2 Candidates Count On Ties to Hope, Ark.
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 28, 2008
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."
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.' "
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