The Huck Heard 'Round the World?

Huckabee says his win could be "a seismic impact on the political Richter scale"

ByABC News
February 9, 2009, 11:58 AM

FORT DODGE, Iowa, Jan. 2, 2008— -- On the day before the Iowa caucuses, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said a victory for his underfunded, out-organized campaign would have "a seismic impact on the political Richter scale," and he compared the intense challenge he faces from former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney with the American Revolutionary War, with multimillionaire Romney cast as the British Red Coats.

"Tomorrow night's going to be an important night for the process of presidential politics, unlike anything I've ever seen before," he told a crowd of 150 voters in Fort Dodge Wednesday morning. "I've been outspent 20 to one in this state. That's a pretty big hill to climb. If there ever was the definition of an underdog, look in the dictionary. There's a picture of me."

Huckabee said that, like him, the Continental Army also faced skeptics. "At the beginning of this country there were some farmers with muskets. Nobody thought they could beat the British. After all, the British were so well-financed. And they had the nice long rifles. …They had a magnificent Navy. Our guys had a few rowboats."

In a seeming comparison with the handsome, well-coiffed Romney, Huckabee referred to the British Army's "nice uniforms, all those nice shiny red coats with beautiful brass buttons."

A Huckabee victory would be quintessentially American, he suggested. America's Founding Fathers "had this amazingly radical idea about politics in government all of us are equal. People are not going to be more equal because of their ancestry," Huckabee said. "People are not going to be more equal because of their last name or their net worth."

Huckabee, born into humble origins in Hope, Ark., and a graduate of Ouachita Baptist University, said he could run for president "because our Founding Fathers had this idea that we were all equal, didn't mean that we started out with the same net income, didn't mean that we started out with a last name that opened doors, and people said, 'Oh, yes, I knew your father at Harvard at Yale or Princeton.' People knew my father from the shipyard, not Harvard.'"