By Nikita Stewart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Brian Summers flew to San Antonio yesterday, hoping to save Mike Huckabee.
If it were simply up to Summers's passionate support for the former Arkansas governor, then front-runner Sen. John McCain -- 193 delegates away from the Republican nomination for president -- would do well to worry.
It was Summers, after all, who denied the Arizona senator a clean sweep of the District primary. Okay, so McCain won the District with 68 percent of the vote Feb. 12, but he lost in Ward 7 by three votes, 61 to 58. In Ward 8, Huckabee held his own with a 37 to 35 heartbreaker, and in Ward 5 he got 31 percent of the vote.
Paul D. Craney, executive director of the D.C. Republican Committee, explains: It's Brian Summers.
The 37-year-old Ward 5 resident is a paid staffer for the Huckabee campaign.
"I went to churches. I went to Bible study groups. I didn't go in selling the Republican Party. I came in and sold a candidate," said Summers, who targeted wards 7 and 8 in Southeast Washington, where he hoped to strike a chord with black Republicans who are Christians and who he thought could identify with Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister. It worked.
Everything, of course, is relative. Huckabee squeezed 1,020 votes out of the Democratic-dominated District. Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), who beat rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) by a 3 to 1 margin in the Democratic primary, had 93,386 votes. Republicans cast 6,292 ballots in the GOP primary.
Summers has traveled the country for his candidate, but nowhere is it tougher than on his home turf.
"I get teased a lot," he said good-naturedly.
Like this past weekend, when Summers was in his favorite haunt, Ben's Chili Bowl. (He had his victory party there.)
Looking like a barbershop quartet in white outfits stained by chili and grease, a group of cooks and servers pointed over the counter at Summers and put their own words to a beat blaring from the jukebox.
"O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!" they sang.
That's what it's like for a black man backing a white Republican in an election that is drawing African Americans to the polls to vote for a candidate who could become the first black president.
Being black does not equal being a Democrat, Summers said, noting that Republicans match his conservative values, including stances against same-sex marriage and abortion and support for the war in Iraq. "I've never taken anything to say that's the way it's supposed to be," he said.
Summers grew up an only child in Davidson, N.C., where he was adopted by an older couple who were tobacco farmers and Democrats.
He said he began connecting with the GOP when he was in eighth grade. While attending Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, he founded a College Republicans chapter. "I got 10 people to come with me and register the club," Summers said.
After college, he moved to the District and worked on the Hill, including a stint working for former North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, a fierce foe of affirmative action and a federal holiday for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Helms, Summers said, gave him a chance to reach out to his home state, and he could relate to Helms, who was an adoptive parent.
Summers also has a master's in divinity and spent two years at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the famed Atlanta church where King once served as co-pastor.
Huckabee, he said, is a candidate who speaks to his political and religious beliefs. "He said he didn't have a lot of money, but I wasn't looking for money."
"Whoever he's committed to, he's committed to," said Mason McCullough, 64, who owns a black newspaper in Statesville, N.C., and has known Summers for 15 years.
Kamal and Nizam Ali, co-owners of Ben's, agree. "He's got Huckabee stickers, Huckabee buttons, Huckabee T-shirts," Kamal Ali said.
Summers is a regular at Ben's, where he's known as "Motown." The first thing he did Saturday was select Temptations tunes to go along with his two chili dogs and fries. "My wife thinks I'm down here eating oatmeal," he said.
"I'm in a mixed marriage," he joked. Politically mixed. "I went to put a Huckabee sign in the front yard and she said no. She left for work, and I put it in the yard," he said.
His wife, Jocelyn Frye, a lawyer, took a stand on that sign. "I said no. No. No. It was not a reflection of a household perspective," she said. "He was right to snatch it up before I got back home."
Her vote, she said, is private, but she did allow that she went to Harvard Law School with Michelle Obama and added, "My deep suspicion is that we might vote for two different people [in November]."
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