Huckabee hunts birds, votes in U.S. heartland
By Ed Stoddard
HIGH PRAIRIE FARMS, Iowa, Dec 26 (Reuters) - Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee hunted for birds and votes on Wednesday during a pheasant shoot in snowy Iowa, a pursuit that goes down well with folks in the U.S. heartland.
"Hopefully we'll just shoot pheasants, not each other," the jovial former Arkansas governor, clad in a blaze-orange hunting vest, told reporters before heading off for the hunt on a farm about 30 miles (48 km) south of the Iowa capital Des Moines.
Huckabee, 52, has enjoyed a meteoric rise in opinion polls in recent weeks, surging into a virtual tie nationally with front-runner Rudy Giuliani, largely because the ordained Baptist preacher has connected with the Republican Party's evangelical wing.
This puts him in serious contention with just over a week to go before the Jan. 3 nomination contest in Iowa, which starts the state-by-state process to pick the Republican and Democratic candidates for November's presidential election.
With an English setter named "Dude" flushing the birds, the avid outdoorsman personally downed one brightly colored ring-necked pheasant that bolted into the air from the snow-covered fields.
"Each of these birds gave their lives for the campaign," Huckabee, who was wielding a camouflaged 12-guage semi-automatic shotgun, quipped to reporters as he laid out three dead pheasants shot by his party.
"God, guns and gays" is often said to be the focus of evangelicals in the Republican Party and the guns part is not simply about what they perceive as their constitutional rights or self-defense.
It also stems from the big role that hunting and fishing play in conservative Christian culture in the United States. Prominent religious conservatives who pursue such activities include President George W. Bush and James Dobson, founder of the conservative advocacy group Focus on the Family.
A U.S. survey of licensed hunters and anglers last year, commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation, found half of those polled identified themselves as evangelical Christians.
But a candidate who knows how to use a shotgun or form a proper line while pursuing pheasants can also win big marks in rural America with the large non-evangelical hunting crowd.
Outdoor Life, a U.S. magazine which claims a readership of over 5.5 million, last month named Huckabee "one of the 25 most influential people in hunting and fishing" -- the only presidential candidate to win that placing.
The magazine said he made the list -- which will be noted in middle America -- because he helped pass a "conservation amendment" pumping approximately $26 million into the coffers of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
Warming to the theme of conservation, Huckabee said on Wednesday that hunters were good stewards of the environment whose license fees were used for wildlife protection.
"A hunter's license is what pays for the food plots and is what pays for the enforcement officers to go out and enforce the law. So the truth is the hunters are the ones who preserve the species," Huckabee said.
(Editing by Stuart Grudgings) (To read more about the U.S. political campaign, visit Reuters "Tales from the Trail: 2008" online at blogs.reuters.com/trail08/)
