In September of 2007, Bill Clinton, appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” said that among the Republican candidates for president, there was only one “dark horse that’s got any kind of chance” against his then-senator wife Hillary Clinton.
Of the same “dark horse,” Clinton adviser James Carville said, “He likes people, he knows how to relate to people. He can talk the talk. I’m impressed with this guy’s political skills.”
“This guy” was Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor well-known to the Clintons but a little-known former Baptist minister to everyone else. He decided he wasn’t scared of John McCain or Mitt Romney, the party’s two frontrunners. He wanted to run for President anyway.
And his performance that year is likely a big reason why Huckabee thinks he may have a shot at the nomination this go round.
In 2008, he won the Iowa caucuses and on Super Tuesday won an additional six states. He finished second in the South Carolina primary and third in the New Hampshire and Michigan primaries.
He earned an impressive following among young, tech-savvy voters, who called themselves “Huck’s Army,” as well as the endorsement of 50 African-American leaders. He was also endorsed, incidentally, by a little-known Florida House speaker named Marco Rubio.
In the end, he couldn’t compete with McCain and Romney’s money. He got his own talk show at Fox News and sat out the 2012 campaign.
But he undoubtedly took notes, watching as two of the last three guys standing in the Republican primary — Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich — were social conservatives. And once they dropped out, leaving Romney with the nomination, you could argue that some of the conservative base, most notably evangelicals, left with them.
So now, with another crowded GOP field, why wouldn’t Mike Huckabee see a pathway to the nomination?
Here’s what he’s got going for him this time around: Of all the GOP candidates who have jumped in, most of whom live South of the Mason-Dixon line, he’s the only one who actually sounds like it. Next to Kentucky’s Rand Paul, Texas’ Ted Cruz and Florida’s Marco Rubio, he’s the guy your fishing buddies — folks he calls “bubbas” — get the most.
And he has policy appeal not because he’s so far right, but because he has a talent for finding economically populist themes that appeal to both sides. As Time’s Michael Scherer put it in 2007, “At some of these events, if you close your eyes, you would think a Democrat was speaking — Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton turned Southern Baptist.”
Another major asset that can’t be overlooked? He’ll have to forgive me the profanity, but he’s so damn likeable.
As the New York Times put it in 2007, he “plays well with others.” An aide to one of his opponents that year said, “If the candidates held a greenroom Mr. Congeniality contest, Huckabee would win in a walk.”
Also in the Times, a Frank Rich column called Huckabee the Republicans’ Obama for attempting to transcend the bitter back-and-forth of American politics.
“Both men,” Rich wrote, “possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.”
Of course, the hyper-partisanship didn’t end under Obama. It’s worsened. Against this backdrop, Huckabee’s happy warrior may play far better with voters than some of the more churlish GOP candidates who seethe openly during interviews and bristle — instead of chuckle — when scrutinized.
I know Mike Huckabee. And even though we’re both conservative, he and I disagree on a number of issues, not the least of which is faith. He has it in spades, and I’m a non-believer. Nonetheless, we’ve always managed to discuss our differences respectfully. And believe it or not, he wrote the forward to my last book, “Losing Our Religion.”
Huckabee’s positions won’t win everyone over, that’s certain. But if voters are truly ready for a “new tone,” as they perennially say they are, they’d be hard pressed to find a more promising candidate.
Contact Cupp at www.thesecupp.com.
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