Politico.com

The Invisible Man

2015-10-30

<img src="http://static2.politico.com/dims4/default/77717cc/2147483647/resize/1160x%3E/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F45%2F1b%2Fe0fa3aa247478e4077bf53a32f01%2Fcampaignbadgenew.png" style="float:left; padding-right:25px" />Over the past few years, Mike Huckabee seemed to be positioning himself nicely for the 2016 Republican primary. He dredged up Barack Obama’s supposedly Muslim roots, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/huckabee-again-attacks-obama-worldview-evokes-madrassas/">explaining</a> that the president was so “very different” because “most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.” He managed to twin fears about public health and border security, <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/10/09/354890869/in-u-s-ebola-turns-from-a-public-health-issue-to-a-political-one">proclaiming</a> that “if someone with Ebola really wants to come to the U.S., just get to Mexico and walk right in.” And he even appeared to insult the women of Fox News, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/mike-huckabee-trashy-women-fox-news-114658">saying</a> they were “trashy” for using foul language (he later clarified he just meant women in New York generally).But whether it was birther dog-whistles, illegal immigrant scare-mongering or out-of-left-field vitriol toward female news anchors, an even more strident Donald Trump has outflanked him, stealing the headlines and harnessing the right-wing fury that should have been Huckabee’s for the taking.The last time Huckabee ran for president, in 2008, it was as a charismatic, evangelical, economic populist. He was a John Edwards for the right—minus the dishonor and smarm—and he emerged from nowhere to win the Iowa caucuses and finish second in the GOP primary. All he seemed to lack was money and exposure.Over the following seven years, thanks to his weekly Fox News show, his syndicated radio program, his seven published books, his anti-abortion movie, his miracle cure infomercials, his paid speaking gigs and a number of other brand-enhancing platforms, he’s become an unavoidable right-wing media presence. (And a considerably richer man: The guy who had reported assets of less than $700,000 in 2008 built himself a <a href="http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2010/12/04/mike-huckabees-3-million-home">$3 million</a> beachfront home in Florida in 2011.) As Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley put it, rather straightforwardly, at an event in August, “I see him on television almost more than I see anyone on television.”Huckabee, in other words, should have been set to improve on his 2008 finish. But then he landed in this specific presidential race—a pundit-defying, lowbrow spectacle that has left Huckabee and most of his fellow candidates confounded. Huckabee carefully mastered the right-wing media machine only to have been out-debated, out-polled and generally shunted to the margins of the Republican field. He has neither the cash-and-credibility advantage of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, nor the torch-and-pitchfork appeal of Trump and Carly Fiorina. If the 2016 presidential race and its bevy of GOP candidates is a three-ring circus, then Huckabee is its vanishing act.Which is why on a Tuesday in early September, he has traveled to the 4,200-person hamlet of Grayson, Kentucky, to protest the imprisonment of Christian martyr and political miscreant Kim Davis. There’s a national holiday feel to the rally Huckabee has put together. Public schools have been given the day off. TV trucks and church vans clog the town’s central artery. An electronic billboard outside a Hardee’s flashes “Welcome Gov. Huckabee” when it isn’t flashing “$1 mozzarella cheese sticks.”Huckabee, who has assembled a stacked roster of Christian luminaries to appear alongside him, seems to have put a lot of thought into this event. And with good reason: It represents a rare opportunity to drown out the rest of the Republican field. Or try to, at least. When fellow 2016 aspirant Ted Cruz shows up uninvited, Huckabee’s communications director, Alice Stewart, physically blocks him from the stage. “It’s our rally,” Stewart tells me after the event, peeved. “We wouldn’t come to try to speak at his rally.” After Cruz disappears, Huckabee grabs a microphone and addresses a crowd hoisting several handmade signs (“Supreme Court = The New ISIS of America!”) and many wooden crosses. “Today we gather—we fought—so we could rally and maybe get the attention of not only a judge, but of the world,” he says, his face flushing. “To say, ‘America is not dead and those of us who love this country are not walking away, are not running away, are not hiding.’” The buzzing throng, the national media presence, the VIP (-ish) guest list: This should have been Huckabee’s big moment. And yet, the rally underwhelms. Not long before it began, a judge decided to, well, free Kim Davis. Great news for the Rowan County clerk, who was jailed for refusing to marry gay couples, but it ends up rendering the whole exercise kind of pointless. “If you have to put someone in jail,” Huckabee says, directing his comments to the judge, “I volunteer to go. Let me go!” Huckabee’s exhortation feels somewhat diminished by the fact that Davis, no longer in jail, is standing behind him. A week later, with Davis in fresh clothes and back at work, Huckabee’s national poll numbers are still stuck around 5 percent.Huckabee’s struggles may owe to an increasingly unforgiving political landscape; since he last ran, he has witnessed the rise of the Tea Party, the birth of super PACs and the eruption of whatever nativist fervor Trump has awakened in the American electorate. But they may also reflect the unexpected toll of his niche media dilettantism. “Once you’re kind of a host of a TV show,” says his 2008 Iowa chair Bob Vander Plaats, “people don’t see you transition from that to the president of the United States.”Huckabee, though, is finding it hard to get seen at all.***The first time I see Mike Huckabee on the campaign trail, the nation is in the throes of Ashley Madison fever. The OkCupid of infidelity has just been hacked, and among its users is <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/20/us/josh-duggar-ashley-madison/">Josh Duggar</a>, one of the cast members of the Christian-themed reality show 19 Kids and Counting. Huckabee, a friend of the family, had (obliquely) <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/josh-duggar-mike-huckabee-defends-19-kids-counting/story?id=31236959">defended</a> Duggar the last time he transgressed (child molestation, his own sisters).It’s late August, and Huckabee is set to address a small group at a VFW post in Waterloo, Iowa. (Befitting his avuncular style, his campaign events are dubbed “Huckabee Huddles.”) Before the candidate arrives, a local TV news reporter asks Huckabee to comment on the most recent Duggar revelation. “Well, I’ve never supported what he did,” Huckabee says. “My support was friendship with his family. … He’s got to pay for his sins.” Perhaps he is still preoccupied with Duggar’s sins when he takes the microphone at the VFW; within a few minutes, Huckabee offers an unsolicited comment about his relationship with mass media. “Some of these idiots who write columns and talk about it, they say, ‘Well, I think some of these people running for president, they’re not really serious about being president. They’re looking to raise their profile so they can maybe get a TV show, a book deal or maybe do some speeches,’” Huckabee says, dressed in cowboy boots and a boxy black pallbearer suit. “I’m thinking, ‘Really?’ I had a television show. I had a book deal. I was making all the speeches I could possibly do.”The point he’s trying to make here is that he’s running for the right reasons. Left unsaid is what Huckabee hoped to accomplish with those book deals and TV shows and paid speeches in the first place. In 2007, Huckabee <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/magazine/16huckabee.html?pagewanted=all">told the New York Times Magazine</a> that he’d be happy to retire and run a “bait shop on a lake.” When I ask him why he did not, in fact, go run a bait shop, he smiles and tells me television paid better. “You know, it was really that I had offers,” he says. “When the campaign ended, it wasn’t that I went out hustling people. I had several offers from at least three networks to come on board.”Huckabee has long grasped the usefulness of broadcast media. When he was 14 years old, Huckabee was hired as a DJ for his local radio station KXAR. The manager of the station, Haskell Jones, was among the only Republicans in Democrat-dominated Hope (also Bill Clinton’s hometown). “Haskell at 7:30 in the morning would do a little opinion piece, maybe a couple minutes, during, say, Watergate,” says Ben Downs, another teenage KXAR veteran. “We saw that Haskell was the only Republican in the town of 10,000. But we saw that people would listen to him. No one went to work in the morning without listening to what Haskell was saying.”In 1975, Huckabee graduated from nearby Ouachita Baptist University, where he majored in religion and minored in speech. After a brief stint at a seminary in Texas, he took a job as a public relations man for the pioneering televangelist James Robison. In the spring of 1979, Robison was booted off a Dallas TV station for delivering an anti-gay sermon, calling homosexuality “a perversion of the highest order”; the federal Fairness Doctrine demanded he give equal time on his program to gay rights groups if he insisted on disparaging them. “I said the homosexual movement at that time proved to have some health ramifications,” Robison tells me, “and I was kicked off television with the Fairness Doctrine, and the homosexuals were given all of my time. Mike was in the middle of that battle.”Robison dispatched Huckabee to help organize a “Freedom Rally” that spring in Dallas designed to restore him to the airwaves. Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell, among other right-wing luminaries, showed up. “I could see almost 40 years ago that the country was moving in a very hostile manner towards people of faith and doctrines of faith that are 1,000 years old,” Huckabee says. “Yet people want to adjust the scripture to an ever-changing culture.” Christian victimization is one of Huckabee’s big themes. In his Huddles, he sometimes equates the abortion of fetuses to the Islamic State’s persecution of Christians. In his latest book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Grits-Gravy-Mike-Huckabee/dp/1250060990">God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy</a>, he identifies Chick-fil-A’s CEO Dan Cathy and Duck Dynasty paterfamilias Phil Robertson, both criticized for opposing gay marriage, as “new American outcasts.” And then of course, there’s Kim Davis.But more than that, it seems, the Robison episode left him suspicious of an ostensibly balanced mainstream media. “His show is a Christian television show, and he made a comment that would not have been controversial at the time, that homosexuality was a sin,” Huckabee says. “The station said, well, you can’t say that on the air. Well, that is pretty shocking. What else can’t you say? This is both a religious liberty issue, but also quite frankly a free speech issue.” After leaving Robison’s side, and side gigs in advertising, PR and ghostwriting, Huckabee spent the next 12 years as a Baptist minister, during which he also established television stations, broadcast out of his churches in Pine Bluff and Texarkana, Arkansas. His TV ministries, in turn, helped him land a gig as president of the Arkansas State Baptist Convention, which in turn propelled him into politics. “I had every intention of being in full-time evangelism-communications,” he said in 1990. “The two complement each other greatly.”But according to his authorized biographer, Scott Lamb, whose book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Huckabee-Authorized-Biography-Scott-Lamb-ebook/dp/B00WBNJTZ6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445437444&sr=1-1&keywords=Huckabee++scott+lamb">Huckabee</a> will be released in November, Huckabee wasn’t certain he could sustain a Robison-level cash flow, and he began to contemplate a career in public office.After a failed Senate run in 1992, Huckabee won a narrow election the next year for lieutenant governor, then quickly moved up when Governor Jim Guy Tucker was implicated in a Whitewater-related scandal. As an unelected Republican in a yellow-dog Democrat state stacked with Clinton appointees, Huckabee assumed a siege mentality, especially when it came to media relations. “Email was just getting started in force back then,” Lamb says. “So they developed this connection where they could bypass the gatekeepers in Little Rock, who were very hostile to Huckabee at the beginning, and work directly with all these small, more conservative papers in little towns.” Huckabee applied the same no-middleman approach to his broadcast media operation. “In the late 1990s, technology had come a thousand miles,” says his former communications director Rex Nelson. “We were producing our own 30-minute television show every month. We had a weekly radio address that was taped. A monthly radio call-in show, monthly television call-in show. He was just so good on radio and television, we used all those formats as extensively as we could.”Or, as his longtime journalistic sparring partner Max Brantley, of the lefty Arkansas Times, puts it, “Well, the old joke was don’t get between Mike Huckabee and a TV camera.”*** Whether or not it actually helped him pick up any votes in 2008, Huckabee was unique among Republican candidates in his ability to buckle the knees of left-leaning journalists. Matt Taibbi wrote a Rolling Stone profile called “<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/my-favorite-nut-job-20110325">My Favorite Nut Job</a>.” Another confessed admirer, Bob Moser, who covered Huckabee in 2008 for the Nation, recently wrote a tortured piece called “<a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/2015/06/05/Liberals-Who-Love-Huckabee">Liberals Who Love Huckabee</a>.” Whatever his exact politics on abortion, the thinking went, Huckabee’s record in Arkansas—he proposed hiking sales taxes to fund schools, supported in-state tuition rates for undocumented immigrants and granted more than a thousand clemencies to prisoners—could be quite progressive. And in 2008, he backed it up on the trail, memorably suggesting to Jay Leno that Mitt Romney reminded voters of “the guy who laid them off.”But after the election, something flipped. Once he landed on television, Huckabee, like a kind of news aggregator at a Puritan content farm, began to bottom-feed for his moralism. Miley Cyrus, Rihanna and Beyoncé <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/07/01/81-things-that-mike-huckabee-has-denounced/">got the rod</a> for their suggestive dancing, clothing and lyrics, respectively. He attacked Jamie Lynn Spears and Natalie Portman for having children out of wedlock. “I think people made an assumption when they heard his voice and saw that ‘gol-ly,’ just how great, nice and friendly he is,” says Lamb. “We’ve got eight years now that we’ve known Huckabee, so they understand him. ‘Yup, he actually is a right-wing culture warrior.’”Eventually, Huckabee’s diatribes began to sound increasingly forced. In 2009, he <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/huckabee-criticizes-obama-for-bowing/">told Katie Couric</a> he was “offended” by President Obama’s “deep bow, to the waist” to Japanese emperor Akihito. A couple of years later, he was <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mike-huckabee-obama-grew-up-in-kenya/">asserting</a> on talk radio that Obama was raised in Kenya. A few months ago, he <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/25/huckabee-obama-marching-israelis-to-door-of-oven/">told Breitbart.com</a> that Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran would march Israelis “to the door of the oven.”Yet, it’s also become apparent that no amount of studied fringe rhetoric can quite satisfy primary voters this cycle. And no matter how out-there he sounds, it’s clear that Huckabee—the only communications professional-cum-Baptist preacher in the race—can’t, or won’t, descend into full-on fire-and-brimstone demagoguery.Two days after his event at the VFW, Huckabee stages another huddle at a bakery in Sheldon, in the ultraconservative northwest corner of Iowa. During his pre-speech flesh-pressing session, Huckabee encounters a woman in a tie-dyed T-shirt named Rhonda Westphal.“I’m between you and Trump,” she says. “Where does Trump stand on abortion?”Huckabee declines to engage, telling her: “It would probably be inappropriate for me to answer another of the candidates’ positions.” Moving on, Westphal, 65, tells Huckabee flatly, “One thing I like about Trump is he’s a businessman. Would know how to get us out of debt. People are sick and tired of the career politicians.”“I understand that,” Huckabee says, wearying visibly. “He’s struck a real nerve with people.”“You know who he reminds me of?” she continues. “Old ‘Give ’em hell’ Harry Truman. Remember Harry Truman?”“I gotta tell you,” Huckabee replies, slowly backing away, “I wasn’t around for when Truman was president.” Huckabee, for the rest of the event, is plagued by Trump. During a question-and-answer session, he is asked, in succession: for his position on illegal immigration; if he’d build a wall on the border; and if he would make Mexico foot the bill. After the third question—a reference to the centerpiece of Trump’s immigration policy—Huckabee finally loses patience. “Can I get Mexico to pay for it?” he says. “The honest answer is no. How would we do that? I’d love to tell you all ‘Yes, of course we could.’ But I might as well tell you the Iranians will buy you a new home. They’re not going to do that.” Regardless of when exactly Trump’s presidential ambitions flame out, he has ginned up in the Republican primary electorate a populism that has little in common with Huckabee’s own blue-collar appeal. Even after seven years of zealous on-air political sermonizing, in other words, Huckabee seems to have lost the Fox News primary. “At the moment,” says strategist Dick Morris, who worked on Huckabee’s 1993 lieutenant governor campaign in Arkansas, “it is true that voters want much more red meat than Mike Huckabee is serving up.” Adds Huckabee’s 2008 campaign chairman Ed Rollins, “I think he’s a victim, like many of them are, of the Trump phenomenon.” Fed up, Huckabee has begun framing his stump speech around the need to nominate the precise opposite of The Donald. Post-bakery, Huckabee’s presence is requested at an unlikely lakeside tiki bar 50 miles away, where Chuck Grassley is hosting a townhall-style shindig for a few of the presidential contenders. After Grassley thanks the ultraconservative audience and urges them not to cannibalize the Republican Party, please, Huckabee launches into his civics lesson.“There are a lot of folks who are angry at their government. I understand that. I’m upset with it myself,” Huckabee tells several thousand political junkies picking at chicken patties. “And some folks are so angry they say, ‘I don’t care if a person can govern, I don’t care if a person can lead a government, and has the experience of taking on the Clintons in the most hostile of circumstances.’ … And I understand that there is a seething rage out there among many people in our electorate today that says, ‘Just burn it down, bring it down, we don’t care.’ But that’s a foolish position for us to take.” Huckabee’s lecture elicits a good deal of dutiful nodding, but not much more.A few minutes later, Fiorina, Trump-like in her proud nonexperience, stands up, delivers a stirring speech and receives a standing ovation.“The people here tonight came here to see Carly Fiorina,” says a state senator named David Johnson, who came here with his girlfriend Becky and who at the time was supporting former Texas Governor Rick Perry but has since switched to Fiorina. “I think the reaction of the crowd pretty much told that. We love Governor Huckabee, and he has so many friends here in Iowa. But I believe that it’s going to be very difficult for him.” ***Huckabee opens the door of a bathroom and makes a startled face. “Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am.” Then he grins at us and walks in. “He did that in the hotel room the other night,” says a member of his communications team, Hogan Gidley, eating a salad. “Scared me.” Huckabee’s small staff is backstage at Winthrop University, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, following an early September Q&A with the state’s attorney general. When Huckabee emerges, I ask him why he’s decided to go with a pro-governance stump speech.“There are people who know me more as a guy who had a talk show on Fox than they know me as a guy who governed a very tough state,” he replies. “My qualification to run for president and to be president is not, ‘Gee, I had a really successful talk show.’” He’s even more intent on downplaying his evangelical roots. “Um, it’s why also, really, I find it amazing when people say, ‘Mike Huckabee, former pastor.’ I’m thinking, ‘Really?’ … Not only is that disingenuous, but also blatantly dishonest for someone to make that part of the biography and narrative.”It’s a bizarre claim, not just because he once led the Baptist convention of an entire state, but because he leaps at every opportunity to defend a Christianity he says is under attack. Over the summer, he <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/19/politics/mike-huckabee-church-south-carolina/">told a black congregation</a> that the country didn’t have a “skin problem,” but a “sin problem.” Within the span of a week in September, he ripped both Obama’s nomination of a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/us/eric-fanning-civilian-adviser-named-secretary-of-the-army.html?_r=0">gay Army secretary</a> and a limited edition bag of <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2015/09/25/huckabee-asks-frito-lay-to-drop-pro-lgbt-raimbow-doritos-partnership/">rainbow-colored Doritos</a>.Still, despite Republican voters’ apparent non-preference for people with public-sector know-how, Huckabee is sensitive to the perception that he’s a fringe candidate, unable, as he was in 2008, to win over non-evangelicals. “I think the big change [from 2008] is the secularization of his agenda,” Morris says. “I think he felt trapped by the media as an evangelical. This guy was a governor for 10 years—as long as Bill Clinton was a governor—and all anybody wants to ask him about is creationism and choice and Planned Parenthood and Kim whatever her name is.”If Huckabee feels that Kim-whatever-her-name-is is both his ticket to ride and his possible undoing, he’s straddled a similar line when it comes to his post-2008 employment history. On the one hand, his media career has clearly helped his exposure. “What we’re finding about the Fox TV show, which is very interesting,” Gidley says, “is now when somebody says something nasty about the governor, what we find is that people in these gatherings say, ‘Hey, that’s not true, I’ve watched you for six years.’ So it solidified him as likable, and also solidified a lot of his positions.”Then again, Huckabee resists the notion that his show, which aired on Saturday nights for six years, was at all engineered for political gain. “I’ve never done anything because I was trying to manipulate my way into the next decision,” he insists. “I didn’t cancel guests or schedule guests on my show because I thought they were good or bad for me politically. When I worked for Fox my sole focus was to put together the best show I could.” It gets even murkier when you try to disentangle the rest of Huckabee’s assorted business ventures from his political ambitions. If you peruse the federal financial disclosure <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate.php?id=N00007539">report</a> Huckabee was required to file this year, you’ll notice the names of five companies: Blue Diamond Horizons, Blue Diamond Media, Blue Diamond Travel, Blue Diamond Rentals and Blue Diamond Communications. It is through these five corporations that Huckabee conducts his business. (“Diamond” because Arkansas is the only state with an active diamond mine. “Blue” because it’s Huckabee’s favorite color.)The lecture circuit portion of Huckabee Inc. stems fairly straightforwardly from his social conservative bona fides. Most of his speeches—he netted $975,700 from 44 speeches in 2014 and early 2015—were delivered to groups like “Pregnancy Help 4 U” and “Central Texas Pregnancy Care Center.” Beyond that, it’s unclear what’s strictly business and what’s not.For the past several years, Huckabee has also led <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mike-huckabee-tour-guide-in-the-holy-land/2015/02/22/f0395335-1716-4f7f-9ce6-5e12c781d823_story.html">touristic pilgrimages</a> to Israel, the most recent in February. The website <a href="http://israelexperience2016.com/about">TheIsraelExperience2016.com</a> currently advertises a 10-day trip in February during which “the Bible will come alive for you as never before.” Huckabee’s name is nowhere to be found on the website, but checks for $5,250 can be made out to Blue Diamond Travel. The versatile Blue Diamond Travel has also received roughly $30,000 from Huckabee’s super PAC, Pursuing America’s Greatness, which the campaign says is “reimbursement for fundraising, meetings and events prior to his announcement for a presidential run.” Paul Ryan, senior counsel at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, says that such a payment might still be illegal if Huckabee used it to “test the waters” for his presidential run.The Blue Diamond conglomerate has propped up Huckabee’s Hollywood ambitions too. In 2011, he starred in an anti-abortion film called <a href="http://www.thegiftoflifemovie.com/">The Gift of Life</a>, co-produced by his son David and Citizens United, the conservative documentary studio. (David Huckabee runs “several” of the Blue Diamonds, including Blue Diamond Travel, according to the campaign.) Not long after, Citizens United sent out a <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/mike-huckabee-obama-surrounds-himself-with-moral">fundraising letter</a>, signed by Huckabee, stating that Obama had “surrounded himself with morally repugnant political whores with misshapen values and gutter-level ethics.” Huckabee <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/05/huckabee-demands-fundraising-letter-pulled-123688">disavowed</a> the communiqué, and Citizens United President David Bossie told me, “It was unimportant to me and therefore I don’t specifically recall it.” But it does bring us to another intriguing aspect of Huckabee’s business portfolio.Through his personal website, frequently promoted on Fox News, Huckabee has <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/us/politics/huckabee-pursues-unconventional-ways-to-fund-a-campaign.html">accumulated</a> email addresses of thousands of supporters. That list, in turn, was rented out to companies that would hawk their wares to unsuspecting fans. Among the emails Huckabee supporters received: for-sale stock tips from Tobin Smith, who was fired from the Fox Business Network for profiting off his advice; a biblically-based cancer cure; and post-apocalyptic “survival food” provisions. Huckabee also cut his own radio and video ads earlier this year for a cinnamon-based diabetes cure. “We were a publication,” Huckabee explains. “That’s how we pay the bills.” In general, the more Huckabee blurred the lines between ideology and entrepreneurship—something he specialized in before getting into politics—the more he found himself linked with some of the lesser lights of the Christian right. In addition to his fealty to reality stars like Duggar and Robertson, Huckabee became a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-rodda/huckabee-david-barton-gunpoint_b_842506.html">fervent booster</a> of evangelical author and revisionist historian David Barton, whose 2012 book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Jefferson-Lies-Exposing-Believed/dp/1595554599">The Jefferson Lies</a> was itself <a href="http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/10/bartons-jefferson-lies-book-yanked/">made up of lies</a>, and pulled by its publisher. (Also Huckabee’s publisher, for what it’s worth.) “We have done many events together over the years, including that he has spoken for events for our 501(c)3,” Barton said of their relationship, via email. “We’ve ridden horses together, broken bread together at many meals, laughed a lot together, planned many serious things together, and we have done many radio and television interviews together.”Lamb, Huckabee’s biographer, sees a potential connection between his presidential run and his penchant for questionable partnerships. “Some of that stuff looks hokey,” Lamb admits. “But let’s be honest—God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy? We’re talking about that base. I think he knows he has to go through the GOP nomination and probably in the states that he could win, all things being equal, it’s an over-50-year-old, white, Protestant, flyover country, overweight probably, has diabetes probably crowd. There’s a lot of things he’s appealing to.”Rollins suspects financial, rather than political, anxieties explain the diverse interests of Huckabee Inc. “The thing is, he’s supporting the whole family,” Rollins says, pointing out that his son David is in charge of “the business stuff,” his daughter Sarah Sanders is his campaign manager, and his son-in-law Bryan Sanders is his media consultant. (Janet, his wife, is also named a salaried employee of Blue Diamond Horizons on Huckabee’s disclosure form.) “It was everybody getting in and everybody needing to be taken care of, and the money was easy.”“It’s absurd to imply the governor was supporting any of his children,” Gidley wrote in an email. “They are all grown, well-educated professionals who have carved out their own careers and livelihoods.”Rollins—and this is probably obvious by now—no longer advises Huckabee. He encouraged Huckabee to run in 2012, as a populist foil to Romney, and seems more than a little annoyed that Huckabee chose to stay at Fox rather than take his advice. “He gets to live a different lifestyle than he ever thought about living,” Rollins says. “I said to him one time: You say, ‘God told me to run.’ God didn’t tell you to buy a house in Florida and live on the beach.’” Or, to quote Matthew 6:24, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” ***Huckabee is a notoriously bad fundraiser. Fortunately for Huckabee, there are super PACS that can do that for you now. Unfortunately for Huckabee, his super PAC has raised just <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate.php?id=N00007539">$3.6 million</a>, almost all of it from two very Huckabee-ish donors: Ronald Cameron, the owner of a poultry company, and Sherry Herschend, whose family runs Christian-accented amusement parks. Short of a surprise infusion from fellow friend-of-Israel Sheldon Adelson. Huckabee’s strategy is to pray that success in Iowa and South Carolina, where he has strong grassroots support, can carry over to the Dixie-heavy “SEC Primary” in early March. (Jeb Bush’s super PAC, for comparison’s sake, is sitting on <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00571372">$100ish million</a>.) “He does need a game-changer,” Vander Plaats told me before the second GOP debate. “And I think it’s going to be from the debate stage.”It wasn’t.While Trump and Fiorina <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=110756">insulted</a> each other’s business experience and Bush talked about smoking weed and Dr. Ben Carson equivocated about vaccines, Huckabee mostly stood in the corner and said nothing; according to a <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/scott-walker-blew-his-last-chance-the-debate/">FiveThirtyEight.com tally</a>, he tied with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for the fewest questions, and was never directly addressed by any of his opponents. A bewildered-looking Janet Huckabee, sitting directly behind moderator Jake Tapper’s left shoulder, seemed to get more screen time than her husband.When I call Huckabee and ask him to explain why he got drowned out in Simi Valley, he sounds more exasperated than I’ve ever heard him. “I don’t think it has anything to do with rhetorical skills,” he says from Little Rock. “Some of the criteria by which [voters are] even evaluating candidates has no basis in anything we have seen in history. It’s almost as if you should go out and say, ‘I’ve never seen the Washington Monument, I’ve never paid my taxes.’ The more you can prove you have no idea what government does, the better you are.”It seemed peculiar, then, that several days later he released a strip-club-themed campaign spot in which he promised to “burn down” the “Washington political machine.” Or maybe it wasn’t so peculiar. Huckabee has staked his recent private-sector career on the very same partisan media infrastructure that’s helped advance the GOP’s prolonged know-nothing phase. And yet, in trying to be at once a statesman and a cultural warrior, he finds himself in a muddle, neither the compassionate underdog of 2008, nor the red-meat nihilist the primary electorate seems to crave.He seems competent. And he seems like a nice person. But most of all, he seems like a guy who’s going to land a Fox News show in six months.