Candidate and Actor Make A Tough-Guy Act to Follow
By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 15, 2007
TILTON, N.H., Dec. 14 -- Mike Huckabee is looking pretty tough these days in the race to the Republican nomination, which is why Chuck Norris looks so right by his side on this first day they're campaigning together.
Team Chuckabee, the preacher and the black belt: gearing up for three full days of G-rated, butt-kicking, campaign-ridin' action.
At one stop in a veterans home, Norris hands an autographed card of himself to a 17-year-old kid named Tyler Ayers.
"No way! So cool!" the kid cries out, clutching his tiny picture of Chuck.
"Everyone says the young people don't vote, and I say, 'Well, they're going to vote this time!' " Norris says, gripping another kid's shoulder in a way that's probably meant to be non-threatening, except he's Chuck Norris, so it's hard to tell.
"That's an order!" a grinning Huckabee says from behind Norris's shoulder.
Team Chuckabee is all might and testosterone. If this were an action movie, they'd wear leather jackets and carry rifles.
Huckabee, 52, is a former Arkansas governor and onetime Baptist preacher who wears alligator cowboy boots and whose dramatic rise in the polls has confounded all those political types who think they know too much to be confounded. Norris is known primarily for roundhouse-kicking bad guys on TV and in the movies.
Team Chuckabee is tough, but not too tough for manly regard. At the veterans home, they praise each other.
"He is a man who says what he means and means what he says," Chuck says of Huck.
"We want a military that's as tough as the idea of going up against Chuck Norris in an alley," Huck says of Chuck.
In the Huck-and-Chuck show, Huck may be running for president, but Chuck has the mullet. He looks a good 10 years younger than his 67 years, and his red hair has the saturated color of a man who stares down time and refuses to budge. Chuck poses for pictures while Huck holds the camera. A local photographer trips on a curb outside the veterans home and Chuck, who just happens to be there, grabs her with catlike reflexes.
"Chuck Norris saved my life!" she cries.
A reporter asks Chuck what he'd do if he were president.
"I would make Congress work out on the Total Gym 15 minutes every day or they couldn't vote," Chuck says, artfully plugging the exercise machine he promotes on late-night TV.
Huck and Chuck have not known each other long. Norris says he started paying attention to Huckabee's campaign some months back, attracted by the former governor's political stances on everything from abortion (against it) to "winning the war on terror" (for it). (Norris writes a weekly column for a conservative online news site. Sample headline: "The surge is working -- Huckabee's too!")
They cut an ad that aired in Iowa last month, in which Norris explained his support for Huckabee and Huckabee quoted several of the humorous sayings about Norris's toughness that have become an Internet phenomenon. Sample: "There's no chin beneath Chuck Norris's beard, only another fist."
Another one: "There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live."
Chuck has called Huck a dark horse who turned into a "shining stallion." He once praised Huck for having the "big package." (The "whole package," he corrected himself.)
The Huckabee campaign was just a "spark" three months ago, Norris says at one point during the day, but it has "turned into a raging fire."
And Huckabee's folksy appeal is fanning those flames. The first visit of the day is to a plant in Boscawen that manufactures copper wire. Norris and his wife, Gena, are delayed flying from their home in Texas, so it's just Huckabee and his wife, Janet, along with several campaign aides, a roomful of plant workers and about 30 reporters, who are scribbling down the candidate's thoughts on taxes, health care, outsourcing.
Huckabee also references these cultural touchstones: hunting, growing up working class, WD-40 and that harsh Lava soap, which, he says, works just as well as some "fancy exfoliation."
In the afternoon, after a packed news conference to announce the Huckabee campaign's new chairman and big gun, former Reagan adviser Ed Rollins, Chuck reveals that Huck visited him not long ago at his ranch in Navasota, Tex.
"We worked out in my gym, and he did pretty good," Chuck says of Huck, who shed more than 100 pounds some years back through diet and exercise. "We kind of boxed around a little bit."
It's true, says Gena -- "lotta testosterone going."
When Chuckabee does a push-up, it's called lifting up America.
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