Campaigns and Elections' Politics - January 2008 - (Page 30)

Pick an issue—any issue— being debated in the United States of America as we approach the 2008 elections, and Mike Huckabee can ﬁnd a way to tell you that it won’t matter until we collectively slim down. Education? “Kids can’t learn,” he told Charlie Rose in November, “because they’re sick.” The economy? Obesity “will bankrupt this country,” he said in the same interview. The War on Terror? “National security,” he told me in November, “isn’t going to mean much if we have a generation of kids so physically incapacitated they can’t go to war.” As campaign strategy, weight maintenance talking points are weirdly effective. Issues like global terrorism, failing public schools and the fragile economy are diffuse, impersonal, seemingly uncontrollable. In an election cycle where all of these issues ﬁgure prominently among Republican primary voters, Huckabee intimates that Americans can help allay their greatest anxieties by choosing salad over bacon. In the able hands of a former pastor, a story about overcoming obesity becomes one of shame, sacriﬁce and redemption. Like everything else with Mike Huckabee, this is personal. Back in 2003, during a meeting of his cabinet in the Arkansas State Capitol, then-Gov. Huckabee famously began the session by smashing his prodigious frame though an antique chair. A lesser fat man would have simply tried to forget the incident. Huckabee dropped 110 pounds and wrote a diet book recounting the experience in excruciating detail. “If I can do it, anybody can!” he writes in “Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork.” There’s a reason Mike Huckabee is the only candidate with a book in the self-help section. Throughout his life, conservatives have deemed him too liberal and liberals have deemed him too conservative, but Huckabee hews to no political philosophy so closely as he hews to the redemptive, empowering philosophies of Tony Robbins, Oprah Winfrey and any particular edition of “Chicken Soup for the Soul.” Mike Huckabee is trying to turn his own candidacy into yet another inspiring, media-ready story about an affable David slaying an establishment Goliath. Along the way, he is struggling to convince his party that a preacher who wants to institute a national smoking ban, jack up funding for public school music programs and abolish the IRS is the one Republican who can lead a beleaguered party to victory. It’s a crazy idea, but not nearly as crazy as it was a few months back. The last time ofﬁcial fundraising numbers were released, on Sept. 30, Huckabee was trailing Iowa Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney by tens of millions of dollars. Huckabee seemed irretrievably stuck in the vicious circle of a third-tier candidacy: He couldn’t raise money because he wasn’t seen as viable, and he wasn’t seen as viable because he couldn’t raise money. But Huckabee has reached voters anyway, capitalizing on free publicity and happily embracing the 24-hour bounty of Fox News. In a single day in October, Huckabee was a guest on The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity & Colmes, and Your World with Neil Cavuto. The same day, he appeared on Fox Business Channel—twice. Huckabee’s very ﬁrst campaign commercial, an endorsement by Chuck Norris, was savvy and odd enough to warrant constant replay on the major news channels the day it was released, and garner continued buzz in the blogosphere thereafter. By late November Huckabee, having released the single campaign ad he could afford at the time, was polling among Iowa voters just a few points behind Romney and well ahead of the national frontrunner, Rudy Giuliani. By press time, he had surged to a double-digit lead over Romney in several Iowa polls. Huckabee’s numbers have risen in other states, too, and may continue to strengthen, given the enthusiasm of his supporters. In an ABC News/Washington Post survey taken in mid-November, 50 percent of Huckabee’s supporters said they were “very enthusiastic,” as opposed to just 28 percent of Romney supporters. Campaign watchers are beginning to ask whether, in a compressed campaign cycle, Huckabee has a chance of converting potential January wins in Iowa and perhaps South Carolina into substantial national support. Not a prayer, says Bill McIntyre, executive vice president at Grassroots Enterprise, a high-tech Democratic communications ﬁrm. “He can become the darling of the media with a couple of wins, but it’s very difﬁcult to convert that attention and spotlight into real, practical soldiers on the ground. Huckabee is really looking more and more like the best man at a wedding. Everybody likes him, but nobody is going to go down the aisle with him.” McIntyre argues that Huckabee’s campaign simply won’t have the time to take the funding and media boosts he is likely to get after Iowa and convert them into real wins elsewhere, given the blitzkrieg primary schedule. But not everyone agrees. Republican political consultant Wayne Johnson thinks the schedule is Huckabee’s greatest hope. In the old cycle, Huckabee would be forced to sustain momentum between wins, space that would normally be ﬁlled with paid media ads he doesn’t have the money for. He didn’t have to worry about that in 2007, and he just might ride the wave of earned media—the free kind—from win to win. “You come out of a victory and a couple days later you’re right back in another election,” says Johnson. “Earned media is going to be much more important in that string of primaries. Somebody could come from nowhere and bootstrap that into a victory.” Huckabee, says Johnson, “is the kind of candidate who can jump 20 points overnight.” No kidding. Observers marveling at Huckabee’s scrappy rise in the polls haven’t been paying attention; this is classic Huckabee, emerging out of nowhere and getting by on pure charm. “Critics called me the ‘accidental governor,’” he is fond of saying, “until I asked them whose accident had caused me to be governor.” As the son of a gas company clerk 30 Politics January 2008 Politics Magazine

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Campaigns and Elections' Politics - January 2008

Campaigns and Elections' Politics - January 2008 Contents GOP Retirement Woes Getting Girls to Think Politics Movers & Shakers: Karen Hanretty If I Had It To Do Over: Mike McCurry Eve Fairbanks Column Cover Story: Mike Huckabee Hopping the Pond GOP: The Next Generation 5 “Truths” About Women Voters Reds & Blues: States in the Spotlight High Road/Campaign Doc Bookshelf Dick Morris Column John Zogby Column Techbytes Playbook Coming & Going: Who's Where Campaign Sign-ups Marketplace Quips & Slips

Campaigns and Elections' Politics - January 2008

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