NEW YORK — Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has kept himself in the spotlight since his unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid. Two years before voters elect their next president, Huckabee remains politically involved and in constant motion, jetting from his Florida panhandle home to a weekly taping of his talk show on Fox News in New York to corporate speeches and campaign fundraisers across the country.
With the midterm elections looming, Huckabee and his political action committee have endorsed more than 120 candidates in about 30 states.
He’s consistently ranked at or near the top of possible Republican contenders for the White House in 2012. The New York Times reported earlier this month that some in the Obama White House assume Huckabee will lead the Republican pack.
“That’s nice,” Huckabee said. “My gosh, it’s certainly better than saying ‘Nobody would vote for the guy.’”
But, he said, he hasn’t decided whether to run and cautioned that early polls and predictions, more than a year before the first presidential primary, don’t mean much.
“If they did,” he said, “either Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani would be president right now.”
Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, who, like Huckabee, has traversed the political and media landscapes, noted that Huckabee has a lot of supporters in Iowa, where early party caucuses are a key proving ground. He also has strength in South Carolina, Buchanan said, a potential bellwether for other Southern races. In addition Huckabee, a former pastor, has a “tremendous base” of conservative Christian supporters, he said.
“He’s got a good three face cards there.”
A BUSY HUCKABEE
On the 18th floor of the Fox News building in Manhattan, sitting in an office scarcely bigger than a freshman dorm room, Huckabee checks his schedule on his iPad.
A rack holds about a dozen suits, and as many ties hang from a hook on the door. Ten or so bass guitars, cases and stray strings are strewn throughout the cramped room, which has no closet. A small TV on his desk is soundlessly playing Fox News. He has several pictures of himself on the walls, including a prized photo of him posing with country-music icons Willie Nelson and Ray Price.
Typically, he arrives in New York on a Thursday, and spends two days preparing for the taping of his Saturday show. While in Manhattan, Huckabee is put up by the network in a hotel within blocks of Fox News’ Sixth Avenue headquarters.
Usually he leaves the city Saturday night or Sunday morning. In a typical week, he said, he may give speeches in eight or nine states before flying back to Manhattan to tape a new show.
Over the past two weeks, Huckabee has made appearances for Nathan Deal, a Republican candidate for governor in Georgia, and given a paid talk for the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association in Lafayette.
Other appearances leading up to Tuesday’s elections include stops in Alabama, Ohio, Virginia and South Carolina. He has also managed to spend some time at his North Little Rock home - the first night, he said, he had slept there in three weeks.
When he talks for a corporate crowd, Huckabee is managed by the Franklin, Tenn.-based Premiere Speakers Bureau, which represents a number of celebrities, including cable broadcasters Glenn Beck and Anderson Cooper and basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson. The bureau and Huckabee declined to disclose his fees.
Asked where he lives, Huckabee responded: “On a Delta airplane.”
This year, through the end of September, Huckabee’s committee had spread money to dozens of candidates, spending $117,500 on contributions to candidates and political parties. The PAC ended the third quarter of the year with $190,865.25 in the bank.
Huckabee’s fundraising is just a fraction of the financial might demonstrated by Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney.
Sarah PAC, the committee run by Palin, reported $1,387,811.94 cash on hand on Oct. 13. It had given almost twice as much money to candidates as Huckabee has. Romney spread even more cash around, contributing $659,110.20 to candidates and party groups, ending the latest reporting period with lots of dry powder - more than $1.4 million in the bank.
Huckabee said that focusing on dollar amounts blurs his organization’s total impact.
“Sometimes we do give cash money to candidates,” he said, “but the biggest function the PAC plays is not so much a pass-through for cash. It’s really a grass-roots organization. If we target a race, for example, we’ll go in and target phone calls and make thousands of phone calls for that candidate.”
“Trucker” Randy Bishop, a Huckabee supporter who ran unsuccessfully for the state Senate in Michigan this year, says “Huck’s Army” - Huckabee’s national grassroots network of volunteers - will be ready in 2012 if they’re called up to active duty. “The machine in Iowa is even stronger than it was in 2008,” when Huckabee came out on top, Bishop said.
Huckabee also is busy in South Carolina - a pivotal primary state in past years.
Hogan Gidley, his PAC director, is the former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party.
In 2008, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson campaigned heavily there, and many observers believe he drained support from Huckabee, allowing Arizona Sen. John McCain to narrowly win the Republican primary.
“It was a decisive loss for Huckabee,” in the 2008 race, recalls Sid Bedingfield, a journalism professor at the University of South Carolina.
Over the first two quarters of the year, Huckabee donated to 10 South Carolina Republican candidates for federal and state offices. The only other state with more recipients of Huckabee’s largesse was his native Arkansas, where he gave to 16 candidates.
“It’s clear that Huckabee is trying to lay the groundwork here in South Carolina,” Bedingfield said.
Some Republican political pros say that although Huckabee can capitalize on his regular TV exposure and his base of religious conservative supporters, the most crucial topic now is the weak economy.
Unemployment and the government’s response to it has driven the Tea Party movement, and some, like Alex Batty, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm, said there’s no reason to think that momentum will wane before the 2012 election.
“He’s got to talk about jobs,” she said.
Huckabee agreed.
“The driving issues of this election are more economic,” Huckabee said. “I get that.”
He likened the situation in the country to two houses, one with termites, representing social, moral ills and the other lit up with a blazing fire, representing the country’s“economic demise.”
“We’re going to deal with the termites,” he said, “but right now we’ve got to put the fire out.”
There’ll be plenty of other would-be firefighters in the GOP primary.
Batty said she expects at least 10 candidates to make a run, crowding the field and making it harder for anyone to become a clear, early frontrunner.
Palin and Romney benefit from their high visibility races in 2008, when Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, was a leading contender for much of the race and Palin was the Republican vice-presidential nominee.
Huckabee said Palin’s “star power” would be a plus in 2012, should she decide to run, but that “she will have a tough time” because of her high unfavorable ratings.
Romney, he said, will either have to embrace the health-care plan he developed in Massachusetts as governor - which the Obama administration said was similar to this year’s health-care overhaul - or run from it, and risk being viewed as having a shifting core of political beliefs.
Huckabee also must deal with his record as governor of Arkansas.
According to Buchanan, the conservative political commentator, “the governor’s got a real problem with that fellow that perpetrated that atrocity out in Washington [state]. His opponents will use that against him.”
The “fellow” Buchanan referred to is Maurice Clemmons, who killed four police officers in Lakewood, Wash., in November of 2009.
In 2000, when Clemmons was serving time in Arkansas on burglary charges, Huckabee commuted Clemmons’ sentence, making him eligible for parole. The Parole Board, hearing no objections during a public comment period, signed off on Clemmons’ release.
Huckabee said in a statement that he takes full responsibility for commuting Clemmons’ sentence. He said he made the right call, based on the information he had in front of him at the time.
IT’S THE ECONOMY
Steve Lombardo, a political consultant who served as a senior adviser to Mitt Romney in his 2008 campaign, said that for a Republican to have a strong showing in a general election, he must secure the base of conservative Republicans and win over enough independent voters to secure a majority.
Huckabee could be a strong contender, Lombardo argued, because his record on hot-button social issues is consistently conservative.
Lombardo said other Republicans who need to convince voters that they have a consistent anti-abortion position could alienate independent voters who worry more about economic issues.
Politicians like Huckabee “don’t have to spend a lot of time defending their credentials. They can then spend time talking about the economy and jobs and they don’t have to talk about abortion,” he said.
It’s a message John Berry, a technical writer and active member of the Redlands Tea Party Patriots group, based in Redlands, Calif., would like to hear.
Berry, who describes himself as a fiscal “hawk,” traveled to New York in October to watch Huckabee tape his show.
He said Huckabee could “sweep him off his feet” if he concentrated more on the economy.
“The energy, the enthusiasm and the money is just waiting for someone to do the right things,” he said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/31/2010