Huckabee coy on ’16 run: Door is ‘open’

Mike Huckabee had wrapped up his speech Thursday night to a Little Rock audience of politically active pastors and turned to questions. The first one came from a woman near the front: “Are you running?”

As the room broke out in whoops and applause, the former Arkansas governor smiled and said, “The Lord knows, but he’s not telling just yet.”

God is not the only one with whom Huckabee is having quiet conversations these days about the idea of making another run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

Over the past three months or so, Huckabee has been sounding out activists and potential financial supporters, as well as looking at whether his cheerful brand of socially conservative populism could bring together his fractured party and increase the country’s faith in Republicanism.

“I’m keeping the door open,” Huckabee said Thursday night about the possibility of seeking his party’s nomination again. “I think right now the focus needs to be on 2014, but I’m mindful of the fact that there’s a real opportunity for me.” Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, only to see his campaign sputter out in later contests for lack of money and organization. He ended up second to the eventual Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, in the number of convention delegates.

The 2008 experience left Huckabee disillusioned - and, he said, bored - with what it took to run for the Oval Office. So he took a pass on 2012 and focused his attention on his radio and television shows and the lecture circuit, all of which offered a chance to make significant money and spend time with a growing brood of grandchildren.

In most of the polling and speculation about 2016, Huckabee acknowledged, “I’m never mentioned in those conversations.” But what Huckabee senses now, he said, is that the process and the political landscape have changed, potentially to his advantage.

“I’m a long way from saying, ‘Yeah, I’m in,’” Huckabee said. But, he added, he is getting encouragement to run “from places where I never got it before,” including the business community and the GOP establishment.

He also produced a private poll, conducted in early December by his longtime political consultant Bob Wickers, that he said surprised him by suggesting he might fare better today in the early-contest states of Iowa and South Carolina than such talked-about names as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida.

“I really believe the key to a Republican victory is an ability to communicate a message that speaks across a broader spectrum,” he said.

“I think that one of our failures is the ability to speak to African-Americans, to speak to people who are Hispanic, to speak to working-class people - more than just speaking to the boardroom, speaking to the people who go in and clean up after the meeting.” Huckabee dismissed the notion that pride was a factor in his decision to float a possible campaign.

“Anybody who would run for any reason other than to win is an idiot,” he said. But he quickly warmed to a question about not getting credit for his skepticism about the health of the economy as he campaigned in the months before the 2008 stock-market crash and financial meltdown.

“A lot of things I said that I was sneered at about turned out to be prophetic,” he said about the criticism he took from fellow Republicans over his focus on the working class during the 2008 campaign.

“A year later I looked like a genius, but nobody ever said, ‘Huckabee was right,’” he said.

And with the passage of a few more years since 2008, he also seems to recall the campaign process a little more fondly.

“Begging people for money was not pleasant, and fighting off total distortions about one’s record is not pleasant,” he said. “But as far as the campaign itself, that was exhilarating. I love that part of connecting with people and the ability to do that.” Huckabee recently announced that he is giving up his daily radio show so he will have more time to devote to other endeavors, including traveling the country next year to support GOP candidates, particularly in Senate races.

However confident he may be in his message, Huckabee would be up against an array of fresh faces in a party that is desperate to turn the page. And some of his old adversaries are still out there as well - among them, the conservative Club for Growth, which deemed his gubernatorial record too liberal.

“My hope and prayer is that more mainstream Republicans would push back hard against the groups like Club for Growth and Freedom Works and even Heritage Action,” Huckabee said in a late October speech to a political club in Little Rock.

“Mike Huckabee should attend an anger-management seminar,” Club for Growth spokesman Barney Keller said when asked about the prospect of another Huckabee campaign. “He’s still upset that the Club for Growth [political action committee] exposed his support of tax increases and bigger government when he ran for president. If he runs, the first thing he should do is grow a thicker skin and get ready for his atrocious anti-growth record to be exposed to Republican primary voters once again.” But Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, also retains a strong base of support among evangelical Christians and other social conservatives, as was evidenced by those lining up for photos and handshakes before Thursday night’s dinner in Little Rock.

He was the keynote speaker at the event, which was sponsored by the American Renewal Project, an organization led by activist David Lane that encourages evangelical pastors to become more involved in political action.

Huckabee focused heavily on income inequality - an issue President Barack Obama also has highlighted recently - as a problem that Christians are compelled by their faith to address.

“We devalue people sometimes who are poor. We do not deem them worthy of the same level of treatment we give those who are connected to the real axis of evil in this country - the axis of power that exists between Washington and Wall Street,” Huckabee said. “The fact is, people in the middle class in this country have lost ground over the past few years, despite all of the rhetoric about trying to lift them up.”

About 600 pastors and their spouses were in the audience. Afterward, Huckabee held a private meeting with a group from Iowa and South Carolina.

“He is by far the best communicator I have seen,” said Greg Baker, political director of the Family Leader, an influential social-conservative organization in Iowa.

While Huckabee has railed against the influence of such groups as Club for Growth, he also sees possibility in the new sources of outside money that super political action committees represent.

“With the advent of the super PACs, it frankly is a lot easier to get the financial support. You can find a few people that really, really are capable of helping and want to,” he said. “One of the challenges I had was, I was out there raising it $2,500 at a time, and there weren’t many people supporting me who could afford the $2,500.”

Among the biggest GOP funders is casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who with his wife, Miriam, has spent nearly $100 million to help Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Adelson and his family poured more than $20 million into advertising supporting former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, without which he likely would not have lasted as long as he did in the GOP presidential primary.

While Adelson has not declared a favorite yet for 2016, he clearly feels warmly toward Huckabee. In November, the Adelsons presented the former Arkansas governor with the Adelson Defender of Israel Award at a Zionist Organization of America dinner in New York, at which Huckabee was also the keynote speaker.

Asked if he was financially comfortable enough now to give up his lucrative television job on Fox News, Huckabee, who lives in a beachfront home on the Florida Gulf Coast, conceded that it was “a big issue.” “And it’s not why I’m in a big hurry to do anything” he added.

Huckabee, who had so little money to live on during the 2008 race that he left the campaign to give paid speeches, said he needs to see if he has the kind of financial support to make a new campaign viable.

“If I talk to people and they say, ‘If you run, we’re in and we’re in a big way,’ that’s going be helpful,” he said. “If I don’t hear that, you know what? This will be a real easy decision for me to make, because I’ve jumped in a pool without water before and it’s a hard hit at the bottom.” Information for this article was contributed by Karen Tumulty and Alice Crites of The Washington Post and by Jonathan Martin of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/14/2013

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