The crowd warms to the Arkansan, and you can see why Huckabee gets high marks for "likability...

...A lady when I first started running for office asked me, 'Are you one of those narrow-minded Baptist ministers who think only Baptists go to heaven?' I said, 'No ma'am, actually I'm more narrow than that because I don't think all the Baptists are going to make it...

...And"—an applause line—"April 15 would be just another spring day in America...

...Huckabee is, as you'd expect him to be, optimistic about his prospects...

...Huckabee sees himself as excelling as a communicator...

...But the truth is that I was a person in communications who backed into the pastorate who then went into politics...

...He would have turned out better if he'd stayed there longer," a line that honors Hope at Bill Clinton's expense, something Republican crowds like...

...Huckabee took the weight off in nine months, chronicling his story and urging others with a tendency toward amplitude to do as he did in Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork, a title spiced with characteristic humor...

...It's what I like to call 'vertical governing.' Because, quite frankly, the average American isn't that concerned about whether you are left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, even though I am unapolo-getically . . . to the right of center, probably to the right of most people in this room...

...Huckabee recognizes there may be a sort of been-there, done-that feeling out there...

...Huckabee doesn't shy from criticizing President Bush, especially his handling of Iraq...

...It's the presidency that takes place in public—in speeches and press conferences, television interviews, and the like...

...Here in southeastern Iowa, three things about Huckabee stand out during my time with him...

...On the other hand, if Hucka-bee moves up at Ames and, come January, he's in the top tier, he'll be drawing scrutiny—of his record as governor (including on taxes and size of government, where there is criticism from conservatives), his time as a pastor, his jobs after seminary, his boyhood in Hope...