In August 1980, as the conservative Christian movement was first transforming American politics, Ronald Reagan stood before a Dallas stadium full of 15,000 foot-stomping, hand-clapping evangelicals and pledged his fealty to the Bible. "All the complex and horrendous questions confronting us at home and worldwide have their answer in that single book," said Reagan, the Republican presidential nominee. Assisting with logistics for the event was a young seminary dropout named Mike Huckabee. "It was the genesis for the whole movement," Huckabee recalled of those early days.Now Huckabee is running for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, his campaign shaped by his two decades as an evangelical pastor and broadcaster. While he says he is running based on his career in the Arkansas governor's mansion, not the pulpit, he has grounded his views on issues like abortion and immigration in Scripture, rallied members of the clergy for support, benefited from the anti-Mormon sentiment dogging a political rival and relied on the down-to-earth style he honed in the pulpit to help catapult him in the polls...
As a preacher and a politician, Huckabee said in an interview, he has pursued the same goal: improving lives. "For me it was never an either or," he said of his dual careers. "The realm you do it in is less important than that you do it."
And winning souls trained him to win votes. "There are four basic things to succeed in either politics or the pastorate," Huckabee said. "You have to have a message. Secondly, you have to motivate volunteers. You have to be able to understand and work with all types of medium to get your message out," he continued, "and you've got to raise money."...
Read the rest of this International Herald Tribune profile of Mike Huckabee here. You'll see that the story's perspective is relatively balanced and I'm pretty sure you'll learn a few things about Huckabee (both positive and negative) that you didn't know before.
