Huckabee said “the sad thing” was how much he loved campaigning—the constant stimulation, the endless opportunity to interact with people, the sport. “He’s incredibly competitive,” Rex Nelson told me. “Never overlook that. If Mike Huckabee were to sit down at this table and play me in a game of checkers, he would beat my brains out. He’s really, really, really competitive, to the point of competing against his staff, competing against his wife.” But Huckabee was discouraged by the last election, throughout which he felt relegated to the periphery by other Republicans with more money and less substance. “It’s almost like a reality show,” he said. “It’s who are we going to vote off the island? And you vote them off not because they’re not capable of leading the island but because you’ve found someone more entertaining.”

I couldn’t help thinking of a certain former governor of Alaska, and told him so. He wouldn’t say anything, but he stared at the floor and laughed ruefully, shaking his head.

A few months ago, Huckabee was eating lunch at Blue Fin, a restaurant in New York—a “city of flamboyant billionaires,” as he once called it—where he spends half of every week, taping his show. It has been an unexpected hit, and though many of the guests are low-profile or wacky (the psychic Kreskin has made several appearances), Huckabee has also had some big gets. On a recent episode, he politely discussed childhood obesity with Michelle Obama. “My view is that, if I host a show, the words ‘host’ and ‘guest’ imply something,” he said, setting his Loro Piana overcoat on the banquette. “If I were to have you in my home, I would treat you with a certain level of civility. When you walk in the door, I wouldn’t say, ‘Let me tell you about you and your crazy left-wing . . . ’ You would be, like, ‘I think I’m leaving now, this guy needs some therapy.’ So why would we do that in a public forum on television?” A bad host, he said, was someone like David Letterman. “I just found him to be the most detached and—I’m sorry to say this—arrogant jerk. He was not warm.” (Huckabee had no similar critique of his Fox colleagues, some of whom can be less than courtly with their dissenting guests.)

“Huckabee” has the aesthetics of a local-access show: the host ends every episode playing bass with his house band, the Little Rockers, which is composed of fellow Fox staffers. “What he does well is break the rules of cable news,” Bill Shine, the senior vice-president of the network, said. “The show is about him; it’s built around him, and not around the genre of cable news. Sometimes I look at the guest list and think, Wow, Neil Sedaka?”

Huckabee has been in broadcasting since he was fourteen, when the man who ran the local radio station in Hope gave him a job reading news and weather. Three years later, he took his wife-to-be, Janet McCain, on their first date, to a truck stop, after he covered one of her high-school basketball games for the station. Huckabee continued working in radio while he and Janet attended Ouachita Baptist University, in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, where he majored in religion. (They married after their freshman year.) When he became a minister, he set up a twenty-four-hour local cable station that aired his sermons. Huckabee has long “believed that part of my calling was to use the media as a communication vessel for the Gospel,” as he wrote in “A Simple Christmas.”

It was Huckabee’s ease in front of a camera that enabled him to stay in the 2008 Presidential campaign as long as he did. “In March of ’07, he said to me, ‘This campaign is going to be over before it starts,’ because he was dismally not raising money,” Fedewa said. “He was staying at Motel 8s.” At the end of 2007, Huckabee had raised less than nine million dollars, compared with Mitt Romney’s fifty-four million—which he augmented with thirty-five million of his own money—and Hillary Clinton’s hundred and seven million.

“It’s O.K. I didn’t marry you for your parking karma.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

To compensate, Huckabee gave nearly twenty television interviews every morning for four months, from the run-up to the Iowa caucuses until he left the race. “We estimate that was two hundred million dollars in free media,” Fedewa said. “The media was his base.” The strategy was to make Huckabee available to everyone, not just CNN and the 700 Club but “The Colbert Report” and Rolling Stone—“the shows that your opponents will be too scared to go on,” as Bob Wickers, one of Huckabee’s campaign consultants, put it. Huckabee is not uncomfortable around Democrats or comedians; he is as happy talking to Jon Stewart about abortion as he is interviewing Gayle Haggard about her marriage, as he did on a recent episode of his own show. And liberals tend to like him in return. Even if you find his politics repugnant, you can still find yourself drawn in by his relentless niceness. It doesn’t mean you’d vote for him, but it might mean you’d have him on your show.

Huckabee was elected lieutenant-governor of Arkansas in 1993. In 1996, Governor Jim Guy Tucker, a Democrat, resigned in disgrace when he was convicted of arranging nearly three million dollars in fraudulent loans. On the day Huckabee was supposed to be sworn in as Tucker’s replacement, Tucker called to say that he’d decided to appeal his conviction. Huckabee threatened to instigate impeachment proceedings if Tucker failed to step aside. In the midst of the ensuing crisis, Huckabee gave an impromptu report to the media and the citizens of Arkansas, an impassioned speech that effectively established him as the governor. In “Character,” he wrote that it was “as clear an example as I ever expect to see of God’s divine providence. It wasn’t my political skills or anything else of my own doing that had brought me to this moment. Only God could have done this.”

Huckabee told me about experiences he’s had with divine inspiration: “There’ve been times when a thought would come to me . . . and as soon as I wrote it or said it I stepped back and thought, Whoa, pretty darn good.” I asked how he knew he wasn’t just smart. “Well, nobody thinks that,” he said, laughing. “Haven’t you read the blogs? I’m a complete idiot. I’m not smart enough to run for President.”

Huckabee invokes God constantly. Yet he feels that his religiosity is overemphasized. “I’m not one-dimensional,” he told me. “I was the governor of Arkansas for ten years! The lieutenant-governor for three! To say that I stepped out of a pulpit last Sunday and said, ‘Hey, I think I’ll be President!’ No, I’ve paid my dues.”

Many people who have worked with Huckabee insist that his politics are influenced far more by pragmatism than by religion. Huckabee’s Presidential campaign manager, Chip Saltsman (who got into trouble after the election for distributing a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” to the Republican National Committee), said, “The ‘religion guy’ was foisted on him by the media. It was frustrating, a little bit. We got ‘former preacher’ as much as we got ‘former governor.’ ”

Huckabee had more executive experience than any other candidate, Republican or Democratic, in the 2008 campaign (with the exception of Tommy Thompson, who dropped out of the race after the Iowa straw poll). “And yet you didn’t hear a Chris Matthews saying, ‘Governor, I want to talk to you about your education policy; you did some innovative things,’ ” he said. “No. It was, ‘O.K., you were a Baptist preacher. Let’s talk about evolution.’ It’s, like, ‘Are you an idiot? Is that the only thing you can ask me?’ ”

When Wolf Blitzer pushed Huckabee to say whether he believed in evolution, at a debate in New Hampshire in June of 2007, Huckabee expressed exasperation that the question “would even be asked of somebody running for President—I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book.” He said that the question was unfair, because it “asked us in a simplistic manner whether or not we believed, in my view, whether there’s a God or not.”

As President, though, he would appoint the Secretary of Education. And it is difficult to comprehend what is unfair about the question when he has written, “Everything you do and believe in is directed by your answer to the ultimate question: Is there a God? It all comes down to that single issue.” According to Huckabee, a person who believes God created man has a world view that is “absolutely irreconcilable” with that of someone who believes man created God. And “either by numbers or persuasion, one side of this polarized culture will defeat the other in setting public policy.” This is the defining paradox of Huckabee: his adamant resistance to being branded a zealot paired with his insistence that faith defines character and, consequently, has an essential place in government.

Some of this has to do with class sensitivity. Huckabee wouldn’t mind being characterized as a Christian intellectual, but he is vigilant against people’s using his background as a pastor to characterize him as a “redneck from southwest Arkansas,” as Nelson put it. “For somebody who plays at the high levels he plays at—the highest level, being a real contender for President—he is pretty sensitive.” The Arkansas press often taunted Huckabee for being thin-skinned, and Nelson said that “some of that was legitimate.”

Huckabee was a radical departure from what Arkansans were used to in their politicians. He was a Republican governor—only the third since Reconstruction—in a state that had been dominated by Democrats, and by the Clintons in particular. When he was elected lieutenant-governor, people regularly cleared the elevator at the statehouse when he got in; his Democratic colleagues nailed the door to his office shut before he took occupancy.

There was also the matter of his wife. “Janet, she was different,” Nelson told me. “She parachutes and sky-dives, rode jet skis down the river. I think the snootier elements of old Little Rock, shall we say, wanted someone who was doing lunch at the country club and attending Junior League events.” Janet Huckabee was determined to make her mark as first lady by updating the Governor’s Mansion. During the renovation, the Huckabees lived in a trailer they installed on the property—which Huckabee sees as evidence of his frugality and populism, and which many other people mocked as impossibly hick.

“That was not considered the classy thing to do,” Don Bingham, who was the Mansion administrator under Huckabee, said. “I mean, living in a triple-wide? The governor? That’s so typical barefoot-and-pregnant for the South. . . . They were crucified for it.”

Huckabee was also criticized for accepting personal donations—suits, furniture, a pair of thirty-seven-hundred-dollar cowboy boots, a chain saw—when he took office. Many people attributed this to “the preacher mentality: you’re used to being pounded with gifts—‘pounded’ is the old Southern word—and there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s not viewed as a moral failing,” Max Brantley, the editor of the liberal weekly the Arkansas Times, said. Huckabee faced twenty hearings before the state ethics commission during his time as governor. He contended that he was being unfairly harassed because he was a Republican, and, in 2002, he sued the commission on the ground that its rules were unconstitutionally vague. “Mike Huckabee sued the state ethics committee for the right to receive gifts!” Brantley said. “It just struck me as unseemly.” (Brantley’s wife was appointed to a judgeship by Bill Clinton, and he personally filed several of the complaints heard by the committee.)

Brenda Turner, who was Huckabee’s chief of staff during the decade he was governor, described the suit differently: “We were just trying to say, Let’s really put this in writing so we can comply, because we can’t comply with a moving target.” She went on, “We would ask them, how do you want us to report? Then we would do that. And then we’d be chastised for doing it that way. Think of this: you can write whatever complaint you want and mail it in and he would have to defend that, taking time and money.”

Turner suspects that Huckabee will not run for President in 2012. “He’s actually living the dream that he’s always had, starting on radio at fourteen and loving TV like he does,” she said. “If he runs, it would have to be a calling, and it couldn’t just come from supporters; he’d have to feel the Lord was calling him. I don’t feel like he has that urgency.”

Turner worked for Huckabee for sixteen years, starting as a volunteer when he was her minister at Beech Street First Baptist Church, in Texarkana, but did not stay on for his run at the Presidency. The reason, she told me, was that she was drained from a decade of defending him within the state. She attributes the antagonism to a kind of xenophobia. “This man didn’t come from a business background, he didn’t come from a law background, he was a pastor, and that was somehow mysterious,” Turner said. “My personal feeling is what we don’t understand we fear. And what we fear we seek to destroy.”

As governor of Arkansas, Huckabee successfully championed laws that prevented gay people from becoming foster parents and banned gay adoptions. “Children are not puppies—this is not a time to see if we can experiment and find out how does this work,” Huckabee told a student journalist at the College of New Jersey in April. “You don’t go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal. That would be like saying, ‘Well, there are a lot of people who like to use drugs, so let’s go ahead and accommodate those who want to use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them.’ ” These comments proved unpopular. On his Web site, Huckabee accused his interviewer of trying to “grossly distort” and “sensationalize my well known and hardly unusual views” about homosexuality. The student publication then posted the audiotape of the interview online. Huckabee had not been misquoted.

Huckabee does not like to be thought of as a homophobe. “I’ve had people who worked for me who are homosexuals,” he insists. “And I don’t walk around thinking, Oh, I pity them so much. I accept them as who they are! It’s not like somehow their sin is so much worse than mine.”

In a recent interview, Katie Couric told him that the Arkansas state representative Kathy Webb, a lesbian from Little Rock, had said, “Huckabee doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of tolerance and good will for gay people.” Huckabee seemed surprised. “It’s not personal,” he replied. “I could argue that people who want to change marriage are angry at me for wanting to keep it like it is!”

“I love my mistress, but I must say I resent the leash.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

But Huckabee doesn’t just want to leave things the way they are; he wants to change the Constitution to specifically prohibit gay people from getting married. He has called homosexuality “sinful and unnatural” and is fond of amusing audiences with the witticism “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

One afternoon in Jerusalem, while Huckabee was eating a chocolate croissant in the lounge of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, I asked him to explain his rationale for opposing gay rights. “I do believe that God created male and female and intended for marriage to be the relationship of the two opposite sexes,” he said. “Male and female are biologically compatible to have a relationship. We can get into the ick factor, but the fact is two men in a relationship, two women in a relationship, biologically, that doesn’t work the same.”

I asked him if he had any arguments that didn’t have to do with God or ickiness. “There are some pretty startling studies that show if you want to end poverty it’s not education and race, it’s monogamous marriage,” he said. “Many studies show that children who grow up in a healthy environment where they have both a mother and a father figure have both a healthier outlook and a different perspective from kids who don’t have the presence of both.”

In fact, a twenty-five-year study recently published by the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that children brought up by lesbians were better adjusted than their peers. And, of course, nobody has been able to study how kids fare with married gay parents. “You know why?” Huckabee said. “Because no culture in the history of mankind has ever tried to redefine marriage.”

But in the Old Testament polygamy was commonplace. The early Christians considered marriage an arrangement for those without the self-discipline to live in chastity, as Christ did. Marriage was not deemed a sacrament by the Church until the twelfth century. And, before 1967, marriage was defined in much of the United States as a relationship between a man and a woman of the same race.

Regardless of the past, wouldn’t Huckabee be curious to know whether allowing gay people to marry had a positive or negative effect on children and society?

“No, not really. Why would I be?” he said, and laughed.

Because saying that something ought to be a certain way simply because that’s the way it supposedly has always been is an awful lot like saying “because we said so.” And Huckabee is supposed to be the guy who questions everything.

In February, the Huckabees bought a place in Miramar Beach, near Pensacola, and Huckabee changed his voter registration to Florida Republican. They still have a big house in North Little Rock, which they renovated after they left the Governor’s Mansion, but Florida has certain advantages: the taxes are lower than in Arkansas, and it’s easy to get to New York City. It could also be politically advantageous to have a bulkhead in the Sunshine State should Huckabee decide to run for President in 2012. Huckabee says, “The dogs like it there in the winter.”

Lucrative and enjoyable as his television career has proved, it remains to be seen whether life in the private sector will be sufficiently stimulating for Mike Huckabee. Janet Huckabee says that her husband is “a workaholic.” Huckabee’s sister, Pat Harris, told me, “He was always the everything kid: student council, every club—from junior high on, he just sort of stood out. Mr. Go-Getter. My dad always said, ‘Go and work the room,’ and Mike did. He had to be busy. And you know what? He hasn’t changed.”

“I don’t know how to relax,” Huckabee admitted one spring evening when he was having dinner with his wife at Rocky’s Diner, in a strip mall in North Little Rock.

“A cruise is best,” Janet, who was wearing a basketball jacket and eating jalapeño poppers, said.

The Huckabees have been married for thirty-six years. They went to school together in Hope, beginning in seventh grade. “We started dating at seventeen, got married at eighteen,” she said. “What were we thinking back then?”

“We weren’t!” Huckabee replied. “We weren’t thinking at all.”

“Our parents must not have been thinking, either.”

“If my kids had come to me and they were eighteen or nineteen and said we’re getting married, I’d have said you’re crazy,” he concluded.

A couple approached and asked to have their picture taken with the former governor. “I’m a huge fan!” said the man, who was wearing a trucker’s cap. “Did you run the marathon this year, Governor?”

“No,” Huckabee said, and sighed. “I wish I could. I love running marathons.”

“You don’t need to be doing that,” Janet said. “You can run three or four miles. That’s O.K. But you do not need to be training for a marathon.”