Welcome to one of the strangest campaign stops in history. Technically it was photo-op no. 4 on Monday, New Year’s Eve, three days before the Iowa caucus: a 2 p.m. haircut and shave at an old-school downtown Des Moines barbershop. But in truth it was yet another unusual moment in what could be described as the most unconventional presidential campaign in recent memory. Huckabee, who until recently was considered a long shot at best for the GOP nomination, has generated buzz and headlines for his White House bid by running an unorthodox campaign built on his image as a regular guy.
He has rocked out on his electric bass at campaign stops and brought his band, Capitol Offense, on the road. He played ping-pong with a reporter from National Public Radio for a story and campaigned with pop culture icons like Ric Flair, the former WWF wrestler. On Monday, Huckabee conducted nearly a full-fledged press conference with his head wrapped in a hot towel, as he awaited a shave. Can someone so offbeat win the White House?
Conventional wisdom was that Huckabee would become a more traditional candidate once he moved up in the polls. But that hasn’t happened. If anything, Huckabee seems to have become more eccentric. Heading into the final hours before Iowans begin to caucus, Huckabee is running his campaign no differently from the days when he was nobody in the polls. While Romney has been campaigning nonstop across the state over the last few days, hitting house parties and holding town halls in a desperate bid to reap a victory out of all that money he’s sowed, Huckabee has been taking a more leisurely route, spending more time giving interviews and participating in photo ops than talking to undecided Iowa voters.
On Wednesday night, the eve of the caucus, Huckabee will leave Iowa and fly to California to do a hit on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.” It’s a highly risky gamble, considering how fluid the race for the GOP nomination is. While the latest Des Moines Register poll out Tuesday had Huckabee leading Romney 32 percent to 26 percent, about four percent of those polled remain undecided. In addition, almost half of Republicans polled said they might change their minds about who they’ll support in the final days before the caucus.
Yet Huckabee seems more focused on getting free media than winning over the undecided. Part of it is necessity: Huckabee told reporters last Friday that his campaign had just $2 million in the bank, about a 40th of what Romney is estimated to have spent on his campaign this year. In other words, Huckabee needs all the free media he can get.
Is he using his moment in the limelight wisely? His New Year’s Eve shenanigans certainly gave cause for wonder. On Monday morning, a couple of hours before Huckabee’s trip to the barber, reporters gathered in a ballroom at the Des Moines Marriott to get their first look at a new TV ad the former governor had filmed over the weekend. The clip, which would have been Huckabee’s first negative ad of the campaign, was set to push back against Romney, who has saturated Iowa’s airwaves with millions of dollars in attack ads aimed at the former Arkansas governor. The ads, which have gone largely unchallenged, have eaten into Huckabee’s once-sizable lead in the state, putting the two basically neck-and-neck heading into Thursday’s caucuses.
As reporters filed in for the press conference, nothing seemed amiss. Huckabee staffers tested the room’s audiovisual equipment to make sure it would work come show time. The stage backdrop seemed to indicate that Huckabee planned to follow through on what aides promised would be a pushback against his rivals. “Enough is Enough,” it read, while signs along either side of the stage broadcast conflicting quotes from Romney on issues like taxes, abortion and guns.
Yet when Huckabee showed up, all bets were off. The former governor took the stage and, with his wife Janet at his side, announced that he wouldn’t be running the ad after all because he didn’t feel right about going negative. “We are now committed from now through the rest of the caucuses that we will run only ads that talk about why I should be president and not why Mitt Romney should not,” he said. “The tipping point was this morning. I just realized that this is not how we run our campaign in this state. We have run it positive. We have gotten here by being positive.”
But then he did just what he had said he wouldn’t do. In a room full of reporters and cameras from nearly every major news organization in the country, Huckabee decided to show the ad that just moments before he had promised never to run. “I know that some of you are up saying, ‘Well did you really have an ad?’ Well, I’m going to show you the ad. You’ll get the chance to find out,” Huckabee declared. Reporters in the room, nearly dead silent with shock up to this moment, looked at each other and started laughing. In the back, Huckabee aides looked pained.
Privately, aides insisted that Huckabee’s last-minute epiphany went down just as he said. The former governor had announced his decision to his top staffers less than an hour before his press conference was set to begin. Not everybody agreed with the move. One strategist associated with the campaign told NEWSWEEK, “What happened today … I just can’t explain it. I don’t get it.” Was it foolish? Or fiercely clever, given Iowans’ famous aversion to negative campaigning?
At the barber, Huckabee tried to explain his decision-making, telling reporters that he’d just realized that going negative wasn’t worth it. “It’s never too late to do the right thing,” Huckabee said, as his barber gingerly snipped at bits of hair atop his balding head. With every snip, shutters flashed like lightning. More than 50 reporters and photographers had shown up to document the event.
After a difficult week in which Huckabee’s flubs on foreign policy were big stories, the former governor’s final push seems centered largely on pushing the pictures and images of him being a regular guy rather than touting substance. On Tuesday he traveled to Cedar Rapids, where he took no questions from the audience or reporters, opting instead to play “Mustang Sally” and a few other selections on his bass.
That afternoon he returned to Des Moines with another secret weapon: Chuck Norris, the martial arts star who has endorsed the former Arkansas governor’s campaign. Appearing at the Val Air Ballroom, a legendary Des Moines music hall, Huckabee played bass as Norris stood at the side of the stage, putting giddy fans in faux headlocks while their friends snapped photos.
At one point, during a rousing rendition of “Sweet Home Alabama,” Huckabee rushed to the front of the stage and lifted his bass to the sky like a full-fledged rock god. “Who says Republicans can’t have fun?” he shouted.
