Mike Huckabee was a barely known former governor of Arkansas when he attended an October 2007 house party on his behalf at the home of Jason Bedrick, New Hampshire’s first Orthodox Jewish state representative.
No major media outlets picked up on the Republican presidential candidate’s radical proposal that day for the Middle East: a Palestinian state in Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
Since winning Iowa’s GOP caucuses Jan. 3, however, Huckabee has had no trouble attracting national attention.
“He is truly a uniter and not a divider,” Bedrick said.
“This is a guy who is very positive, very uplifting, ” added Bedrick, the gabbai at the Chabad synagogue in Wellesley Hills, Mass., where he often spends Shabbat. “This is a country that needs some healing in addition to leadership. And of all the candidates in all the parties, he is the only top-tier candidate that can provide that.”
Bedrick may see Huckabee as the perfect fit for the White House, but for many American Jews the thought of an anti-abortion Baptist minister as president is a major cause for alarm.
Especially one like Huckabee, who has called on Americans to “take this nation back for Christ,” signed a newspaper advertisement stating that wives should submit to their husbands and declaring that he does not believe in evolution.
The blatant Bible-thumping campaign stumping naturally turns off many Jews, according to Jacques Berlinblau, an associate professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University.
“Jews have been conditioned to play it close to the vest and keep their religious sentiments to themselves,” Berlinerblau said. “It is so viscerally in our cultural DNA. I don’t think we are very comfortable with public faith-and-values talk, especially when it is coming from a Christian spokesperson.”
The primary issue — whom to vote for?
Even as critics have sought to paint Huckabee as religiously intolerant, the former Arkansas governor and many pundits have portrayed him as the embodiment of a new breed of evangelical Christian voter, one who sees not only a religious imperative to stake out conservative positions on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage, but also in some instances to take more liberal stands on race, taxes, poverty, immigration and the environment.
He has employed populist rhetoric in slamming the establishment of his party, challenged its general embrace of free trade and recently criticized the Bush administration’s “arrogant” approach to international diplomacy.
Huckabee has faced tough criticism of late not only in some liberal corners, but also from several prominent conservative commentators, including George Will, Rush Limbaugh, Robert Novak, Charles Krauthammer and Ann Coulter.
He has the backing, however, of Bill Kristol, the neoconservative scion and Weekly Standard editor who spoke effusively of the man from Hope, Ark., in a column for the New York Times.
Despite being a fairly unknown quantity in the Jewish community, Huckabee opted not to attend a presidential forum in October 2007 organized by the Republican Jewish Coalition, citing scheduling conflicts.
In the end, some observers say, American Jews — most of whom trend toward the liberal — will find it impossible to get past Huckabee’s conservative Christian faith and rhetoric, even though they translate into staunch support for Israel.
“The more liberal Jews find out about his core values of Christianity, the less they’ll like him,” journalist Zev Chafets told JTA shortly after writing a cover story on Huckabee for the New York Times Magazine.
In 1998, Huckabee told a Baptist convention to “take this nation back for Christ” and said that he “got into politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.”
That same year his book on America’s “culture of violence” lumped environmentalism with pornography and drug abuse as forces that have “fragmented and polarized our communities.”
During a debate in early 2007, Huckabee said he did not believe in evolution. Later in the summer, at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit in Washington, he bemoaned the “holocaust of liberalized abortion,” drawing criticism from the Anti-Defamation League for using “the H-word.”
The primary issue: Dissecting the election for Jewish voters</a