Huckabee Rejects Spoiler Role, Vows to Continue Race

Facing heat from backers of Mitt Romney, who say his continued presence in the race for the GOP nomination will hand that prize to Sen. John McCain, Mike Huckabee is not standing down.

Desperate to stay relevant in this contest, the former Arkansas governor is instead dialing up his attacks on Romney and largely ignoring McCain, even though the latter has emerged as the clear GOP front-runner heading into Super Tuesday.

"Let me explain something to Mr. Romney and his supporters," Huckabee told a crowd in Huntsville, Ala., on Saturday morning. "It ain't the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog, and there's a lot of fight left in this dog."

In Macon, Ga., yesterday, Huckabee noted that his poll numbers in Southern states are stronger than Romney's.

"Romney's arrogance is offensive to my supporters and serves only to fire them and me up," Huckabee said. "We're even more determined to fight and win."

Romney has spent much of the past week working to undermine the case for Huckabee's candidacy. Appearing on Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes" show Friday, Romney said, "Most people recognize that a vote for Mike Huckabee is a vote for John McCain." Exit polls in early-voting states have been inconclusive on that argument: Some Huckabee backers have cited Romney as their second choice, while others favored McCain.

"There's no question but that his voters are voters that in large measure that would come to me," Romney continued. "That's the way the cookie crumbles. I'm not going to cry about that. . . . If they want John McCain as their nominee, why, that's exactly what that vote would do."

Since a surprising win in Iowa, Huckabee has failed to win a primary or caucus, and he has not been able to demonstrate that he can expand his support beyond the evangelicals who powered his win in Iowa and his second-place finish in South Carolina. And in states such as Florida and Michigan, he ran even with Romney, who is a Mormon, among evangelicals.

"I've always known that evangelicals are not a monolithic vote," Huckabee said. "I'm maybe one of the few that knows because I am one. . . . Evangelicals are like everybody else, they're evangelicals and those issues are important to them, but maybe they're evangelical and union members and they vote union before they vote gay marriage."

In some ways, Huckabee's loss in South Carolina to McCain two weeks ago was as crippling as Rudolph W. Giuliani's loss in Florida, a setback that led the former New York mayor to drop out of the race.

After Iowa, Huckabee aides had hoped to use that victory as a springboard to raise $10 million before Super Tuesday, funds they planned to use to hire additional staff in key states and run television ads. But hopes that the money spigot would be turned on -- and that party establishment figures would flock to his candidacy -- were all predicated on a win in South Carolina.

Huckabee aides were in tears as the results rolled in showing a second-place finish in South Carolina, and a campaign that had raised only $9 million in 2007 laid off staff the next day, dropped plans to air ads in Florida and was dogged by rumors that Huckabee would not compete in the Sunshine State. The campaign was still able to air ads in some of the Southern states that will vote Tuesday but has struggled to raise $5 million before that most important day.

Huckabee argues that his money woes are tied to the fact that many of the party's big fundraisers did not view him as a winner last year, making it difficult for him to raise money. He started courting big donors long after Romney and McCain, who spent much of 2006 preparing for their runs, and for months his campaign lacked a finance director, unable to find someone willing to move to Little Rock and take the post. Huckabee says that lack of money also prevented him from beefing up his team of policy advisers.

"If we had raised even $5 [million] or $6 million more, or even $3 million more, it would have made a big difference," Huckabee said. "But even so, our story is, with the resources we have, we've remained competitive."

At the same time, Huckabee's team credits its relatively small size for breeding a loose, creative atmosphere that led to gambles such as a clever ad featuring actor Chuck Norris, which generated needed attention and drew donors to the campaign at a critical juncture.

But since Florida -- when Giuliani's third-place showing caused him to drop out and Huckabee placed a distant fourth -- Romney's campaign has worked hard to portray the GOP race as a two-man contest. Activists such as Hannity and former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) are organizing a stop-McCain movement with Romney as their standard-bearer.

"If you're a Republican, if you're a Republican in the broadest sense, there is only one place to go right now and that's Mitt Romney," Santorum said on a radio show hosted by Laura Ingraham, another Romney backer.

Ed Rollins, Huckabee's campaign chairman, insisted that "we want to get into a two-way race" with McCain and argued that his candidate would be in better shape than Romney after Tuesday. Huckabee is aggressively campaigning in a group of states in the South and Midwest that includes Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas and Missouri, hoping to cast himself as the heartland candidate and win enough races to stay alive in the nomination fight.

The former Baptist minister courted his base of Christian conservative voters Saturday at several stops in Alabama, including a rally at a church in Tuscaloosa. He also emphasized his proposal to replace the current income tax structure with a national sales tax, even holding up an IRS Form 1040 that he tore into pieces during each of his speeches.

"Goodbye, IRS, and hello, freedom," he said in Tuscaloosa.

In most of the Southern states, polls show him competitive with McCain, although the senator from Arizona collects endorsements every day that give him the look of a favorite in the region.

A decisive win in contests across the country would make it difficult for either of McCain's chief opponents to stop him, and unlike Huckabee, Romney has an immense personal fortune to fall back on and keep his campaign going. Regardless, Rollins said the Huckabee campaign is determined not only to win Tuesday but to press on after that.

"I'm a better conservative alternative because I'm not a latecomer to the cause," Huckabee said in Huntsville on Saturday in another dig at Romney.