Big Dreams Born in A Humble Town

2 Candidates Count On Ties to Hope, Ark.

HOPE, Ark. -- Bill Clinton's first home is a modest frame structure that looks out over the railroad tracks, a poster-plastered tobacco shop, a car lot and a Sonic fast-food drive-in. Mike Huckabee's boyhood home, just on the other side of downtown, is a small brick house that's only peashooter distance from where young Billy Blythe -- years before he changed his name to Clinton -- went to Miss Mary's Kindergarten.

If Huckabee defies the odds and makes it to the White House, political scientists and anthropologists may descend on Hope to find out what's in the water.

Could this humble place in southwest Arkansas, population 11,000, a town that can only dream of being as cosmopolitan as Texarkana, turn into the Birthplace of Presidents -- plural? Is there something about this place that makes possible the dreams of little boys?

"What made them think they could win?" asks Mary Nell Turner, 88, the unofficial town historian. She's known Clinton since early in his political career, and she taught Huckabee at Hope High School, where she recalls him as smart, mature and opinionated, but hardly future-presidential material. She taught journalism, and she poses all the right questions: "What drove them into politics? Why politics? Do they think they're going to change the world?"

Huckabee's chances of joining Clinton as local-boy-made-president will depend a lot on what happens on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, when Arkansas holds its presidential primary. The Republican candidates will be fighting for 34 delegates here, and scores more in the evangelical-laden Southern states of Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia. Arkansas neighbors Oklahoma and Missouri will also hold primaries that day.

Clinton's return to the White House -- this time as a spouse -- also will depend a lot on Feb. 5, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), who served as Arkansas' first lady before going to Washington with her husband and then launching her own political career, faces off against Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.). The Clinton campaign is counting on Arkansas as a bulwark in the South after Obama's victory in South Carolina on Saturday.

Unlike South Carolina and other Southern states, Arkansas never experienced the dramatic switch in party affiliation that occurred among Southern white Democrats after the civil rights era. Arkansas has elected only one Republican as senator since Reconstruction, and for only a single term. About half the state legislative races are not competitive -- the GOP doesn't even field a candidate.

"It is not your traditional red Southern state by any stretch," says Janine Parry, a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas. Arkansans, she says, "are going to vote more on economics, on bread-and-butter issues, than they are on flash-in-the-pan social issues. It's what makes Arkansas different from the rest of the South."

Huckabee is the populist of the Republican contest, the candidate most likely to talk about the travails of the poor. That might cost him some support on Feb. 5 in the northwestern part of the state, the power base for hard-line Republicans who, according to Parry, have a great deal of animosity for Huckabee.

Some Arkansans may also support Hillary Clinton because they feel that her husband got a rough deal during his presidency, Parry says. She sums up a common attitude: "We're going to come out all guns blazing for our girl and our first family."

Turner says Hillary Clinton never spent much time around Hope because she was busy being a lawyer in Little Rock. But she vividly recalls a speech that Mrs. Clinton gave on education in the 1980s, just up the road in Arkadelphia. Turner has been sold on Clinton since. "I really think of her as an Arkansan," she says.

Hope is a Democratic town through and through, but Huckabee's aunt, Emilie Prescott, is a proud Republican. "The Democratic Party used to be the conservative party," she says. "And it's not anymore. It's the liberal party. They're not associated with the Christian principles that I feel like Mike has. And he's not ashamed to say it. We act like God can't be part of our land, and we are a Christian nation."