The Other Man From Hope

In 1989, Huckabee, then 34 years old, was elected the youngest-ever president of the Arkansas Southern Baptist Convention. Nothing prepared him for the elbows-out world of big-time Southern Baptist politics. When salvation is at stake, no one backs down without a fight. The convention was deadlocked over the issue of Biblical inerrancy. Conservatives insisted that Scripture was to be taken literally; others advocated a less-strict interpretation. Huckabee tried to have it both ways. He sided with the conservatives, but urged members to be tolerant of differing views. "I resent sometimes when we get on our high horses about what is right and wrong," he says. "I've always believed in grace. Who am I to cast judgment on someone else?"

It's the same careful, noncommittal approach he now takes when voters ask him about the touchy issue of the afterlife. Does he think nonbelievers are doomed to hell? "I don't know," he says. "Jesus can decide that." Huckabee clearly hopes believers and nonbelievers will hear different things in that answer, and both sides will go away pleased.

After Huckabee's trial by politics in the convention, he felt ready for the real thing. He ran for Senate in 1992, but lost. State Republicans urged him to run for lieutenant governor under Democrat Jim Guy Tucker, who became governor when Clinton was elected president. He was a long shot in the Democratic state. To his surprise, he won—but Democrats didn't welcome him. When he arrived for work, he found the door to his offices nailed shut from the inside. Huckabee soon got another surprise: in 1996, Tucker was indicted on felony charges related to the long-simmering Whitewater scandal. Huckabee became governor.

He disarmed many state Democrats, who found they couldn't hate him on every issue. Though he didn't water down his conservative beliefs to mollify his critics—he led an anti-abortion rally in Little Rock and backed a bill that would block gays and lesbians from adopting children—he often played against stereotype. He argued for new funding for school arts- and music-education programs and pushed an expensive health-care fund for poor kids. (Once obese, Huckabee lost 110 pounds while governor and traveled the state preaching the virtues of diet and exercise.) He urged a gas-tax hike to fix the state's crumbling highways, a move voters approved in a ballot measure. When the state Supreme Court ordered him to put more money into the state's failing schools, Huckabee raised the sales taxes to pay for it.

Huckabee says he had to do it; the court left him no choice. But a lot of Republicans in the state were livid. They dubbed him "Tax Hike Mike." Betsy Hagan, Arkansas chairman of the conservative Eagle Forum, says Huckabee is no small-government Republican. "He was a liberal when it came to taxes," she says. "He spent and spent." Huckabee says he cut taxes "90 times" as governor. But he is anything but a tax-cut zealot. In his campaign book, "From Hope to Higher Ground," he attacks Bush-like tax cuts for the rich, which he says are based on a "false and callous assumption that the poorest people in our nation … can somehow afford to patiently wait while someone else's wealth eventually splashes onto them."

Some Arkansas conservatives also tag him as soft on crime for supporting the controversial 1997 parole of Wayne Dumond, a convicted rapist who then raped and murdered another woman. Huckabee says he "feels terrible" about what happened, but is quick to note that he put more offenders to death than any other Arkansas governor. (He says he agonized over each one of them, and has been critical of "switch happy" governors.)