A Q&A with Mike Huckabee

By Linda Douglass

updated 1:04 p.m. ET Nov. 2, 2007

National Journal's Linda Douglass sat down with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. This is a transcript of their conversation.

Q: I want to welcome Governor Mike Huckabee, who is one of the Republican presidential candidates and is creating a lot of buzz out there on the trail right now. Welcome, Governor Huckabee.

Mike Huckabee: Thanks Linda, pleasure to be here today.

Q: Thank you so much, let's start right off with asking you the questions that everyone is asking about your campaign, and that is this: you would seem to be the ideal candidate for the Christian conservatives, and yet their leaders are clearly hesitating to embrace you. Is it your message? Is it you? Is it something else?

Huckabee: You know, the good news for me is, even if the leaders are hesitating, the followers aren't, and at some point the leaders may look up and say, "Can you tell me where everyone went? I'm their leader and need to know where they went."

The amazing thing in the Value Voter debates, when the people have a chance to see all of the candidates at the same time, I not only win but I win overwhelmingly, getting more votes than all the other candidates put together and that's happened now in three different Value Voter debates.

Q: But what do you think the hesitation is on the part of the leaders?

Huckabee: I think some of them are sort of forgetting that the movement is all about what we believe and what we stand for, and it's not so much about the politics of Washington. But if they're based there and they breathe that air too much, they tend to start to thinking like the people who look at this from a very political standpoint, and say, "OK, what do the polls say? How much money is in the bank?" rather than, "Who stands with us? Whose ideas and principles are where ours are?"

And people really do forget that back at this point of the game in 1979, Ronald Reagan was flat broke. He was in, like, fourth place. No one was giving him any shot of being the nominee much less winning the election, but he went on to win because he communicated in a way that touched where people were -- maybe not necessarily where the Establishment was or where the elite of the party happened to be. In fact, he never really had the support of the elite of the party until he became the president, and then he became the elite of the party. But that is what people forget... is that when the conservative movement generally wins, it's not because it's a top-down. It usually is because it's a bottom-up-type operation.

Q: Do you think that the Republican Party this year risks losing the strong support from Christian conservatives that it has had in the last several elections? Is there something that could happen in this year's race that could cause those voters to be turned off?

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Huckabee: It could happen if the nominee is not somebody who really shares their principles, but I still think when it comes down to it, that many of the pro-life and pro-family voters are going to believe that they still have reason to support a candidate, particularly if the candidate shares their views. I think that's why many are coming on board with me. They know that if I were to be the nominee, it would be very easy for them to support me and do it enthusiastically.

Q: Would you, as president, move to ban abortion in this country?

Huckabee: What I would love to do is to see that we really change this debate from banning abortion to understanding that the issue is trying to protect innocent human life. And I think sometimes when we frame it in the sense of banning something, it's like, "Oh that's a terrible thing." What we really need to do is say, "Is it a human life?" Let's talk about that. Is what is in that mother's womb a human life? Or is it something else? If it's something else, it's a different discussion. If it's a human life, then let's ask, "Do we have a right to end that human life for our conveniences?" Whether it's the mother's or the society's, and where does that lead us?

What I think we have to get back to is that the debate ought to center around the sanctity of human life -- the unique and intrinsic worth of every human life, and that's not going to happen in a single election cycle. We'll not make all the changes, but we need to start moving that way, and as a president I'd try to shape the debate and change the discussion so that we really begin to focus on the real issue which I think we've lost over the last several years.

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