A Pastor’s True Calling

Huckabee has gotten noticed in part by politely exploiting the voters' dissatisfaction with his rivals. He has positioned himself as the only true conservative in the campaign, the one candidate who hasn't conveniently inched rightward on issues like abortion or stem cells just in time for '08. He believes the Bible is the inerrant word of God and says creationism should be taught in schools alongside evolution. All the same, he is careful not to come off as all hellfire and brimstone. As he likes to say, "I'm a conservative, but I'm not mad at anybody about it." Huckabee hopes his charm will help overcome any qualms secular voters or those of other faiths might have about the possibility of a minister in the Oval Office.

Huckabee jokes that he used to have trouble getting anyone to take his picture with a cell phone. Now he is chased by reporters and television crews wherever he goes. Not all the attention is welcome. His political rivals aren't ignoring him anymore—Romney in particular has come at him as soft on taxes and illegal immigrants. "The other campaigns are just in almost frantic mode cranking out negative releases and throwing oppo research," Huckabee tells NEWSWEEK. "Being ignored is sometimes more pleasant, but being attacked means you're doing better."

Though he likes to fashion himself as a folksy country preacher, he spent a decade as the Republican governor in overwhelmingly Democratic Arkansas, a state where politics is rough and memories are long. Over the years, Huckabee made plenty of enemies, not all of them Democrats. Small-government Republicans in Arkansas, who fought the governor over immigration, education spending and taxes, have long complained that he is really a closet welfare-liberal. As a presidential candidate, he has all but declared war on big-business Republicans, believing the standard GOP mantra of tax cuts and unfettered free markets has made the rich richer at the expense of ordinary Americans.

At times he can sound like John Edwards, promising health care for low-income children and vowing to defend wage earners against Wall Street greed and runaway CEO pay. Alone among the GOP candidates, he speaks emotionally about the legacy of Jim Crow and the dangers of ignoring lingering racism. It is wrong, he says, that inner-city blacks routinely receive harsher sentences than affluent whites arrested for the same crime.

For some Huckabee detractors, the trouble isn't his policies but his personal character. Far from his public image as approachable and easygoing, they describe a thin-skinned pol with a short temper and a petty streak who sought to punish those who crossed him. Huckabee has characteristically tried to shrug off these stories with a joke: "It's like my old pastor used to tell me, 'When they're kicking you in the rear, it's just proving you're still out front'."

As a candidate running on morality, he might have a harder time slipping free of long-simmering allegations about his own ethics. As governor, Huckabee battled numerous charges that he improperly took cash, expensive clothing and other gifts from friends and contributors. He was sanctioned or fined five times by the Arkansas Ethics Commission. As lieutenant governor, he received tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from a secretive Texas fund that was financed, NEWSWEEK has learned, in large part by a major tobacco company that was looking for help in defeating a possible national cigarette tax. Though the contributions were legal, and Huckabee says he reported the income, he has consistently refused to identify any of the donors. He tells NEWSWEEK he did not know about any tobacco money. But two of the officers who ran the fund tell NEWSWEEK that Huckabee's account is not credible. One of them, a former Huckabee strategist, says the governor personally met with a tobacco executive about the fund. Huckabee's rivals are clearly hoping to goad him enough that he'll strike back and expose a darker side of his character they say he has so far kept tucked away. The way Huckabee sees it, all the attention—the good and the bad—is a sign that he is where God wants him to be.