Huckabee brings his own style to politics of Hope

WASHINGTON -- Mike Huckabee's first day as Arkansas governor is remembered most for the Four Hour Crisis. Five minutes before Huckabee was to be sworn in, the disgraced outgoing governor, Jim Guy Tucker, tried to wriggle out of his promise to resign.

For the next few hours, the state flirted with a constitutional crisis as Lt. Gov. Huckabee and Tucker, the governor who had been convicted of two felonies in the Whitewater investigation, jockeyed for control.

Huckabee, a Republican, stood tough; he went on television and threatened to call a special legislative session to have the Democratic governor impeached. Behind the scenes, he worked with Democratic legislators to coax Tucker to quit. An anxious afternoon ended when Tucker scribbled a note of resignation, salve for what Huckabee had described as an "open, oozing sore."

Democrats and Republicans alike praised Huckabee for handling the 1996 standoff with grace and grit. And thus did he begin an improbable path that has taken him to the presidential campaign trail.

Huckabee, a fireman's son from tiny Hope, Ark., is hoping to follow the footsteps of his hometown's most famous overachiever, former President Clinton.

Smart, funny and articulate, he is the happy candidate whose campaign has vaulted out of obscurity. His rise in the polls has been accompanied by new scrutiny of both his policies and personality.

The rap from his critics: He's too flip, too weak on foreign policy. Quick to turn on someone he thinks has crossed him. Some think there's still too much of the preacher in the politician, and get queasy about a candidate who raised his hand when GOP debaters were asked who didn't believe in evolution.

But Huckabee, 52, has made a habit of confounding skeptics.

When Huckabee, a Southern Baptist, felt the call in high school to pursue the ministry, his older sister, Pat Harris, remembers that local folks sadly shook their heads and said, "Gosh, what a loss. He could've really been something."

Two decades later, when he decided to give up his popular ministry for a life in politics -- as a Republican in Democratic Arkansas, no less -- the reaction was the same.

As governor, Huckabee surpassed expectations again on an altogether different matter when he put himself on a diet and managed to drop 110 pounds. Now, the self-described one-time "sofa spud" is a 6-foot, 180-pound marathon runner, and he sees parallels in politics.

"Running marathons trained me for more than running 26.2 miles," he said. "It also gave me a real good understanding that just because somebody runs out in the early miles and does real well does not necessarily mean they're going to finish."

Huckabee is nine years younger than Bill Clinton. So by the time he followed the future president's tiny footsteps into Miss Mary's kindergarten in Hope, Clinton had long since moved on to Hot Springs, Ark.

However, both men have drawn heavily on their early years in their campaigns. Huckabee styles himself as something of a political hybrid, a conservative populist.

He often tells people that his family was only "a few pocketsful of change" away from poverty. The Huckabees weren't really a churchgoing family, but sometime in grade school their mother, Mae, started taking Mike and Pat to services.

Huckabee stood out early. At 14, he was an announcer for a local radio station; at 15, he felt a spiritual "awakening;" by 16, he was preaching Sunday sermons; at 17, he was president of the student council and governor of Arkansas Boys State, a civic program for outstanding students; by 18, he was an ordained minister.

He was already a showman, too, playing the lead in "Flowers for Algernon" his senior year, playing guitar in a rock band on the weekends.

In 1977, he dropped out of a Baptist seminary to work for Texas televangelist James Robison, helping to coordinate his Billy Graham-style crusades and television program. Huckabee soon had adoring parishioners of his own. After filling in as a guest preacher in Pine Bluff, Ark., Huckabee was recruited to stay on.

In 1992, at age 37, with three kids and a mortgage, he left the ministry to run for the Senate against Democratic incumbent Dale Bumpers.

Huckabee lost that race badly, receiving 40 percent of the vote. But an unusual domino effect nonetheless put him on the political fast track to become governor within four years:

• Tucker, the lieutenant governor, moved up to complete Clinton's gubernatorial term when Clinton became president.

• Huckabee won a special election to complete Tucker's term, and later was re-elected lieutenant governor.

• Huckabee moved up when Tucker resigned the governorship after his conviction in the Whitewater investigation.

Huckabee was only the third Republican governor in Arkansas since Reconstruction, and Democratic legislators didn't make it easy for him. Nor, they complain, did he make it easy for them.

Despite partisan tensions, Huckabee was elected to two full terms and compiled a solid record of achievements: expanding health insurance coverage for poor children, implementing education reforms, reducing welfare rolls. He served as chairman of the National Governors Association.

All this while still displaying a refreshing sense of humor and claiming the distinction of being the only sitting governor with his own rock band, Capital Offense.

Huckabee's good at working without a net, with easy ad libs and campaign oratory that does the preacher in him proud.

But sometimes his freewheeling style gets him in trouble. He's joked about being on a concentration camp diet, called Arkansas a "banana republic," dismissed "wacko environmentalists."

Democratic Arkansas legislators, meanwhile, complain that Huckabee expected them to bring about his "accomplishments" but was loath to share credit and quick to nurse grudges.

Republican state Sen. Gilbert Baker counters that Huckabee did remarkably well in a difficult political environment.