My Final Thoughts on the Huckabee Campaign

I was traveling so missed the governor's concession speech. As I thought this would be all be wrapped up last Tuesday. I think he will be a huge asset to the McCain campaign. I suppose I shall take the Huckabee stuff down today. I shall be looking for a few McCain items to put on the blog.

I think the Governor ran a very good race for the limited resources and the very compacted primary schedule. He had chances to come back. If he had won South Carolina(Darn you Fred Thompson) he very much could have won Missouri and Oklahoma a week later on Super Tuesday. The huge delegate win that McCain got in California over Romney was unexpected. It was that night that I knew the razor thin loss in Missouri was perhaps fatal. Now I am going to post what I think went wrong and lessons we can learn for the future

Fundraising-
Good grief this hurt us early on. I have said since South Carolina that we have always been hurt by not having a few extra million in the bank. We had our chances but to be honest our lack of money and spending it all pretty much in Iowa hurt us. We had no chance to invest in organization in the states which is related to another problem I will bring up. The Governor truly caught on too late

The Club for Growth Killed US-
While for much of last year no one was paying attention to Huckabee the Club for Growth was. The lack of an aggressive response to their lies and well funded smear campaign hurt us big time. One day some will investigate who was behind that and who funded it.

The Huckabee Campaign handle the Religious voter issue badly
I think there are a bunch of wrong perceptions on what went wrong here. Partly because the media and the thousands of blogs in the peanut gallery never understands the Religious and evangelical voter. I am not all convinced that Huckabee handled the touchy Fundamentalist/ Baptist and the Charismatic/Pentecostal divide very well. They are oil and water at times. Every time Huckabee announced he was more Baptcoastal in his remarks I got nervous. I think a lot of Baptist like folks did not react well to this. Huckabee did not get the needed Baptist leaders and others to hold the others in line.

If you want to see in detail what I am talking about visit this blogger that handled Religious outreach for Bush. He has a must read post called Mike Huckabee’s big mistake. Pretty much he sums it up. Here is just a part:

Rightly sensing that Charismatics and Pentecostals were the key to Iowa, Huckabee, a Southern Baptist, told Pentecostal congregations, “My church was more like yours than a typical Southern Baptist.” It was music to their ears but as most evangelicals know, Pentecostals will vote for a Southern Baptist but not the other way around. Huckabee was courting disaster and he needed hundreds of surrogate evangelical and Southern Baptist leaders of influence out there to help keep the herd of cats together.

Nowhere did all of this matter more than in the northern counties of South Carolina, where Baptists and Pentecostals have had a long history. For years Baptists had suffered under the influence of the Pentecostal PTL Empire, headquartered a few miles across the State border, and they resented PTL for defining so much about their own faith and culture. Inroads in those counties by Thompson were deadly to the Huckabee effort.


Huckabee Lost the Secular Message theme-
This was tragic. This again is related to not having money for organization and the mishandling of the religious voter issue. The Huckabee campaign tried to get back on track later on but he had already been labeled the "evangelical only" person running. This was often done by his opponents that wanted to say he was playing "ID" politics. In the days of the South Carolina race the head of the campaign stated that there statements were an effort to get the evangelical base they had pumped and too the polls. Thus Huckabee was making so big public statements to that community. That was a double edged sword. Because the campaign had no organization or money to make one Huckabee had to keep priming the pump to get bodies to the polls. The economic and even a tad "populist" message that Huckabee was getting out in Iowa became lost.

Lack of Catholic Outreach was Fatal-
Now as I mentioned above Huckabee had a problem with outreach among even Baptist. So this is no surprise. However for a campaign run largely by Catholics I think they failed Huckabee in this regard. There were opportunities for Catholic outreach. He had advocates in the Catholic community. He was very much in a position to get the George Bush Catholic voter of 04. Especially because his campaign themes were very attuned to Catholic Social Justice issues and ideas. However this connection was lost when he had to shift to other issues in South Carolina. I am not sure his Catholic outreach would have made a difference in South Carolina. As I mentioned this group was friendly to McCain on military issues. However we had no business losing the Catholic vote in Georgia(that strangely went to Romney the only state to do so).

If we had Catholic outreach I think the effects of that would have hit when we got to Super Tuesday and especially Missouri. Huckabee's numbers were good here and had effort been expended months earlier I think enough of the Catholic cote there would have gone to Huckabee to win that state. Missouri and that razor thin loss there was critical as to the delegate count.

There was no rapid response team worth a darn-
I very much like the Huckabee staff. However the staff was a skeleton of what we needed. From the Club for Growth lies, to the Huckabee is anti Mormon lies, to the Huckabee is anti Catholic lies, to a hundred other things the Huckabee campaign did not respond fast enough to negative press or spin put out by opponents. We would go a week at time before it appears the Huckabee campaign realized there was problem.

Going to Michigan was a mistake!!!!-
I think it is clear that the campaign realized too late that Fred Thompson was causing us some serious problems in South Carolina. One must wonder what would have happened if we had skipped Michigan(a state where we had not even sent a piece of direct mail too for a year) and gone to South Carolina. However for a possible future race that visit might prove helpful

It was not his time-
IN the end that is true. We are at war and the McCain's bond with the military issue voter and WOT terror voter was a obstacle we could not overcome. IN the end the voters decided. I am pretty cool with that.

There were many positives to the Huckabee movement and I am proud to have done my small bit. I think Huckabee has a future

It is now time for me to move on. It is now time to embrace fully McCain and work for the win. Just like Huckabee wants us to do.