Another governor from Arkansas
Conceivably there will be two Republican presidential candidates in 2008 who’ll make a top priority of one of America’s biggest long-term domestic issues: health care.
One, obviously, is Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.), a heart surgeon who’s an expert on everything from infectious diseases to health care information technology.
The other, less obviously, is Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who came to the issue by a personal “epiphany” — being told by his doctor that he was so fat he’d be dead in 10 years — and now has made disease prevention through healthy lifestyles a major theme of his governorship and his chairmanship of the National Governors Association (NGA).
A long shot for the nomination in a field currently dominated by such household names as Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as well as Washington-based pols such as Frist and Sen. George Allen (Va.), Huckabee nevertheless is testing the waters. And he thinks he has advantages over Frist and other senators.
“I think one advantage governors have is that their experience in government is practical in solving everyday problems, whether it’s education or road-building or cleaning up the environment or promoting the state’s economic development, job creation,” he told me in an interview last week.
Governors, he said, “are not so much about making speeches as making decisions. And we’re held accountable, I can assure you, every day on the front pages of the newspaper, for everything we do and say.”
I once wrote an article saying that you’d expect a president to come from Arkansas about as soon as a great international leader would emerge from Bolivia. I wrote that in 1991, and Bill Clinton promptly did it. Can lightning strike twice?
Odder still, both Clinton and Huckabee hail from Hope, Ark. Michael Barone, in his “Almanac of American Politics,” observed that Huckabee stayed there and, whereas Clinton went to Georgetown and Yale Law School, Huckabee attended Ouachita Baptist University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary on his way to becoming a politician.
Clinton now has a reputation for being nearly the world’s all-time champion natural politician, but Huckabee comes off as being just as personable, accomplished and empathetic as Clinton did as governor — and without the baggage of venomous hatred from local enemies.
Huckabee deserves credit for making himself into a health expert, starting by losing 110 pounds and writing a book about it, then launching “Healthy Arkansas,” a multi-phase program designed to encourage weight loss, exercise and check-ups to ward off disease.
He recently unveiled his “Healthy America” campaign as NGA president at the National Press Club, and he’s trying to get other governors to emulate his Arkansas program and, as he says, “change the culture” on obesity the way it’s previously been done on smoking and litter.
On hot-button issues beyond health, Huckabee is an amalgam. He’s strongly pro-life, has been a high-profile backer of “covenant marriage” (which sets strict limits on when couples may divorce), opposes embryonic stem-cell research and supports President Bush on the Iraq War.
Politically, Huckabee has had his ups and downs in his home state. His poor showing in 2002 followed his wife’s effort to run for secretary of state, as well as controversial pardons he granted to dangerous felons and allegations that he accepted expensive gifts from friends.
On the other hand, he enjoyed a 67 percent approval rating in the Arkansas Poll last year, including 64 percent among African-Americans. Among other comparisons that might be made to Clinton, he’s a comeback kid.
Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.