The Gospel According to Mike Huckabee

What do you make of the conservative mutiny against Giuliani led by some familiar figures?
It's not just that Giuliani's positions are significantly different than the core conservative constituency, but he's been outspoken in the past, saying things that really lit up that community … whether it's the NRA or the pro-life community. So I think that's some of it, but I think there is among many people a healthy respect for him. I know my own attitude is I don't agree with him on several key issues. But I have said and I'll continue to say that I do respect that at least he's honest and forthright about his positions and that he hasn't changed them just to run for president.

You're behind in money and polls in a big way: what is your path to leapfrog past Romney and Giuliani and McCain and everybody else. You say you'd be great against Hillary Clinton, but how do you get there?
First of all, people forget: four years ago it was Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt duking it out for first and second place in Iowa, and when A and B start fighting, C often wins. And so, I like being C. It's a much better position than being the dead carcass of A or B … I mean I've got as much cash on hand right now as John McCain and no debt. Has he raised more money than me? Sure he has. But he's spent more money, and I'm ahead of him in many of the national polls and certainly in the Iowa polls. So am I better off or worse off than he is? I'd say I'm better off. I haven't laid anybody off, I haven't fired anybody. I didn't have to borrow money.

Now is the time when it's going to start getting expensive, when you're sort of expected to go on the air in Iowa. How are you going to do that?
We like to say in our campaign [that] our greatest ally is Santa Claus. Santa Claus is coming to town and folks, in December, from about the first week until the 26th, nobody—I don't care how much money they have—can compete with Wal-Mart and Mattel and Toys R Us to capture the attention of the marketplace.

You mentioned the conservative resurgence under Reagan. That was a long time ago, of course, and there is some talk about how the arc of that conservative movement has passed, or is passing. What do you say to that?
I think it's certainly changed, and that's one of the things that I believe I can bring back to the party: recapturing a lot of those Reagan Democrats that we've lost. We've lost them because right now our party is perceived as a completely establishment party, a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street, corrupted by K Street, not in touch with Main Street. People have become disenchanted. You know there are some significant things that have happened in my campaign that I think are sort of harbingers of what could be. I'm the first Republican in 119 years to get the endorsement of the [International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which has] 750,000 members. And I'm the first-ever Republican presidential candidate that actually went and spoke to the National Education Association. I got 48 percent of the African-American vote in my state for my gubernatorial re-election. You'd be hard-pressed to find any Republican anywhere in the country who did that. So I have a history of being able to get the nontraditional votes but still be true to the core of the Republican base. That's what gave Ronald Reagan a capacity to win, and, frankly, if we don't have that in our general-election strategy, we lose.

The incumbent Republican president has gotten us involved in a war in Iraq that is highly unpopular and is thought to be a quagmire … What would you do differently in Iraq?
The biggest problem is maybe not what we will do, but the fact that the administration never fully communicated to the American people why we were there, and then made serious mistakes in carrying out the post-Saddam Hussein period of rebuilding the country, never putting enough soldiers on the ground to really bring stability. You have Sunni and Shia issues that we're never going to fix. They've been going on for 1,400 years and they are going to continue to go on. But I think the next president has got to be able to communicate effectively to the American people not just something about our vision and renewal capacity—our resilience as a nation—but he's got to be able to explain what is really taking place and the true threat with Islamo-fascism. I don't know that the average American gets it yet: that there really is a serious threat to our long-term security, and it is unlike the other wars we've faced before. 

Once that's communicated, what would you actually change or not change in terms of what's actually happening on the ground?
Well, even the Democrats agree [that] we can't just pull out today. I think in this last debate they had, when they really got down to it, they were admitting that we're there for a while. Even if we wanted to start pulling out today, it is not possible to be out of there by Christmas. What we first have to do is to realize that our goal is to get out, but it's to get out with both victory and honor. If we don't do that, we need to remember that in war, it's about will. Whoever gives up loses. Whoever loses has emboldened the enemy and has demoralized his own army.