Huckabee cites power of ‘kingmakers’

Mike Huckabee can’t definitively explain why he couldn’t win the Republican presidential nomination, but he thinks the desire of Christian leaders to be “kingmakers,” media coverage and Mother Nature all had something to do with it.

“Rank-and-file evangelicals supported me strongly, but a lot of the leadership did not,” the former Arkansas governor says. “Let’s face it, if you’re not going to be king, the next best thing is to be the kingmaker. And if the person gets there without you, you become less relevant.”

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson backed Rudolph W. Giuliani; American Value President and former presidential hopeful Gary Bauer endorsed Sen. John McCain; and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins remained neutral, even as Mr. Huckabee was wowing their supporters and winning the values voter straw polls they organized.

Mr. Huckabee said his foreign-policy views were misunderstood by evangelical leaders whocriticized him for not comprehending the direness of the “Islamo-fascist” threat.

Their criticism and even antagonism still leave him bemused, and he said it was “like playing the Whack-a-Mole pizza-parlor game” in trying to shoot down their objections.

“I was the one person who talked about this being a theological war, not just a geopolitical war [because] it was unlike a traditional war over borders and boundaries,” he says.

Mr. Bauer says Mr. Huckabee “ran an honorable campaign, but in spite of his successes I saw no evidence that he could bring together the three main parts of the Reagan electoral constituency — defense, economic and social conservatives.

“If he asked my advice, it would be to try to do that in the months and years ahead,” he said.

Mr. Perkins said his organization tries to influence the public policy debate and has never endorsed a presidential nomination candidate in its 25 year history.

At the same time, Mr. Huckabee says, the press undermined his prospects by too often mentioning he was a Baptist minister before he was an elected official.

“The qualification for me being president is not that I was a pastor 20 years ago [but] that I effectively governed a state, running a microcosm of the federal government,” Mr. Huckabee said in an interview with The Washington Times.

And the same news outlets that gave him so much positive attention ended up saying he couldn’t win — creating “a self-fulfilling prophecy” that helped sap donations and turnout.

Mr. Huckabee takes solace in what his campaign accomplished: Winning the first-in-the nation Iowa caucuses and seven other states, and being the last to exit the race when Mr. McCain became the party’s presumptive nominee.

It showed “that a person of humble background and ordinary means can run for the presidency of the United States and get close enough to scare people to death,” he said.

“We never raised the money that competitors had,” Mr. Huckabee. “I think what’s remarkable is that we got as far as we did.”

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