Big Dreams Born in A Humble Town

Anyone on the Huckabee trail in Hope has to pay a visit to a local dentist, Lester Sitzes III. Huckabee and Sitzes are hunting buddies. Just about every room in Sitzes's dental office has a signed, framed photo of Huckabee in camouflage, dangling unfortunate ducks. Sitzes says Huckabee aspired to be a baseball player, but he wasn't much of an athlete.

"He has very flat feet. He has no arches in his feet," the dentist says.

The things they know back home.

Presidential ambition may never yield its ultimate mysteries. There is nothing in Hope that suggests the town is uniquely suited to the cultivation of powerful men. In fact, the place is as ordinary as ordinary can be. When you see one of the boyhood homes of Clinton or Huckabee, your first thought is, "That's it?"

Myra Reese, Clinton's second cousin, still lives in Hope, and she recalls the sweet and rather chunky little boy she used to take to the movies. He was smart from the get-go: "We always credited it to his grandmother, who insisted that he read at an early age."

But lots of little kids have doting grandmothers. At some level, Hope's politician-spawning is purely a coincidence.

Turner and her friends came up with an interesting theory at a meeting of what they call the Dear Old Town Club, which spends a lot of time discussing Southern writers. The nature of Arkansans, the group decided, is that "they work hard, but when they have time to play, they have fun," Turner says.

Here, perhaps, is the secret to Bill Clinton's national success, and Huckabee's improbable rise this year: They look like they know how to have a good time. They don't seem to take themselves too seriously. Clinton played the saxophone, Huckabee jams on bass guitar (when not hanging with his buddy Chuck Norris). The homespun persona, the gosh-shucks demeanor, might conceivably backfire, but politics today depends so much on personality, and Arkansans seem to have personality to burn.

Next to a Clinton or a Huckabee, a lot of politicians seeking high office look like stuffed shirts -- like prigs who relax by reading exit polls or fussing with their hair.

"No doubt they're two of the most persuasive people you'll ever meet," Sitzes says. "When you talk to Mike or Bill, you feel they're really caring about you. They're not looking over your shoulder."

Hope's mayor, Dennis Ramsey, recalls that when Clinton was governor, people in town didn't pay much attention to his local roots. After all, he left after the first grade. He grew up in Hot Springs. But then political opportunity converged with biographical geography. In 1992, Clinton leveraged the name of his birthplace, turning it into a famous campaign slogan: "I still believe in a place called Hope."

The mayor notes the obvious: "He couldn't say, 'I still believe in a place called Hot Springs.' "