Can Mike Huckabee Out-Charm The GOP Big Three

From salon.com:

In a race dominated by Giuliani, McCain and Romney, the folksy Arkansas Republican is a long shot. But he’s the one Christian conservative running who might not scare independents.

By Michael Scherer

March 5, 2007 | WAUKEE, Iowa — When he woke up this morning, Mike Evans knew basically nothing about former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. But now he sits in a booth at Philly’s Finest, a pizza joint squeezed between a tanning salon and a tax shop in an Iowa mini-mall, waiting for the long-shot 2008 Republican presidential candidate to arrive. He has brought along his five home-schooled children, all younger than 14, who are digging into the free pizza and soda pop. In his hand, he holds Huckabee’s Wikipedia entry, printed out just hours earlier. “I Googled him,” he says.

In the traveling vaudeville circuit known as the campaign trail, Iowans like Evans are a prize of near-incalculable value, early voters worthy of countless hours of campaign time and millions of dollars in advertising. In exchange for the privilege, Evans, who is the pastor of the nearby Crossroad Evangelical Free Church, takes his responsibility seriously. Though the caucuses are still a year away, he has already been learning about Massachusetts’ Mitt Romney, the other former governor in the race, who has visited the suburbs of Des Moines four or five times. “I have respect for him as a person,” Evans says of Romney, a practicing Mormon. “But I have problems with him theologically.”

Huckabee, on the other hand, is cut from Evans’ cloth. Before becoming governor in 1996, he served for 12 years as a small-town Baptist pastor. He is unassailably antiabortion, anti-gay marriage and sympathetic to creationism. He pushed for a law in Arkansas that allows for covenant marriage, in which spouses sign a contract agreeing not to divorce unless there is abuse, a felony conviction or adultery, an agreement Huckabee calls “a positive pre-nup.” As governor he declared countless statewide “days of prayer” and has written several books that explain the importance of God in daily life.

But as Huckabee gets warmed up with his stump speech, Evans seems to notice something about the candidate beyond his policy positions, and he pulls out his day planner and begins to take notes. “Optimistic,” he writes below Huckabee’s name. “Positive.” Far from the fire and brimstone of other conservative Christians, Huckabee speaks warmly of Democrats and even mentions the leadership of John F. Kennedy, who wanted to put a man on the moon. The former governor boasts of increasing spending on children’s healthcare and education in Arkansas. He mentions the need for renewable fuels and music programs in schools. “I come from a state where 86 percent of the elected officials are Democrats,” Huckabee says. “I didn’t try to be a Republican governor.”After Huckabee is finished, Evans explains his impressions, which have nothing to do with the candidate’s stand on cultural issues. “It’s nice to see a little humility in a politician once in a while,” he says. “Just to say that Democrats might not be completely out to lunch — I’ve always believed that.”

In an instant, Evans had captured the Huckabee quality that poses the clearest threat to partisan Democrats. He is the only Republican currently running for president with solid-gold Christian-right credentials as well as the potential to appeal to crossover independent voters, who abandoned the Republican Party in 2006. When you listen to his stump speech, you hear a Republican who calls himself an “authentic conservative,” but believes in the power of government to help the poor and disenfranchised. You hear a leader who is eager to tell everyone that President Bush’s blunders in New Orleans “made my blood boil.” You hear a politician who says he wants to help people, a sort of Dr. Phil-meets-Ned Flanders for the political arena, someone who just might be able to talk, listen and care his way into the Oval Office.

For the other second-tier Republican candidates, the hard road Huckabee faces will lead to a near-certain dead end. But no one is counting out Huckabee just yet. It doesn’t matter that he is barely a blip on the national polls, or that he has just a fraction of the money, endorsements and organization of the relative front-runners, Romney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain. What matters is that Huckabee appears to have that special something — the charismatic ability to communicate with the common man, which hundreds of millions of dollars never bought Bob Dole, Al Gore or John Kerry. “Huckabee is as close to Bill Clinton as I have seen for a Republican since Ronald Reagan left public life,” says Richard Land, who heads the public policy arm of the nonpartisan Southern Baptist Convention, which represents 42,000 churches. “When he speaks, he not only knows the words and music, he knows the harmony and the melody.”

It is an act that can impress both ends of the political spectrum. In a rousing address Friday to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Huckabee took the group’s hard line on taxes and abortion, but he also struck a strong populist tone. “Folks, I stand here today knowing full well that I am probably not the first choice to be president on Wall Street. I am probably not the first choice among the people on K Street,” he told the crowd. “I just want to be the first choice among the people who live on Main Street, out there in the heartland of America, who shop at Wal-Mart, who go to church, who hunt, who fish, who drive pickup trucks and listen to country music and follow NASCAR, the kind of people who are tired of politicians telling them what they want to hear rather than what the politician truly believes.”

During a recent appearance on “The Daily Show,” Huckabee wowed even the liberal gatekeeper Jon Stewart with his graceful call for throwing away partisanship. “I couldn’t have put that better if it had come out of my own mouth,” Stewart told Huckabee, a soft-faced man, with a pointed chin, dimpled cheeks and thinning hair. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the dean of liberal bloggers at DailyKos, describes Huckabee as the strongest potential Republican candidate, the sort of contender that makes him lose sleep. “The guy is a scary good politician,” Moulitsas wrote, “and the more Republican voters around the country see him, the more support he’ll get.”

Not all Republicans will sign on, of course. For years, Huckabee has been dogged by conservatives for repeatedly raising taxes in Arkansas. “It’s clear that he is not a limited government conservative,” says Pat Toomey, the president of the Club for Growth, a free-market political action committee. Likewise, his tenure as governor has also not been without stumble. His closet of political baggage even includes supporting the parole of a convicted rapist who later murdered a woman in Missouri. But it is also easy to see that a successful Huckabee campaign could transform the polarized, red-blue state of political discourse in America. Consider, for example, his stock answer when he is asked about his religious beliefs.

“If I really know what it means to follow Jesus, it means no kid goes hungry tonight,” he said, at one stop in Iowa. “It means no wife gets the daylights beat out of her by some alcoholic abusive husband. It means no kid lives in a neighborhood where he is scared to death of some child predator that is going to pick him up and carry him off. It means not one single elderly person has to make the choice between food or medicine.” Unlike former Sen. Rick Santorum or Sen. Sam Brownback, Huckabee does not spend time pounding the pulpit over baby murder and sodomy. He’s a self-styled “compassionate conservative,” a poll-tested concept that worked once before. But while President Bush discarded the slogan like a prom queen’s sash, Huckabee wants to convince America that he is the real deal.