Huck’s Tough Night Down South

ABC’s Kevin Chupka reports: Former South Carolina Gov. David Beasley (Gov. Huckabee’s
senior advisor here in the state) and a group of reporters huddled around a laptop studying the returns county by county.  Turned temporarily from politician to pundit, he picked apart the results — just
as the media was doing all night.

The crowd of supporters here at the Convention Center in Columbia, while smaller than one would have expected, cheered enthusiastically as the percentages changed on various cable news networks shown on the big screen.

However, despite the fervor and best efforts of both the campaign and an army of evangelical supporters, when the dust settled around 9:30 p.m., two-and-a-half hours after the polls had closed, Gov. Mike Huckabee took home silver, not gold.  South Carolina was a lynchpin state for him. A southern governor losing a key southern state?  Not a good indicator of what is to come.

Huckabee and his staff have long said the key to their success was momentum, not money.  For a campaign on a shoe-string budget such a strategy has been a necessity, not a choice.  After 16 days out of the winner’s spotlight and after failing to win a contest here in South Carolina many thought this would be his best chance to find that all-important momentum before superduper Tuesday.

Huckabee took the stage here to thank his family, staff and supporters. He told the crowd gathered that he spoke with Sen. John McCain: "I told him that I’d much rather preferred that he had called me tonight, but he was very gracious as we knew he would be … I want to thank him for running a civil and a good and a decent campaign."

Huckabee, who has pledged to keep his campaign a clean one, added, "Even though I’d like for the outcome to be just a little different on the top and in the second place — I would rather be where I am and have done it with honor, then to have won with the dishonor of attacking somebody else"

Some in the chattering class have criticized Huckabee for spending time in Michigan, a state he was not tracking all that well in, instead of focusing on South Carolina, where the race was so close. "Let me just say that tonight is not a time to start asking ‘what if’ — it’s a time to start talking about ‘what now,’" Huckabee told his faithful. "We’re not gonna sit around and second guess, well, what if we had done … no , ya know what, I feel like [in] our effort here we gave everything we had — we left it all on the field."

The campaign was taking a late night flight to Little Rock before heading to Texas for a fundraiser at the ranch of celeb supporter Chuck Norris. From there Huckabee will focus on Florida for the next few days, hoping to regain that momentum the old-fashioned way, by shaking hands on the ground.