Huckabee: “Rank-and-file evangelicals supported me strongly, but a lot of the leadership did not.”
Mike Huckabee has shared some thoughts on his campaign with the Washington Times. As a source of points for discussion the article is very . . . rich.
First, Huck clearly thinks he was done in by evangelical leaders who did not support him because they are jealous for their influence:
“Rank-and-file evangelicals supported me strongly, but a lot of the leadership did not,” the former Arkansas governor says. “Let’s face it, if you’re not going to be king, the next best thing is to be the kingmaker. And if the person gets there without you, you become less relevant.”
I think he’s wrong about his Evangelical support. If memory serves me, in most, if not all, primary states Huckabee got a large chunk of the Evangelical vote, but I am not sure he ever got a majority of it, at least when Romney was still in the race. [Note: See the comment to this post by Texan, who has a breakdown of the Evangelical vote.]
But beyond that, I simply adore Huck’s narcissicm: He thinks the real reason “the leadership” did not support him was their own personal selfish motives. Golly, Mike, could it be that they simply did not think you were the best candidate? Gary Bauer, who has always backed McCain, said it best:
Mr. Huckabee “ran an honorable campaign, but in spite of his successes I saw no evidence that he could bring together the three main parts of the Reagan electoral constituency — defense, economic and social conservatives.
“If he asked my advice, it would be to try to do that in the months and years ahead,” he said.
In other words, get to the right place on the issues! What a concept that must be for Huck, who clearly thought Evangelicals should support him just because he is . . . an Evangelical. Can you say, “identity politics?”
As for the idea that those nasty, self-absorbed Evangelical leaders withheld support from Huck in order to preserve their own influence and “king-maker” status . . . I am going to let John weigh in on that. We have said here that what Huck himself really wants is to be a king-maker. The psychological concept of “projection” comes to mind.
The article offers an interesting breakdown of where the Evangelical support went:
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson backed Rudolph W. Giuliani; American Value President and former presidential hopeful Gary Bauer endorsed Sen. John McCain; and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins remained neutral, even as Mr. Huckabee was wowing their supporters and winning the values voter straw polls they organized.
No mention of Jay Sekulow, Mark DeMoss, and Bob Jones III, all of whom supported Romney.
But forget all that. This may be my favorite ‘graph in the article:
Mr. Huckabee says . . . the press undermined his prospects by too often mentioning he was a Baptist minister before he was an elected official.
“The qualification for me being president is not that I was a pastor 20 years ago [but] that I effectively governed a state, running a microcosm of the federal government,” Mr. Huckabee said in an interview with The Washington Times. [Emphasis added.]
Oh, where to begin? Where to begin?
Did Huck not run ads touting himself as a “Christian leader” in Iowa, or is my memory playing tricks on me? No, I think he really did that.
Did he not use religious imagery in his speeches repeatedly? Ad nauseum? Yes, I think he did that.
And wasn’t there another candidate in the race, Mitt Romney, also a former governor, whose religion was mentioned in almost every news article about him — even though Romney never brought it up himself? Yes, I think there was.
Most people who are paying attention noticed these things. But when your name is Mike Huckabee and you have a “poor me” whiner complex, I guess that’s how you see the world.
John Chimes In: I am under the weather, so this will be brief. I will address only that that Lowell has asked me to, though this piece is indeed a “target rich environment.” Most evangelical leaders are pretty smart cookies politically. What they want is to be effective. That means they back the best candidate, not the one most like them. In our opinion, and the opinion of many of them that I have heard from privately, that best candidate was Mitt Romney. But, those same leaders did not go for Mitt either, largely – there are the exceptions Lowell notes, but largely, evangelical leadership was on the sidelines in this one. The key question is why.
There was with Romney an unease based on faith. Most leaders I know knew of that unease, but also knew he was the best candidate and that unease could be overcome. But then enter Mike Huckabee and his faith appeals. And even though his ads, what few there were, got more secular outside Iowa, his network was almost purely church-based — everywhere. That gave that unease a place to land. So rather than have to work to overcome it, people experiencing that unease simply went Huck’s way. Some would have gone to Romney, and many I suspect would have simply sat this one out.
What this did was put Evangelical leadership between a rock and a hard place. Their constituents largely had focused on Huckabee and their unease with Romney’s faith was growing into opposition given that Huck was providing them cover. This left the leadership with a choice: Risk crossing their constituencies and losing their leadership capabilities; go for a candidate they could not back on the issues, as the article cites – and who they thought was a loser; or sit on the sidelines. Of course, they chose the latter. The net effect, however, is that Evangelicals have no voice in this election. At least they kept their power bases intact to fight another day.
One final quick comment: Huck is attempting here to shape history contrary to reality. His denial of the very issues he shaped his campaign with, in order to make that campaign look more acceptable, is deplorable. It begins to call into serious question not just his politics, but his character — and I really hate to say that about a fellow Evangelical.
Posted in Electability, Political Strategy, Religious Bigotry | 6 Comments » | 
Print this post
| 
Email This Post
CarlH on 26 Mar 2008 at 1:43 pm #
Is there something in the water in Hope, Arkansas, or do they teach it in the schools there? And is it given away as part of the dowery at marriage?
Dissembling and attempting re-write history by quite disparate individuals, whose reaches clearly exceed their grasps but may be dwarfed by their ego-centrism.
coltakashi on 26 Mar 2008 at 2:08 pm #
What bothered me from the beginning of Huckabee’s effort to gather votes to him as the “Christian leader” was that it seemed inconsistent with Christ’s criticism of those who sound a trumpet as they give alms and pray on street corners to be seen of men. He called them “hypocrites”.
Even the Savior, who had the absolute right to publicize his works (He is God, after all) refrained from a publicity campaign, from the start of his formal ministry (when he refused Satan’s temptation to jump off the pinnacle of the Temple to gain attention) through his injunction to people healed to not brag about it. Even when he made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem in fulfillment of prophecy, he refrained from, for example, using Lazarus as a visual aid to whip up more sentiment and support.
Now, I can understand how being a minister in the traditional “low-church” Protestant environment of basically being a free lancer who has to be invited by individual congregations, who is not guaranteed a job by his denomination, requires a person to sell himself to potential congregants. The focus every Sunday is on the sermon he (or she) offers, as the focal point of the worship service. People develop a personal loyalty to their minister (as Barack Obama has pointed out). Maintaining humility in an environment where you are the star every week, where people tell you how much your work means to them, can be a real challenge. We have certainly seen examples of highly popular ministers who allowed popularity and the associated wealth and power to take them out of the path of Christian behavior.
The parallels to politicians are absolutely clear. Elections, from picking the King of the Prom to the President of the US, are popularity contests. Mike Huckabee basically used arguments that were appropriate in the context of seeking selection as pastor of a congregation in the different context of running for President of a religiously diverse people. And he got votes that way from people who would be glad to have him as their pastor. But by targeting his campaign in that way, he specifically was not persuading most of the people to whom his pastoral qualifications were unpersuasive. His campaign started out to sift out the “wheat” of his religious supporters and cast away as “chaff” the rest of the Republican Party supporters.
It was inherently divisive, and therefore inherently weakening for the Party. As his Evangelical constituency promoted his campaign as an opportunity for them to dominate the Party, they were abandoning the unity and community within the Party across religious lines (especially with Catholics) and making the Party weaker. After all, what reason was there for a Catholic Republican or a Mormon Republican to support Huckabee?
If Huckabee was being rational in his actions, he knew he could not win the nomination that way, nor the presidency. What he COULD win would be a public position as a widely known leader for Evangelical Christianity, to supplant the Old Guard of people like Dobson who are going to pass away within a few years. He can form a non-profit organization and a “separate” political organization and use his notoriety and his popular support across the Bible Belt to accumulate more power, and set himself up as the new kingmaker and power broker, to whom other candidates and eventually elected officials will have to bow in order to ensure support from his constituency.
After all, that is the kind of power that Jesse Jackson enhanced with his own presidential bid. It would take someone fairly bold and self-confident not to take the chance that Huckabee can turn off support from a large part of his voter supporters. Huckabee may want to see himself taking on the role of religious adviser to presidents that Billy Graham will relinquish with his death. He may want to be the “go-to guy” for media comments and sound bites on all things religious and political. He could start his own satellite TV network or take over an existing one (his other area of non-government experience). You don’t have to get involved in the difficult and often unresolvable problems of real people in a congregation. It’s all upside and no down. And no one wants to assassinate you.
K.G. on 26 Mar 2008 at 6:22 pm #
Like coltakashi, I just wish Huck would quit running for political office and get a megachurch pulpit or a media gig. People would love him. He would no doubt earn a bunch of money (he’s always crying poor-mouth), enjoy a immense prestige and it would satisfy his narcissistic personality.
His identifying himself as the “Christian” candidate created a perfect storm where neither he nor Mitt could win. Getting Huck out of politics would be upside for everyone.
texan on 26 Mar 2008 at 9:32 pm #
Lowell, your memory is almost correct. Huckabee did win a majority of the Evangelical vote in 1 state (Arkansas). Romney won a majority of the Evangelical vote in 2 states (Massachusetts and Utah). McCain never won a majority of the Evangelical vote.
From the 20 3-way contests for which we have polling data about religious affiliation, here’s the breakdown of wins and ties:
Huckabee – won Evangelical vote in 8 states, 1 tie
McCain – won Evangelical vote in 6 states, 1 tie
Romney – won Evangelical vote in 5 states, 0 ties
If we look at the popular vote in these 20 states, Huckabee won 6 contests. In the 5 Huckabee wins for which we have polling data, a majority of the Repbulican voters were Evangelical. The other state he won (West Virginia, which is 44% Evangelical according to Beliefnet) almost certainly had a majority of Evangelicals among the Republican voters, since all other states with more than a 40% proportion of Evangelicals in the state had a majority of Evangelicals among the Republican voters.
Even more interesting is how Huckabee fared among non-Evangelical voters in these 20 3-way contests. In Arkansas, he won 41% of the non-Evangelical vote. Outside of Arkansas, the most he gained was 21% of the non-Evangelical vote. And, outside of states that have a majority of Evangelicals among Republican voters, the most he gained was 9% among the non-Evangelicals (Illinois).
Huckabee polled as a true identity politician. He only won the largest share of the state vote in states with an Evangelical majority among the Republican voters. In fact, he only won the largest share of the Evangelical vote among those states with an Evangelical majority. And, outside of the states with an Evangelical majority, the most he ever gained among non-Evangelicals was 9%.
CarlH on 27 Mar 2008 at 4:22 pm #
WSJ’s John Fund reacts to Huckabee’s blame game with Huckabee’s Woes of the Pharisees, a column published at the on-line only Hawaii Reporter, putting up some facts to undermine the whine.
SGS on 30 Mar 2008 at 3:30 pm #
I remember Huckabee claimed he is the best man to lead this country because of his Christian beliefs. He also mentioned on more than one occasion how he knew exactly what the people need because of his experience as a pastor. And then, there were actually his, as you said in a recent article, “behaviors” that are strongly influenced by his religion — namely, how he believe in second chance for these criminals he released from the jail at an much higher rate, and alarmingly so, and that he caused the delay of the relief for tornado victims in part of Arkansas because he refused to sign into law a bill that contained the term “God’s acts” which has been used since time immemorial. Those are just two of many that have given us pause in considering his leadership.