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Huckabee walks fine line amid pulpit, podium
Candidate trying to fire up evangelicals without unnerving secular voters
SPARTANBURG, S.C. - Mike Huckabee mentioned his faith only glancingly in his stump speech this week at North Greenville University in Tigerville, S.C. Discussing presidential decisions that will matter after he is long gone, he added: “By the way, I have made arrangements for what happens after that, and it’s all good. It’s all good.”
No one missed his allusion to the afterlife at North Greenville, a Southern Baptist college, where the college president pulled back Mr. Huckabee to expand on his “salvation experience” as a 10-year-old at summer Bible school.
“I didn’t want to get dirty, because I have never felt so clean in my life,” Mr. Huckabee told a hushed crowd of several hundred.
Between his droll performance and heartfelt encore runs the delicate line that Mr. Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister before becoming governor of Arkansas, walks as he tries to fire up his fellow evangelical Christians to vote for one of their own without unnerving more secular-minded voters.
His advisers say he has counted on the support of existing networks of conservative Christian activists to help propel his shoestring campaign to a victory on Saturday in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary, just as they did in the Iowa caucuses two weeks ago.
Evangelicals are expected to make up an even larger share of South Carolina primary voters, and recent polls show Mr. Huckabee locked in a close race with Senator John McCain of Arizona.
“What we didn’t know initially was would all the Christian right activists that Karl Rove built up over the last eight years come to us and give us a ground force, and that is what we have proved over the last several weeks,” said Ed Rollins, Mr. Huckabee’s national chairman. Mr. Rollins described a two-pronged pitch, playing up Mr. Huckabee’s Christian convictions to fellow evangelists and his empathy for working people to more secular voters.
'Like Houdini'
But as Mr. Huckabee has moved to the front of the Republican field and as the race will now quickly move beyond the Bible Belt, his ability to harmonize both elements is under new scrutiny from the liberal and conservative sides of the pew.
Some evangelical observers say they marvel at Mr. Huckabee’s knack for making even the most conservative tenets of orthodox Southern Baptist faith, about creation, the accuracy of the Bible or gender roles, sound downright moderate when he is speaking in television interviews or at public debates.
“He is like Houdini,” said Oran P. Smith, president of a Christian conservative group, the Palmetto Family Council, admiring Mr. Huckabee’s recent defense of an official Southern Baptist statement about the family that he endorsed eight years ago.
The statement said, “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband,” and “serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.”
Many Southern Baptists understand that to mean that just men are meant to occupy certain leadership roles like church pastor.
But in a debate last week in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Mr. Huckabee said the position required no subordination at all. It meant, he said, both husbands and wives “mutually showing their affection and submission as unto the Lord.”
“Biblically,” he added, “marriage is a 100-100 deal. Each partner gives 100 percent of their devotion to the other.”
Mr. Smith said, “It was masterful.” He was “still struggling,” Mr. Smith added, to understand just how Mr. Huckabee had put together his answer.
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