By Bob Allen
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee announced his second run for president May 5 at a gathering in his hometown of Hope, Ark., pledging to lead the country “from hope to higher ground.”
“It seems perfectly fitting that it is here that I announce I am a candidate for president of the United States,” said Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor who won the Iowa caucuses and five state primaries in 2008 but sat out the 2012 campaign.
Observers say Huckabee, who stepped down in January after more than six years as a broadcaster on Fox News, won’t repeat the problem he encountered in 2008, when he ran out of money.
Others say he will have a harder time winning Iowa this time around because conservative voters back then had serious reservations about candidates Mitt Romney and John McCain, while the upcoming race is crowded with GOP candidates who are wooing evangelical voters, like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Ben Carson, and other social conservatives like Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Scott Walker still testing the waters.
Huckabee, 59, didn’t get strong support from leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention in 2008, because few believed he could defeat Hillary Clinton in the general election. A year later Huckabee spoke at the SBC Pastors Conference, following Fred Luter, a New Orleans pastor later elected first African-American president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“What a shame that Barack Obama didn’t listen to Fred Luter instead of Jeremiah Wright for 25 years,” Huckabee quipped, referring to Obama’s controversial former pastor in Chicago.
Planners of this year’s Pastors Conference grudgingly withdrew an invitation to Ben Carson, a popular media spokesman for conservative causes, after a couple of blogs objected to his Seventh-day Adventist faith and the implied endorsement of a political party.
“If I were Ted Cruz (Southern Baptist, member of FBC, Houston), I’d be jumping-up-and-down mad,” wrote Texas pastor Bart Barber. “If I were Mike Huckabee (Southern Baptist, former president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention), I’d write a protest song for the Little Rockers and play it on national TV.”
A Christian Examiner headline May 4 claimed that Southern Baptist bloggers “bullied” Pastors Conference President Willy Rice into pulling the plug on Carson’s invitation. Perry Noble, a megachurch pastor in South Carolina, posted a blog April 30 rebuking “the theological police” on social media that led to Carson being uninvited.
Huckabee left his Fox News program to explore a second bid for the Republican nomination. His recent tour promoting his latest book, God, Guns, Grits and Gravy, included stops at First Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., and First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla.
Huckabee, a graduate of Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark., attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for one year before being hired as director of communications for evangelist James Robison.
He returned to Arkansas in 1980 to become pastor at Immanuel Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, Ark. He moved on to serve at Beech Street Baptist Church in Texarkana, Texas — 1986 to 1992 — where his sermons were televised.
In 1989 he was elected president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, supported by moderates who found him preferable to the conservative-backed candidate, current Southern Baptist Convention President Ronnie Floyd.
Huckabee left the ministry to run for the U.S. Senate in 1992, losing to popular Democratic incumbent Dale Bumpers. That same election sent Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton to the White House, meaning the lieutenant governor moved up to the governor’s office.
A year later Huckabee won a special election for lieutenant governor. He was re-elected in 1994, and was in the process of running for the Senate again when Gov. Jim Guy Tucker resigned after being convicted of felony charges in the Whitewater investigation. Huckabee took over as governor in July 1996 and won nearly 60 percent of the vote in 1998. He won narrowly in 2002 and was being mentioned as a possible contender for the 2008 Republican nomination for president beginning in 2004.
Huckabee announced his intention to run for president in January 2007, winning several primary victories before bowing out of the race to U.S. Sen. John McCain, who by then had scored enough delegates to win the nomination.
Fox News hired him as a political commentator in 2008 and later gave him his own show, Huckabee, which aired on weekends from Sept. 27, 2008, until Jan. 3, 2015.