Huckabee: The Lessons of My Campaign

If it was offered to you, would you accept?
It's impolite to start saying that if the captain of the football team were to invite me to the prom, that I already have a dress picked out. Again, my job right now is to get him elected.

Former congressman Bob Barr has entered the race as a Libertarian. What do you make of that?
Not much, to be honest. I think a lot of people claiming to be Republicans really aren't; they're Libertarians, and they need to be in the Libertarian Party. That's something beginning to emerge, and I'd rather have people being honest about what they are rather than masquerading as Republicans.

Do you think he could be a spoiler to McCain, like Ralph Nader was to the Democrats in 2000?
I don't see that happening. Nobody knows who Bob Barr is. Nader was so well known when he ran, he was a brand unto himself. I don't see Barr having that kind of brand appeal.

You're working on a book due out in November. Is it a campaign memoir or more of a political plan for the future?
It's a bit of both. In many ways, it's how the future of the conservative movement can learn from what we saw on the campaign trail and what we saw from the grass-roots effort. The conventional wisdom has been that it's all about the money, but we shattered that. To me, that's the most important lesson that came out of the process: that it's about the message and moving people through that message, and that ordinary people who can't write the biggest checks and have never been invited to sit among the swells, that they can have just as much an impact as anyone.

You're under a tight deadline. What's you're writing schedule like?
I'm writing every day. It's good and bad because it does force you to write—being on deadline—but you also wake up every morning in a panic, thinking of how many pages you have to write that day. My schedule depends on my travel, but I'm trying to get through about two to three chapters a week.

© 2008