Missive From Mid America:Hope Rising: Mike Huckabee, The Man From "Nowhere."

By Lyombe Eko In Iowa City, Iowa

Mike Huckabee is the man to watch in the 2008 American presidential election campaign. The Republican presidential candidate, who is leading the polls in Iowa, South Carolina and other States, is an enigma that has literally taken American politics by storm. 

The man has the most compelling life-story of all the candidates in this presidential election cycle. He was born in Hope, Arkansas, the same small town where former President Bill Clinton hails from. He was as poor as Bill Clinton.

He rose to become the Governor of the State of Arkansas just like Bill Clinton. Both of them are Southern Baptist Christians. Both men love music. Bill Clinton plays the saxophone while Mike Huckabee loves to play the bass guitar with his band, a group called Capital Offense.
In Africa we would say Clinton and Huckabee are brothers from the same tribe, who speak the same or similar moderate political language.

The similarities between the two politicians end there. Bill Clinton is a Democrat, once the dominant party in the Southern parts of the United States. Huckabee is a Republican who rose in the ranks of the anemic Republican Party to become governor. Clinton has had, to put it delicately, "woman problems."

The man has had a hard time keeping his zipper closed.  Mike Huckabee is a model family man with three children. That is not the main difference between them. Clinton is a lawyer, who graduated from the elite Yale University. In contrast, Huckabee is an ordained Southern Baptist Pastor who graduated from lowly Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas and attended the Southwestern Baptist Seminary.

The Rev. Michael Huckabee, 52, is a man who has dabbled in a number of professions. Besides being a church pastor-he is a self-described "Bapticostal," a neologism formed from the words Baptist and Pentecostal-he has been a baseball sportscaster, the founder and president of ACTS, a 24-hour TV station, a television talk show host, president of the Arkansas State Baptist Convention, and ultimately Governor of Arkansas after Bill Clinton. 

All these professions prepared the man for today's political arena. He is arguably the best communicator in the field. He reminds some voters of Ronald Reagan. Huckabee speaks in short, radio and television-size segments or sound bites, and has a down-to- earth sense of humor and wit that speaks to the common man.

When Mike Huckabee came to campaign in Iowa, the first State in the country to start the selection process for the presidency of the United States, he was a virtual unknown. The richer and better known candidates, Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and John McCain, Barack Obama, got all the media attention and the large crowds.

Like another Southern Governor before him, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, Huckabee went door to door and spoke to anyone who would listen to him. To pay for his campaign, his band held concerts in small Iowa towns, and charged a modest gate fee.

When Mike Huckabee first came to the Iowa City area in the summer, he made a stop at West Music in Coralville. West Music is a one-stop music business that sells musical instruments-from grand pianos to electric guitars. West Music also has studios where teachers offer private music lessons to children.

The place is always full of parents, children and music enthusiasts. Huckabee the guitarist stopped at West Music to speak of the necessity for more government funding for music and arts education in public schools. He calls these "weapons of mass instruction".

Huckabee's amazing rapport with ordinary Americans was evident during his stop at West Music. Since Huckabee was not well known at that time, he was not given much of a chance in the race. As a result, there was almost no media interest in the man but Iowans saw what they liked. His door-to-door, business-to-business "retail politics," as Americans call it, paid off.

He surged in the opinion polls. When he returned to the Iowa City area in late December as the front-runner, things had changed radically. The West Music hall was too small.  There was not even enough room for the hordes of journalists, photographers, and camera crews from around the world who braved the frigid weather and the remnants of a recent ice storm, to get pictures of the man meeting with voters and answering their questions.  The meeting was held at a nearby hotel.

If politics is the art of shoring up political bases and building coalitions, Mike Huckabee is the man to watch. An ordained, former Baptist pastor, he has garnered Evangelical Christian support by denouncing homosexuality, abortion and excessive taxation. 

This message also appeals to Catholics and social conservatives. Indeed, during the last election cycle, the Catholic Church opposed John Kerry, a Roman Catholic of Jewish descent, because he supported abortion and homosexual rights.  Huckabee has something else going for him-his region of origin. His state, Arkansas, is in the so-called Bible belt, the Southern States of the United States.

Huckabee is expected to do well in this region. Huckabee had another ace-his life story. America is a nation of radical individual self-invention. This is the phenomenon that gave the world the expression "make-over." Deep down in the American psyche and culture is belief in the ability of individuals to change, to have a new beginning, to start over.

America is a nation of second or third chances. This philosophy is aptly expressed in the metaphor from baseball, the national pastime "three strikes and you are out." America is a society that believes in human redemption, moral, economic and social betterment. That is why it is a very mobile society. People can always move to other locations or States and start their lives over.

The Rev. Mike Huckabee is the personification of American redemption and self-invention. That is why he strikes a chord with many ordinary Americas. Besides his rather modest upbringing-he says that on his mother's side, the floor of the family home was not cemented, and they had outdoor toilets-he has had a radical makeover. 

Huckabee reinvented himself when, as an overweight Governor of Arkansas, who lived an unhealthy lifestyle, he was diagnosed with diabetes. That was the shocking news he needed to turn himself around. He went on a crash program of dieting and exercise. He lost 110 pounds (almost 50 kilograms) and took up running.

He is now healthy and runs marathons. His inspirational story has struck a chord in a nation obsessed with weight, weight-loss, dieting and exercise.  Indeed, everywhere he goes, he is invited to visit private school and company gymnasiums and exercise facilities.

"Mike Huckabee is an inspiration to many Americans who have weight problems," said Rev. Ken Polsley, a Baptist minister and former missionary who states that he has had weight problems himself.

Mike Huckabee's rise in the polls is giving the Republican Party establishment in Washington D.C. and its conservative media supporters and pundits, fits. The Republican elite had all but anointed Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York as its standard bearer who could easily beat the Democratic nominee. 

If Giuliani failed to make it due to the revelation of some skeletons in his closet-and he apparently has a good number-the Republican establishment would have reluctantly sided with former Massachusetts Governor, Mitt Romney, despite his Mormon faith and his inconstancy on issues.      

That scenario seems to be crumbling. The second Governor from nowhere-Mike Huckabee of Hope, Arkansas- has left the strategy of the Republican Party power brokers in tatters. The stated fear of the Republican elite is that Huckabee will lose easily to the eventual Democratic nominee, who will most likely be Hillary Clinton.

Ironically, what strikes terror in the heart of the Republican establishment is the Rev. Mike Huckabee's profession and open religiosity. This is ironical because the Republicans have traditionally positioned themselves as the party that respects the religious beliefs and values of Americans as opposed to the Democrats who have been portrayed as having a secret wish to impose a French-style religion of secularism, big government and homosexual marriage on the United States.

The real problem of the Republican elite is that they really do not care much for religion. They have just used it as a political ploy to get into power. That is why they do not know what to do with Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor who is not part of the Republican establishment in Washington D.C.

This has led to fierce attacks against Huckabee by both the liberal and conservative media and their respective chattering elite and pundits, who populate the American radio and TV talk show cocoon. Only time will tell if Mike Huckabee will prove to be as unstoppable as two other outsiders-Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Comments

[Ma Mary]

Huckabee represents the decoupling of social conservatives (Christian Right) from the fiscal conservatives in the republican party. It was a recognition that denying the poor a helping hand is an unchristian position.

Obama's is also a remarkable story, and I hope you would give him an equally upbeat story. He also started with nothing and launched his campaign with a series of two successful biographies after a career as a community organizer and state politician. He also has a powerful appeal to the young. He tends not to speak in sound bites, which is quality that I loathe in politicians and is the main reason I mistrust Mike Huckabee. Sound bites are a form of condescention.

[Mike A.]

As Christians we are called to tell the whole truth, not just half-truths.

We are especially called to hold worldly leaders accountable and not allow them to behave as wolves in sheep's skins.

Huckabee's ties to anti-Biblical Dominionists and to racists have been carefully documented by web sites such as Box Turtle Bulletin (boxturtlebulletin.com).

I encourage your site to report the whole truth about Huckabee so that Christians can discern who the true faithful really are.

[Mike A.]

I also must protest the notion that Huckabee's policy of taxing the poor with a 30-40% sales tax -- while eliminating taxes on unearned wealth -- is somehow Christian.

[Tanyi]

Hmm...when I first saw that The Post is running an article on the US elections I was truly intrigued that we would now be talking about American politics. But what I wonder is if this article is also printed in the versions of The Post that are distributed in Bamenda and Buea for example. Because then it paints Mike Huckabee as the MOST excitable candidate in a presidential race that actually has many of them. Barack Obama is a half-Kenyan, half-American (but he looks like me and you) who has his a quite inspiring story. Hilary Clinton is a woman running for president; she too has her own buzz. And there are more of them. It is not befitting to have a first article on an ongoing occurrence that just tells a juicy part of the middle of the story. To someone who is reading this as the first informative piece on this election--and it will be many people indeed--will see Mike Huckabee as the single renaissance candidate with reminders of American iconic leaders like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and even Bill Clinton. Simply not the entire story and dangerously, glaringly biased.

[Ma Mary]

Other dimensions of Mike Huckabee seem to emerge here. He seems to belong to Biblical fundamentalists who would change the established order in the United States viz separation of church and state. In other words, underneath his affable exterior, Huckabee could be a religious nut. That is very disturbing. The author needs to look into both sides and as Tanyi points out Obama and Clinton would be at least equally as fascinating to Africans.

An intense and interesting democratic exercise is unfolding in the USA now, while some other people are trying to change constitutions to make themselves life presidents.