In Iowa, Mike Huckabee '08 isn't Pat Robertson '88
Posted December 16, 2007
By Frank Lockwood
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
DES MOINES, Iowa — It’s a story line we’ve seen before: A Republican preacher toes to Iowa and launches a longshot campaign for the White House, firing up evangelical voters and scaring the pants off the party’s country-club wing.
The Rev. Pat Robertson did it in 1988, and the Rev. Mike Huckabee’s doing it again in 2007.
Robertson finished second in Iowa and then faded. Huckabee, pollsters say, may actually win here.
There are, of course, similarities between Robertson and Huckabee. Both are Southerners, evangelicals, social conservatives and ordained by the Southern Baptist Convention. Both hinted, at times, that God was responsible for their improbable electoral successes. Both have denounced abortion and homosexuality.
But there are substantial differences, too.
“The big difference,” Huckabee said during an interview last month, “is that Pat Robertson had never held a public office. He went from being on television to running for president.”
Huckabee, on the other hand, was Arkansas governor for a decade.
Drake University political-science professor Dennis Goldford says both men had similar political agendas, but that Huckabee is a far better salesman, a “religious conservative without fangs.”
“[Huckabee] knows how to talk to people, he’s got a way with words. He’s genial, he’s charming, and he sounds sincere,” Goldford said. “Robertson was prone to say things that struck a lot of people as bizarre and scary. So far, Huckabee hasn’t done that.”
University of Akron professor John Green said that Huckabee’s positions “do not inspire fear. They seem very conventional. They seem to be in the mainstream of political belief, whether one agrees with them or not.”
The candidate’s style of religion is also different. “Robertson, although a Baptist, is a charismatic, so he believes in speaking in tongues and the gifts of the spirit and most Baptists do not believe in that. In fact, at one point, Baptists saw that as vaguely heretical behavior,” said Robertson biographer David Marley of Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, Calif. “In terms of the Baptist church, he was outside the mainstream.”
Huckabee’s Southern Baptist credentials, on the other hand, are impeccable. Unlike Robertson, he attended one of the denomination’s leading seminaries — Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He pastored Baptist churches in his home state and led the Arkansas Baptist State Convention.
Spirituality differences
Robertson, whose Virginia Beach-based 700 Club airs nationally, was unable to rally the nation’s 16.3 million Southern Baptists behind him. Huckabee, on the other hand, has been endorsed by several of the denomination’s former presidents. In November, he was allowed to give a sermon at the largest Dallas-area Southern Baptist megachurch, giving his campaign a high-octane boost at a key time in the race.
Huckabee’s brand of faith is more marketable on the campaign trail, University of Akron’s Green suggests. “I think Robertson did frighten a lot of people,” he said. “Although Mike Huckabee is a deeply religious man, he’s much more conventional in his religiosity than Pat Robertson.”
Robertson, for example, claimed his prayers in September 1985 had helped change the path of a hurricane, steering it away from Virginia. Unfortunately, instead of blowing out to sea, Hurricane Gloria headed straight towards Massachusetts and New Hampshire primary voters.
The Virginian also made apocalyptic prophecies, supposedly from God, about foreign policy and the economy, that routinely failed to come to pass. He also did faith-healing via television, claiming to cure a variety of ailments, including hemorrhoids.
“That’s a good thing, to heal hemorrhoids,” Green says, “but a lot of Americans found it hard to take this seriously.”
Huckabee’s spirituality is evangelical, but closer to the American mainstream.
Huckabee doesn’t heal people or deliver prophecies, either.
“Can’t say that I have,” he said during that interview last month, after pausing and smiling broadly. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I just don’t believe I have any background in that.”
Uncomfortable with Robertson’s theology and unconvinced that he was presidential material, most evangelicals failed to rally around him two decades ago. When the National Association of Evangelicals surveyed its board members, Robertson wasn’t their first pick. He placed fourth.
Many born-again voters, including Jerry Falwell, backed George Herbert Walker Bush. Others sided with Sen. Bob Dole.
In this election, Huckabee has far broader support.
Evangelical support
“Huckabee is a clear first choice [among evangelical leaders], but there is concern that he is too far behind in the polls to catch up,” the National Association of Evangelicals declared in October after surveying its board of directors. “If he does well in the Iowa caucuses or early primaries then evangelicals may suddenly rally to his support.”
Twenty years ago, Pat Robertson welcomed — and later regretted — receiving the backing of fellow televangelist Jimmy Swaggart. Soon thereafter, Swaggart was caught with a prostitute at a New Orleans-area motel, destroying his own ministry and making the endorsement a big campaign negative.
To make matters worse, Robertson blamed the Bush campaign for exposing the scandal, a claim that “indicated a bit of a paranoid streak,” says Bill Martin, a professor of religion and public policy at Rice University.
This time, Huckabee is supported by televangelist Kenneth Copeland, a prosperity-gospel preacher who is under investigation by Sen. Charles Grassley. But he also gets high marks from The Purpose-Driven Life author Rick Warren.
Warren, a fellow Southern Baptist, recently called Huckabee “a man of vision, compassion and integrity.”
“He’s definitely presidential material,” Warren said.
Two decades ago, the Christian conservative movement was still fairly new and viewed with suspicion in some Republican quarters. “We got a significant amount of castigation, brow-beating, so to speak,” says Drew Ivers, Robertson’s 1988 Iowa campaign chairman. “The country-club Republicans weren’t at all receptive.”
Today, these evangelical insurgents are part of the backbone of the Iowa Republican party. “Instead of being on the outside looking in, they’re on the inside looking out,” Ivers said. Thanks in part to Robertson’s pioneering work, Iowa’s Christian conservatives are true power brokers.
“They’re sort of the mainstream of the Republican party now,” said Des Moines Register political columnist David Yepsen.
Under their leadership, the party has moved to the right. According to a Des Moines Register poll, Yepsen said, 97 percent of likely Republican caucus goers are Christians and 71 percent say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
Invisible campaign
When he sought the presidency in 1988, Robertson called his supporters an “invisible army.” Pollsters couldn’t find them, and pundits questioned whether they really existed, but on caucus night, they turned out en masse, helping the TV preacher finish second with 26 percent.
This time, Huckabee doesn’t have an invisible army. He’s had, until recently, an invisible campaign.
Through October, he had no commercials. No direct mail. A skeletal staff. A near-empty bank account. Few yard signs, few bumper stickers, few buttons. Now, the money’s beginning to flow — Huckabee has raised more than three million dollars online in the last 45 days. But he’s still playing catch-up.
Outside Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate in Johnston, sign-waving partisans for candidates Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Ron Paul lined the sidewalk, hyping their favorites. But Huckabee loyalists, the Register noted, were noticeably absent.
And a week ago in downtown Des Moines, Huckabee’s first-floor campaign headquarters was unlocked and unmanned for at least a half-hour, less than a month before the caucuses.
At this point in the 1988 campaign, Robertson had a formidable statewide organization and had gathered the names and numbers of tens of thousands of like-minded Iowans. His campaign had mailed 100,000 cassette tapes bearing a message from Robertson. His ads had flooded the market.
Yet he never topped 13 percent in the Des Moines Register's polls.
Huckabee, on the other hand, has soared into first place in the most recent Iowa polls — despite being outspent 20 to one, by some estimates.
Ricky Dean, chairman of the Mahaska County Republican party, isn’t surprised that the North Little Rock preacher is faring better than the Virginia Beach televangelist: “I’d just like to say, from a conservative Christian standpoint, that Mike Huckabee just looks a whole lot better than Pat Robertson ever did.”