I remember following Mike Huckabee around the Iowa State Fair, last August, when he wasn’t exactly attracting big crowds. On a terribly hot day, Huckabee played second fiddle to Kristy Demner, the Iowa Holstein Princess, as she addressed a crowd at the Cattlemen’s Beef Quarters on the state fairgrounds. Huckabee got to say a few words after Demner finished, but few were listening.
Later, Huckabee walked — pretty much unnoticed — to the WHO Radio temporary studio, where one of his early boosters, a talk radio host named Steve Deace, gave Huckabee a lot of time on his program. On the show, Huckabee explained that he didn’t have the money to rent buses and give people rides to the Iowa Republican Straw Poll, coming up the next day in Ames. So he urged listeners to accept free rides from other candidates and once in Ames — on Mitt Romney’s or Sam Brownback’s dime — to vote for Mike Huckabee.
They did. Huckabee came in a surprise second in the poll, knocking Brownback out of the race, diminishing Romney’s victory, and setting up all that was to come in the Huckabee campaign. That evening, as dusk fell on all the tents and bandstands and barbecue stands in Ames, Huckabee was ecstatic. “For all practical purposes, we won the Iowa Straw Poll,” he told reporters. “No one was even saying we would come in second. Everybody was saying Huckabee may get fourth, maybe if he’s really lucky he’ll get third. You’ve got to admit, for what we had to work with and the resources we had, for us to surge, coming in second, is the victory, it is the story.”
I had come to Iowa to do a piece on Huckabee, and I wouldn’t have had much to work with if he had finished third and dropped out. As it happened, though, I went back to Washington with a good story. I wrote that Huckabee’s skills as a speaker were dazzling and that his economic record as governor of Arkansas was defensible, even though it was under heavy attack from the Club for Growth. On foreign policy, I wrote that Huckabee was quite weak, and I also suggested he might have trouble with the case of Wayne Dumond, a convicted rapist whose release from prison Huckabee supported, only to see Dumond commit murder once free.
I thought it was a mixed assessment of Huckabee’s record. But the cover of
National Review featured an appealing photo of Huckabee playing bass with his band. If you’re Mike Huckabee, struggling to make a mark on the GOP race, what’s not to like? The campaign loved it and asked
NR if they could buy 1,000 copies.
It wasn’t long before Huckabee began an astonishing ride up the polls in Iowa. If you look back at the graph of the Iowa race on the RealClearPolitics average of polls, you’ll see Huckabee come out of nowhere in late summer, climb through September and October and November and finally, in December, take a ten-point lead over Romney, far ahead of the rest of the field. At that point, as candidates sometimes do, Huckabee seemed to have briefly exempted himself from the law of gravity. And all before any voters or caucus-goers had spoken.
Shortly afterward, however, gravity reasserted itself. Huckabee began to slip in the polls, and for a while it seemed like he might lose Iowa to Romney. But Huckabee got himself back on track, prevailed, and did serious damage to Romney’s win-early strategy.
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