Opinion: Survivor: The Republican Primary Edition

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Mike Huckabee sat in a borrowed office at an Irvine law firm earlier today and spent 25 minutes talking with The Times about his sense of the presidential race, and his position in it.

Huckabee’s upbeat -- all the candidates are at this point. It’s part of the schtick. No one can admit being concerned about what others would read as the handwriting on the wall, because once you say publicly your campaign has problems, well, then it has even more problems.

But Huckabee, the affable former governor of Arkansas, is still riding high on his second-place showing in the largely irrelevant Ames straw poll last month. Mitt Romney won that Iowa contest with 32% to 18% for Huckabee, but national front-runner Rudy Giuliani and John McCain both sat it out and Fred Thompson wasn’t quite running yet. Even then, Huckabee barely captured one in five votes.

Still, it was more than most people expected and politics at the pre-primary stage is all about expectations. Huckabee said post-straw poll visits to his campaign website were up, as is fundraising, though he couldn’t say by how much. Hmmm.

In fact, the quest for money is what brought Huckabee to town. He spoke midday before a Lincoln Club group in Irvine (not a fundraiser, but you can bet one will be planned) and Wednesday night he was to attend a Beverly Hills fundraiser hosted by Suzi and Fred Wehba, a real estate investor whose holdings include the Watergate in Washington, D.C, among other landmarks. But the post-Iowa cash influx hasn’t been enough for Huckabee to upgrade his travel arrangements. He’s still flying commercial,...

an everyman experience just as frustrating and time-consuming for him as the rest of us. ‘One of the first things I do as president,’ he joked, ‘is I fix the air traffic control system.’

Huckabee’s campaign strategy is to be the last guy standing, the one not voted off the ‘Republican Island.’ An occasional marathon runner, Huckabee equates the campaign with the 26-plus mile foot races, and another more famous one between a hare and tortoise.

‘Of course, the moral of the story is the turtle did win, because of consistency and persistence,’ Huckabee said, confusing the land-dwelling tortoise of the fable with its more aquatic cousin. ‘I’ve always felt that this campaign was going to be about stamina, not about speed,’ he said.

Key for Huckabee, who has a habit of mixing metaphors, is to be ready when the field begins to narrow. ‘There’s an assumption that some people in front of us will stumble,’ Huckabee said. ‘Not that we’ll put nails in the road ahead of them. I don’t think we have to. We just stay out of the way so that when these cars crash into each other, we don’t get into the wreckage.’

But you first have to be close enough to the front to take advantage. And polls still place Huckabee in the single digits. A new LA Times/Bloomberg poll shows Huckabee drawing less than half of what ‘don’t know’ received in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and placing a distant fourth or fifth in each state behind Romney, Giuliani, McCain and Thompson, whose recent entry in the race has scrambled the conservative vote.

It’s still early. Very early. And history teaches that whoever is leading now -- regardless of political party -- isn’t necessarily standing at the podium in a shower of balloons and confetti come the final night of the party coronation, er, convention.

‘Going into Iowa in the last election cycle, Howard Dean was the unstoppable train,’ Huckabee said, recounting the Democratic nomination fight. ‘Dick Gephardt was a close second and he was closing in fast. When it was all over, it was John Kerry and John Edwards who come out of there and Howard Dean was on his way back to Vermont.’

Huckabee expects a similar shake-out among Republicans after the first round of primaries and caucuses heading into the Feb. 5 votes in some 20 states. ‘Whoever does emerge ... [is] going to be on fire with afterburners,’ Huckabee said. ‘There are going to be only a few people still in the field. And we want to be one of them.’

The Times’ Cathleen Decker has another story on Huckabee available online here now and in Thursday’s print editions.

-- Scott Martelle