Double Down: Game Change 2012 (20 page)

For months, Barbour had seemed to be sprinting like a scalded dog toward yes. But all along, he was shadowed by doubt. He thought about former Tennessee senator and actor Fred Thompson, whose ballyhooed 2008 campaign had gone nowhere. He thought about Gingrich, whom he bumped into in Iowa, bubbling about the crowds coming to see him. (
Jesus, don’t let me run just because I get so full of myself because everybody’s listening
, Haley mused.) He thought about the general election—how winning could turn the endeavor into a ten-year commitment, with two on the trail, four in office, and four more if he were reelected. For a man his age, the presidency would amount to “a life sentence,” he said. Did Haley really want that? What about Marsha?
When does she get her turn?
he wondered.

Then there was the likelihood that he’d lose. It would be hard for
anybody
from Mississippi to beat the first black president, Barbour told Daniels, who didn’t disagree. And given the premium in the GOP on electability, that meant it would be difficult for a Mississippian to claim the nomination. Barbour thought back to 2008 and how Katrina had dashed his plans. In presidential politics, he believed, your time only comes around once, and maybe that was it—maybe, Haley thought, he’d missed his moment.

The next day, April 25, Barbour got on a conference call with his embryonic campaign team and pulled the plug. “I decided I don’t have the fire in my belly to make this race,” he said, choking up. “I hope I haven’t misled you all, or disappointed you too much.”

Actually, the people closest to Haley heaved a sigh of relief. Over the months of gearing up, most of them had become convinced that if he ran, he would be destroyed. Donors were already expressing misgivings about his
race-related blunders. (“He didn’t just touch the third rail,” said one. “He hugged the motherfucker.”) Sadly, reluctantly, Barbour’s inner circle concluded that a drinking, drawling, corpulent ex-lobbyist stood little chance of being elected president in modern America. In other words, that Haley had been right all along.

•   •   •

B
ARBOUR’S BAILING OUT WAS
good news for Huckabee in at least two ways. It left him as the only potential southern charmer in the field, and it opened up the possibility of Haley endorsing him, which Huckabee thought conceivable. A couple of weeks earlier, the two had chatted when Huckabee was down at Mississippi College for a speech. Huckabee’s daughter, Sarah, a political operative, had been angling for a job on Haley’s team, in case her dad chose not to run. The two men joked about that, and about Barbour becoming Huckabee’s campaign chairman if the decision went the other way.

Beyond their regional roots, silver tongues, and bulging waistlines, Huck and Haley were as different as could be. The former Arkansas governor was unimpeachably pious, a long-serving Baptist pastor. In terms of his policies, personality, and barely concealed resentments, he was a populist to his core. At political banquets, he often observed, I’ve got more in common with the people working in the kitchen than the ones at the head table. And unlike Barbour, Huckabee inspired trepidation in the Romneyites (because of his potency in the early states and with evangelicals) and the Obamans (because of his likability, folksiness, and optimism).

In 2008, that combination of qualities had carried Huckabee further than anyone expected: to second place in terms of delegates. (It made him crazy when pundits called Romney the runner-up. “Excuse me? Can you
add
?” he fumed.) Yet Huckabee was dismissed by the party’s big shots. His offers to campaign for McCain were ignored, and he wasn’t shortlisted for VP. Not long before the Republican convention, Huckabee received a call from the organizers, offering a speaking slot—five minutes to talk about education at 5:00 p.m. on the opening day.
They might as well ask me to set up a hot dog cart in front of the arena,
he thought.

The campaign had left Huckabee more than bruised; he was also
basically broke. To finance his bid, he had taken out a second mortgage on his house, cashed in his annuities, retirement plan, and life insurance, and run up a debt of nearly $100,000. So into Rove mode he went. In quick succession, Huckabee signed deals to be a political analyst and weekend host on Fox, do daily radio commentaries for ABC, and write a book. He started traveling constantly, Willy Loman style, giving speech after speech.

By the end of 2010, Huckabee Inc. had made him fiscally whole again—and then some. He and his wife, Janet, had grown up poor, and Huckabee had spent his adult life in the ministry and public service. For the first time, he had some bread in his basket and was enjoying the taste. Mike and Janet were building a reported $3 million beachside home down in Walton County, Florida, near Pensacola. When they inspected the property, they burst out giggling at their good fortune. The first apartment they shared had cost $40 a month, they reminded each other, and would have fit inside one of the closets of their manse-in-the-making.

All along, Huckabee was eyeing another presidential run—in 2016. But the events of 2010 caused him to revise his timetable. In Obamacare, Huckabee saw a defining moment of doom for the incumbent; in the Tea Party, he saw a populist rebellion in which many of those who were packing the pitchforks were also Christian conservatives. In his travels before the midterms, Huckabee was struck by the fame he had achieved by being on Fox. During the 2008 race, he rarely had been recognized in public except by political junkies. Now people were coming up to him on the street, in airports, and in restaurants, asking for his autograph or a photograph with him, telling him they loved what he said on the tube, beseeching him to run again.

The night after the midterms, Huckabee had dinner with Ed Rollins, who had been his 2008 campaign chairman, and told him he was raring to go. Rollins was a storied political strategist, the manager of Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984. Loquacious and pugnacious—Rollins titled his memoir
Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms
and posed on the cover wearing boxing gloves—he was sixty-seven but still appetent to be in the game.

Rollins saw a clear pathway to the nomination for Huck—and a last chance at glory for himself. A Reuters/Ipsos national poll at the end of 2010 ranked Huckabee as the most popular Republican in the country. He would
be unstoppable in Iowa and South Carolina, and with those wins in the bag, he could close the sale in the Sunshine State, his soon-to-be home. Rollins imagined headquartering the campaign in Tampa, where the GOP convention would be held. He insisted on total control, telling Huckabee that he was too old to have it any other way. Huckabee said, I wouldn’t do this without you, Ed.

Over the next several months, Huckabee, Rollins, and two other operatives met for dinner regularly to hash out the race. A forty-page memo on the field was prepared, which yielded a verdict that Rollins spelled out succinctly: “If you don’t run, Romney is going to be the nominee,” he said.

Huckabee’s bitterness toward his 2008 rival was unsurpassed, and owed in part to personal grievance. On the night that Huckabee took Iowa, Romney failed to call to congratulate him; when Huckabee extended that courtesy to Romney after losing to him in Michigan, he felt Mitt brushed him off. For two years, Huckabee stewed, until one day Romney phoned during his mending-fences phase. I didn’t do right by you, Mitt said. I apologize. I should have realized that’s the way the game is played.

Huckabee thanked Romney, who seemed sincere enough. But he couldn’t help suspecting that Mitt was thinking,
This guy is on television every week. He’s on radio every day. A lot of Republican voters pay attention to him, and I don’t want him telling everybody what a bum I am.

Huckabee’s bully Fox News pulpit had a major downside, though: his contract prevented him from taking any steps toward a candidacy. (In March 2011, Fox suspended Gingrich and Santorum, who also had deals with the network, for ramping up their campaigns.) So Huckabee had to keep his meetings on the down-low. In mid-April, when a dozen religious-right leaders flew to New York to exhort him to run and vow their support, Huckabee steered clear of the session, letting Rollins handle it.

The political world assumed he would pass, and that money was the reason. One day, Rove, who had a home of his own in Florida not far from where the Huckabees were building, drove over to take a peek at the construction project.
That ain’t a $3 million house—that’s a $6 million house,
Rove thought. And after doing some guesstimates regarding Huckabee Inc.’s revenues, Rove surmised,
No way he can afford to run.

Money was indeed on Huckabee’s mind, but the calculations were more
complicated. He realized that if he ran, he would have to sell the Florida property. Although doing so would have been painful for him and Janet, they were willing to take that step. The greater personal financial obstacle was regular income. Unlike Romney and other candidates who could live off of dividends, Huckabee had no stocks or bonds.
Everything I do for a living, every dime I make, ends the minute I become a candidate,
he thought.
No more speaking engagements, radio, or TV. How will we make it for two years?

Sometimes Rollins guilt-tripped Huckabee when he brought up these concerns. “God’s calling to you was ‘Go spend twenty years in a ministry and twelve years in a governorship, and you could be the first real moral man elected president,’” Rollins said. “You think God wants you just to go make money?” Other times he tried to placate his guy. “We’ll figure something out,” he said. But no solution was ever found to cover Mike and Janet’s monthly nut.

Equally confounding was the other side of the financial equation, which involved fund-raising. As governor, Huckabee had taken some moderate positions that the far right hated; he also had granted clemencies to prisoners who committed violent crimes after their release. Huckabee took hits for all of this in 2008, but in the new world of super PACs, he assumed the pounding from Romney’s allies would be much more brutal.

To equip himself to fight back, Huckabee believed he would have to raise $50 million for the nomination contest. But he abhorred asking rich people for money, and his populism had alienated business and Wall Street. What Huckabee needed was his own Spencer Zwick, a gangbusting finance chair. Recruiting such a person, however, would require a signal that he was getting in, which would jeopardize his Fox contract. Thus was Huckabee caught in a devilish catch-22: wary of sacrificing his livelihood without knowing that the support for a run would be in place, but unable to gauge how much support was there without risking that livelihood.

Even so, Huckabee was inching toward yes—until he and Rollins came a cropper. For months they had been arguing over how long they could wait before rendering a final decision, with Huckabee wanting to defer until September and Rollins insisting on June. In late April, Huckabee began seeing stories in the press about his increasing inclination toward a run, and they
had Rollins’s fingerprints all over them. When Huckabee confronted him, Rollins was unrepentant. Mike, I’ve got to do this to keep us in the conversation, he said.

Huckabee was furious. His situation with Fox was already delicate, and now he was being summoned to meet with the company’s lawyers to explain away the stories. Huckabee’s family was ticked off, too. Janet was enthusiastic about his running, and his three kids were on board. They viewed Rollins’s blabbing as inexcusable.

Huckabee saw it as a kind of epiphany. While he had learned in 2008 that Rollins was sometimes indiscreet, Huckabee always believed he could trust the strategist. No longer.
And if you can’t trust the people in your inner circle to keep their mouths shut, you can’t run a campaign,
he thought. With no team in waiting, no confidence about the money, the gaze of the Fox attorneys on him, and the prospect of being pulped by Romney’s super PACs ahead of him, Huckabee decided that there was no point in waiting until September.

On Friday, May 13, Fox released a statement saying that Huckabee would announce his intentions on his TV program the next night. He didn’t alert Rollins as to his decision. He didn’t tell his executive producer or his staff. Outside of his family, the only person Huckabee informed in advance was the one who mattered most: Fox News CEO Roger Ailes.

“I’m surprised,” Ailes said. “I thought you were going to do it.”

•   •   •

H
UCKABEE FEATURED A SPECIAL
guest star on his program that night, who appeared right after the host’s sign-off. “I’m Donald Trump, and this is a special announcement,” the besuited billionaire said. “Mike Huckabee is not going to be running for president. This might be considered by some people, not necessarily me, bad news, because he is a terrific guy—and frankly I think he would be a terrific president. But a lot of people are very happy that he will not be running, especially other candidates.”

The two men had huddled in Trump’s office a few weeks earlier. The Donald liked Pastor Mike, although he wasn’t sure that Huckabee should be the person negotiating with the Chinese. (That was Trump’s department
.
) Huckabee entered the meeting suspecting, as did many observers, that Trump’s coquetry about running was a charade, a publicity stunt. But
he left with a different opinion.
Gosh, he might really jump in,
Huckabee thought.

In the terrarium of American public life, Donald John Trump was an exotic specimen: famous and infamous, beloved and detested, lauded and mocked—but never ignored. His politics were promiscuously ecumenical. He had been a Republican, a Reform Party member, and a Democrat, and now he was a Republican again. On the left, he was excoriated as a racist for his promulgation of birtherism. On the right, he was scorned as a crank for espousing a variant of protectionism that bordered on mercantilism. Among many in the Beltway and Manhattan smart sets, he was derided as a bloviating braggart.