H-MRI: Mike Huckabee, The Sam's Club Candidate?

The Hotline turns on the H-MRI, continuing a series of short scans of WH '08 resumes. Over the next few months, we'll cut to the bone to assess candidates' records and tease out the interplay of policy and politics in their lives. Our first scan examined Sen. Evan Bayh's relationship with organized labor.

To movement conservatives assessing the crop of '08 candidates, Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) is an attractive, though beguiling bundle of unorthodoxies. But if he gets through the primaries and becomes the party's nominee, he could be a nightmare for Democrats desperately trying to regain the mantle as the party of the working class. Democrats talk about improving public health; Huckabee can say that he's done it. Democrats talk about raising the minimum wage; Huckabee signed a law that makes his state's the highest in the region.

First things first. Nat'l reporters covering Huckabee have begun to notice what AR reporters - and many conservative activists - have known all along. It's hard to stereotype the guy. Like another AR governor of recent vintage, The Huck, as he is known by some media wags back home, is not anchored by ideology. [MARC AMBINDER AND JONATHAN MARTIN]

His Anti-Bush/Washington Schtick?

Huckabee conceded he had a "visceral" - and he did not mean positive - reaction to NSA data mining of phone records. He worries that there is some "racism" among those who angrily oppose guest worker programs. He concedes a human role in warming the earth and a human responsibility to steward it. And that is just in the past few months.
He is quick to mention how he supports the public schools. He opposes same-sex marriage and believes government should affirm the primacy of heterosexual marriage, but he's uncomfortable with a constitutional amendment that would "ban" same-sex marriage -- he'd rather see one affirm something, rather than ban something else.
While he supports the reduction of capital gains tax rates, he's contemptuous about a presidential platform based upon a Beltway issue like that.
"I didn't grow up a child of privilege," he told reporters at an informal lunch gathering last spring. "If you've grown up like more Americans have, you have an understanding that there are some people out there that, at the end of the day, are really wondering how they're gonna pay the rent tomorrow, and for them, it's not a big discussion about marginal tax rates and capital gains reduction."
Last year, as oil prices reached record levels and as Wal-Mart, Arkansas's pride and joy, contemplated raising prices to cushion the blow to its profit margins, Huckabee blasted oil companies. "Market forces," he said, are "one thing." But the companies are "stealing from absolutely the poorest people." When people are suffering, he said, "there's no excuse" for windfall profits.

Is Huckabee a populist?

He is certainly not a traditional small-government conservative; he appears to believe that government has an affirmative and unquestionable duty to protect the most vulnerable. At the same time, he seems to have a reflexive distaste for bigness and centralized power, be it in the executive office of the president, in corporations or with government. But that wariness does not extend to his pet issue: public health.
Friends and opponents look to 2002 as the year that changed Huckabee's outlook on politics and life. Like another Arkansas governor, the closest Huckabee's political peril in the state had much to do with his spouse, Janet. Never wildly popular, her run for Sec/State that year was savaged by Republicans in the state, and the relentless media coverage dragged down the governor's popularity and nearly threw own his re-election chances into jeopoardy. Janet Huckabee lost handily; Gov. Huckabee barely won. The experience -- he called it a slow-passing kidney stone -- upended his perspective on politics. He became more aggressive with the state legislature. He began to insert himself into political debates that a pre-'02 Huckabee would have avoided. Personally, the bruise of the race was slow to heal. A few months later, Huckabee was diagnosed with diabetes started a medical weight loss program.

Born-Again...
He lost 100 pounds and has kept it off, and he's become an evangelist for healthier living - a crunchy conservative with his own recopies of granola. He worries openly about epidemics of childhood obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Chubby children (and skinny children) now get weighed in state schools. Huckabee and Bill Clinton brokered a deal to get soda machines out of public schools. They're working with food manufacturers and grocers on other agreements. An Arkansas newspaper blasted him as a Nanny State governor for suggesting that a ban on women smoking while pregnant - even if unenforceable -- was worth looking at.
Said Huckabee: "There are a lot of things pregnant women shouldn't do. The point is, if you're going to make that against the law, you're probably going to have to extend it to all the other things that are equally unhealthy for the child." Huckabee signed into a law a bill that prohibits smoking at most restaurants and bars. He's raised the state's cigarette tax.
The "populist" label doesn't fit Huckabee in another important sense: he is not a majoritarian who sways to the passions of the populace -- or even to the activists who set expectations for the Republican voting base.
Huckabee, who supports guest worker programs and is not an immigration hard-liner, said he believes opposition to comprehensive immigration reform was "irrational in many cases." And he did not discount the causative factor of racism.

Always A Preacher Man

Huckabee is a former Southern Baptist minister and counts as a core belief the fallibility of man. He proclaims himself "pleased" that evangelical leaders are beginning to focus more on climate change and poverty.
"People are waking up to the fact that if we're going to be true to our faith and believe that god is the creator of the earth and we are manager and steward an taking care of it, we've done a lousy job of really taking care of it."
Asked directly if he believes humans caused global warming, Huckabee says that while he is "not a scientist," he thinks "we ought to act as if that is the case. There is never a downside when it comes to conserving national resources."
As he explores these issues, he is largely short on solutions. But he is quick to say that he does not believe that "government is the answer to most problems. I think people are."
But he does like to use government to achieve conservative ends. "I certainly am not ashamed of afraid that we need to be addressing a lot of issues that Republicans historically have ignored," he said.

A Republican And His Taxes

About Gov. Huckabee, the Club for Growth, which aims to be a gatekeeper interest group in 2008, is adamant. The group's leaders in Washington do not like him. He's the only person with his own category on the Club's blog. They point out that the state's per capita income is, by some measures, the second lowest among 50 states. They say he raised taxes five times -- a gas tax increase in 1999, the cigarette tax hike, tax increases in '2004, a tax on beer and a tax on nursing homes.
Huckabee's defenders say his record as a tax-cutting governor is unmatched in the state's history, which is true. During his first two years, he and the Dem legislature cut taxes across the board. They increased the standard deduction for all filers, doubled child care credits, removed the so-called "marriage penalty" in states, indexed the income tax to inflation, eliminating bracket creep. In 1999, he pushed through reform of the state's messy property tax laws. He's also trimmed discretionary spending (which was fairly painless, thanks to growing income from the income taxes. And he says he'll entertain ideas to give back portions of a projected $600M budget surplus this year.
But it's very hard to cast him in the mould of a reflexive anti-taxer.
He defends a gas tax increase by noting that an overwhelming majority of Arkansans supported it and he, the governor, makes no apology for fixing the state's dilapidated roadways. In 1996, just months after he came into office, Huckabee championed a state constitutional amendment that aimed to levy a small (1/8th of a cent) conservation tax to help the environment. He later summed up the lesson he learned. "Arkansas proved to me in November 1996 that they don't mind paying reasonable taxes if they understand how the money is being spent and can see a return on their investment."

Too Much Like Clinton?

Indeed, Arkansans are a confounding lot to pigeonhole. And it is important to understand the state to understand the man. Perhaps most importantly, the Natural State is a small one. It has really just one city, one significant university and one sizable daily newspaper. Folks tend to know each other or at least have mutual friends regardless from where in the state they hail from. This is particularly true among the political class. Leaf back through Bill Clinton's "My Life" and you get a sense for this proximity.
Now instead of a young, shaggy-haired, Ivy League, anti-war liberal whose greatest claim to fame was running Texas for McGovern in '72, imagine a candidate who graduated from an in-state Baptist college, was an ordained Baptist minister and had taken a turn running the state's Baptist Convention. One is recalled as a unifying force to Baptist Arkansans. One who hosted a religious-oriented TV show. The political connections - the familiarity - were instantaneous for Huckabee. But, unlike Clinton, he was not somebody who dreamt and angled his whole life to be in a place from where he could run for president. His pragmatism, however, cannot be completely chalked up to apolitical principles he brought over with him from church to state. Having lost to iconic Sen. Dale Bumpers (D) in 1992 in his first campaign for office, Huckabee learned something else about the state as important as its small size: its Democratic traditions ran deep.
He's only known a Democratic legislature and has governed in a way that reflects that. Bragging to an in-state reporter this summer, Huckabee declared the Republican leadership had "brought ideas" and "made changes" to the state. But they've only been able to implement those ideas and challenges by working with the opposition party. And helping his cause, he's picked issues that played to the state's conservative and populist traditions. Huckabee's governing principle has been consensus not combat. An accidental governor who's gotten elected twice on his own, he's not sought to overturn his state's political order.

Not Your Usual Arkansas Republican

Then again, Huckabee is from Hope, not from Northwest Arkansas, where the party's financial and foot-soldier base lives. And he was bumped into office after a few years as LG and a life in the pulpit. He wasn't a party hack and has not seen fit to spend much of his time developing the party's capacity in the state.
A retrospective of his first few years published by his office ticks off accomplishments like a health care insurance program for poor kids and a long-awaited streamlining of the state's car tag renewal process. The document calls Huckabee a "progressive, reform-minded" leader.
But his reticence to prejudge, through narrow partisan lenses, the contested questions of domestic policy, which sounds refreshing and open-minded, is easy for a governor. It may trip him up when he moves to the next level when quick and pithy answers are de rigueur.

On Iraq

At that spring lunch meeting, analyst Stu Rothenberg wondered why the American electorate would trust the presidency after Bush to a governor with no discernable resume of foreign policy or national security experience.
Huckabee had anticipated the question. "For the same reason they handed it to Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan," he said.
"As I recall," interrupted Rothenberg, "Different times. Didn't 9/11 change the nature of the executive branch?"
Probably, Huckabee said. "It probably tilted people toward thinking that maybe a person who had executive experience or leadership." He continued: "The point is, people want decisive leadership, even if they disagree with it., I don't think that you see people clamoring for the mindset of a legislator in times of crisis."
Reporters asked Huckabee whether he would have invaded Iraq, and Huckabee won't take the bait. He does allow that, had he received the same briefings and intel the president did, "I'm not sure I would have made a different decision." He is critical of the aftermath and his answers are indistinguishable from most Democrats and Republicans in Washington. He's not sure where to draw the line about American intervention overseas.
As to the balance between civil liberties and counterrorism, he seems to worry about the power of a government unchecked, even in wartime. It is a classical worry of a small-state governor used to federal encroachment of state prerogatives. (Huckabee led the charge against the Defense Department's attempt to reduce the size of the National Guard.)

A Sam's Club Republican?

So Huckabee is not an ideologue. He's a social conservative with a stellar voting record who worries about seeming mean or punitive. He's a political conservative who is a functional pragmatist when it comes to economic issues. Dare we say: he's a "compassionate conservative?"

Two young conservatives -- Ross Douthat and Reihaan Salam, are finishing a book called the Party of Sam's Club. They argue that the voting base of the party today not accurately described as a collection of single-issue ideologues, be they anti-taxers, anti-regulation zealots, anti-communists or anti-abortion activists. Rather, they're working class whites who were so turned off by Democrats' cultural modernism and secularism that they've given the Republican Party the benefit of the doubt. But that benefit is diminishing and the doubt is growing. Sam's Club Republicans are, yes, Big Government Republicans, but they're not liberals. It would recognize that "these objectives--individual initiative, social mobility, economic freedom--seem to be slipping away from many less-well-off Americans, and that serving the interests of these voters means talking about economic insecurity as well as about self-reliance. It would mean recognizing that you can't have an 'ownership society' in a nation where too many Americans owe far more than they own. It would mean matching the culture war rhetoric of family values with an economic policy that places the two-parent family--the institution best capable of providing cultural stability and economic security--at the heart of the GOP agenda."

Is Huckabee the first candidate of Sam's Club Republicans? (Hotline examining, 8/23).