Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama invoked the Sermon on the Mount as a reason for why he supports civil unions during an appearance in Nelsonville, Ohio, on Sunday.

The response came after Pastor Leon Forte, who heads up Grace Christian Center in Athens, Ohio, asked about Obama’s faith. The video is available here and the full transcript is available here.

“Your campaign sets a quandary for most evangelical Christians,” Forte said. “They believe in the social agenda that you have. They have a problem with what the conservatives have laid out as the moral litmus test about who is worthy and who is not.”

Obama responded by saying he is a devout Christian, he prays to Jesus every night and tries to go to church as much as he can.

“I think what you may be referring to, though, when you say controversies, probably has more to do with two issues, which is abortion and gay marriage, which has become, I think, how people measure faith in the evangelical community.”

Obama said that while he does not believe in gay marriage, he does think the state should allow civil unions that allow a same-sex couples to visit each other in a hospital or transfer property to each other.

“If people find that controversial then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans,” Obama said.

He called abortion a tragic and painful issue.

“But I think that … in the end I think women, in consultation with their pastors, and their doctors, and their family, are in a better position to make these decisions than some bureaucrat in Washington.”

Obama ended: “That’s my view. Again, I respect people who may disagree, but I certainly don’t think it makes me less Christian. Okay.”

Obama also cited the Sermon on the Mount in his June 28, 2006, ‘Call to Renewal’ address.

“Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.”

Obama also spoke with CT about abortion in a January interview.

In a letter dated Feb. 20 and received by church officials Feb. 25, IRS official Marsha Ramirez said “a reasonable belief exists” that the denomination violated federal law. Churches and other non-profit groups organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code are barred from endorsing or opposing candidates and political parties.

The UCC is generally considered the nation’s most liberal large Protestant body. Obama has been an active member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for more than two decades. Trinity is the UCC’s largest congregation.

In the IRS letter, Ramirez said the agency’s concerns “are based on articles posted on several websites” that described Obama’s June 23 appearance at the UCC’s biennial General Synod meeting in Hartford, Conn. The senator — by then an announced Democratic candidate for president — spoke to about 10,000 church members, according to the denomination and news accounts.

But UCC officials said they took pains to ensure that the speech was not perceived as a campaign event or an endorsement of the candidate.

Obama was invited “as one of 60 diverse speakers representing the arts, media, academia, science, technology, business and government. Each was asked to reflect on the intersection of their faith and their respective vocations or fields of expertise,” a UCC news release said. It also said church officials invited Obama as a church member rather than in his capacity as a candidate and said they asked him to speak a year before he declared his intention to run for higher office.

“The United Church of Christ took great care to ensure that Sen. Obama’s appearance before the … General Synod met appropriate legal and moral standards,” UCC General Minister John Thomas said in the news release. “We are confident that the IRS investigation will confirm that no laws were violated.”

Prior to the speech, a church official told the crowd that the appearance was not intended to be a campaign event and that campaign-related material and other forms of electioneering would not be allowed inside the event venue.

The IRS letter claimed that “40 Obama volunteers staffed campaign tables outside” the Hartford Civic Center, where the event was held. But church officials said they barred any campaigning inside the venue.

Thomas said that, while he believes the investigation will ultimately acquit the denomination, he nonetheless is concerned about its effect.

“The very fact of” the investigation’s existence “is disturbing,” Thomas said. “When the invitation to an elected public official to speak to the national meeting of his own church family is called into question, it has a chilling effect on every religious community that seeks to encourage politicians and church members to thoughtfully relate their personal faith to their public responsibilities.”

IRS officials do not discuss such investigations with the press because tax information is private. But several ministries and local congregations have been warned and investigated in recent years for electioneering.

The agency is currently investigating Southern Baptist pastor Wiley Drake for using church letterhead and a church-sponsored radio show to endorse Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.

Last year, the IRS ended an investigation without any sanctions against All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Calif. It had been under investigation for a guest sermon its former rector had given just before the 2004 presidential election. In it, he strongly criticized the war in Iraq but said he believed that both President Bush and his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, were good Christians.

IRS officials contended that the sermon amounted to an endorsement of Kerry over Bush. The church contested the charge. In a September letter to the congregation announcing that it was ending its investigation without penalty, IRS officials said they continued to believe the church had illegally intervened in the election.

All Saints’ legal defense ended up costing more than $200,000, according to church leaders. Anticipating a similar financial burden for the UCC, Thomas sent an appeal Feb. 27 to church members asking them to donate to a special legal-defense fund.

“In order to adequately defend ourselves, as well as protect the broader principle of the freedom of religious communities to entertain questions of faith and public life, we will need to secure expert legal counsel, and the cost of this defense, we are told, could approach or exceed six figures,” Thomas wrote. “This is troubling news.”

March 4 (Bloomberg) — Mike Huckabee, the Republican presidential candidate who struggled to find a second act after his surprise win in Iowa, ended his campaign tonight, conceding the nomination to John McCain.

Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, exited the race after he failed to win any of the four states voting today, and television networks announced that McCain had amassed enough delegates to capture the Republican nomination.

“One of the things we’ll be able to say is we fought the good fight and we finished the race,” Huckabee told supporters in Irving, Texas.

Huckabee said he had called McCain and said he and his campaign staff would help the Arizona senator. His departure ends the Republican presidential race, allowing the party to coalesce behind a single candidate while the Democratic nomination remains in doubt.

“We’ll be working on doing everything we can to help Senator McCain and to help our party,” Huckabee said. “There are many battles that we need not just to fight, we need to win for our country’s sake and our future’s sake.”

Huckabee, 52, had won eight states, including the first-in- the-nation Iowa caucuses, largely through the strength of his appeal to evangelical Christians.

His announcement caps a campaign in which he went from afterthought to front-runner and back again. Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher with a penchant for using humor, was largely ignored until shortly before Iowa’s Jan. 3 caucuses. There, religious and socially conservative voters helped him defeat former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

Huckabee’s Struggle

Huckabee, unable to raise the tens of millions of dollars needed to run a national campaign, struggled to replicate that success elsewhere. He finished third in New Hampshire, behind McCain and Romney, and then bypassed the subsequent contests to focus on South Carolina. He lost to McCain there by three points, and said he might have won had former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson not also been in the race.

After placing fourth in Florida, Huckabee looked to rejuvenate his campaign by doing well in the southern, midwestern and rural states voting on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5. He won five of those states. Romney, who tried to nudge Huckabee out of the race, ended up dropping out himself. Huckabee, meanwhile, declared it a two-man race.

McCain continued racking up victories that gave him an all- but-insurmountable lead among delegates. Huckabee rejected calls from within his own party to concede, saying he wanted to ensure that conservatives continued to have a voice in the contest.

`Foot Soldiers’

“The foot soldiers of the Republican Party, the conservatives in the Republican Party, need to make sure their voices aren’t shut out,” Huckabee said in a Feb. 20 interview with Bloomberg Television.

Money was always an obstacle for his campaign. He raised $13 million through Jan. 31. Democrat Barack Obama raised more than that in a single month.

Still, Huckabee defied predictions that such as cash- strapped campaign could not become a factor in the race, Republican pollster Whit Ayres said.

“He did more with less than any other presidential candidate in recent memory,” Ayres said. “He demonstrates, along with Barack Obama, the extraordinary importance of being a superb speaker to being a successful politician.”

“It’s important for students to see that their votes do count,”

“I’m rooting for him more and more now,”

“After this, I’m hoping he can at least stay until the convention,”

These are just some of the comments from the quite enthusiastic crowd. The article is in the Plano Courier Star which also displays an abundance of positive reader comments.

GO MIKE!!!!

Though Sen. John McCain of Arizona is the presumptive nominee and “it is mathematically impossible” for Huckabee to pull ahead in delegates, Huckabee “remains our choice for the GOP nomination,” the newspaper’s editorial board wrote, just two days before the state’s primary.

This is not the first time the paper has endorsed Huckabee. Last month, it called him a “a progressive conservative with a pastor’s heart.”

And in December, it called him “decent, principled and empathetic to the views and concerns of others — an antidote to the power-mad partisanship that has led U.S. politics to a dispiriting standstill.”

The Dallas Morning News also endorsed Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, for the Democratic presidential nomination.

In the piece published Sunday, the newspaper’s editorial board wrote, “True, a Huckabee vote today won’t do much to determine the 2008 GOP presidential candidate.”

It added, “But it’s a good investment in the Republican Party’s future.”

McCain has 1,033 delegates to Huckabee’s 247, according to CNN calculations. A candidate needs 1,191 to seal the Republican nomination.

McCain appears to hold a comfortable lead in Texas. Recent polls indicate he is the choice of 58 percent of the state’s likely Republican voters, while Huckabee trails with 30 percent.

The Republican Texas “poll of polls” consists of three surveys: American Research Group (February 29-March 1), Reuters/C-SPAN/Houston Chronicle/Zogby (February 28-March 1), and Belo/Public Strategies (February 26-28).

McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, has “long experience and personal courage” and “a solid record of fiscal responsibility,” the newspaper said.

It added that he “has been on the right side of campaign finance reform and environmental issues” and credited him as “correct and principled to lead the fight for comprehensive immigration reform last summer.”

But the board added that McCain’s age, 71, “and his choleric temperament gave us pause, particularly when contrasted to Mr. Huckabee’s sunny-side-up brand of conservatism.”

The paper lauded Huckabee’s views on the environment and described him as “a compassionate conservative” on economic matters.

“Though his social and religious conservatism puts him on the wrong side of abortion, gay rights and other key issues, that same deep-faith commitment inspires his dedication to helping the poor and to racial healing,” the board said.

Huckabee’s youth, pragmatism and “good-natured approach to politics” mean he could play a role in GOP politics for many years, the paper said.

“That’s why we encourage Texas Republicans to mark their ballots for Mr. Huckabee in the GOP primary: to demonstrate to the party’s elite that Mr. Huckabee and his vision have a solid constituency.”

Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont all hold contests March 4.

Huckabee’s visit comes two weeks after Dobson endorsed him for president.

“Personally it was a great encouragement,” Huckabee said of the endorsement. “I think it also was an extraordinary boost for our campaign because Dr. Dobson is seen as such a true national leader when it comes to issues of life, marriage and family.”

Huckabee is an ordained Baptist minister and a former governor of Arkansas. His campaign has been kept alive in part by support from conservative Christians who don’t want to back Arizona Senator John McCain.

Appearing without Dobson at a podium on a lawn outside the campus of Focus on the Family, Huckabee declined to describe what he and his friend of 14 years discussed.

Huckabee, who was in Colorado Springs to speak Friday night to the conservative group, Leadership Program of the Rockies, said the meeting was “personal” in nature and “not a meeting that I was having with him in his capacity as the leader of Focus on the Family.”

Although Huckabee said Dobson’s backing has helped him, he doubts the Focus on the Family founder will be campaigning for him.

“I think it would be very difficult for him to go on the campaign trail,” Huckabee said. “I did not ask for that, and I would not expect that.”

Through a spokesman, Dobson also declined to describe the conversation and cautioned against reading into why he didn’t appear with Huckabee.

“This was a long-planned private conversation between two friends and Dr. Dobson wanted to keep it that way,” said Gary Schneeberger, a Dobson spokesman. “It’s certainly not meant to temper his support of the governor.”

He said Dobson would not comment on a private meeting. Schneeberger also said Dobson was sensitive to IRS rules that restrict tax-exempt groups like Focus on the Family from getting involved in politics. When Dobson endorses political candidates, he emphasizes he is speaking as an individual and not for the group.

Many political observers believe Huckabee, with 254 delegates, doesn’t have a chance of catching McCain, who has 958 delegates of the 1,191 needed to win the nomination. Romney, who dropped out of the race earlier this month after picking up 280 delegates, has endorsed McCain.

That hasn’t discouraged Huckabee.

“There’s 46 delegates at stake in Colorado that could be mine,” Huckabee told dozens of cheering supporters.

Dick Wadhams, Colorado chair of the Republican Party, said that that the Feb. 5 caucus — where Huckabee came in third after Romney and McCain — was a “preference poll” and that delegates are still up for grabs.

Huckabee also commented about a New York Times article Thursday alleging that McCain’s staffers were concerned about a relationship with a female lobbyist during his first presidential run eight years ago. McCain and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, have denied they had a romantic relationship.

“My only experience with (McCain) as a fellow candidate the past 14 months is a positive one,” Huckabee said. “I see him as a man of integrity. He’s denied the allegations in the New York Times article. I have no reason to doubt him.”

Mimi Hailes, 50, of Colorado Springs has been working on Huckabee’s campaign in Colorado and it was thrill to meet him and see him person.

“I told him that I’ve been praying for him and that I pray for him every day,” Hailes said. “I’m very hopeful that he’s still going to be our candidate.”

“Your vote on March 4 is not going to be wasted if it’s a vote for me,” Huckabee told the cheering crowd. “If we win Texas, everything changes.”

The former Arkansas governor spoke at a campaign rally at the Renaissance Hotel in Greenway Plaza.

Political pundits nationwide are saying John McCain has the GOP nomination wrapped up, but Huckabee is telling Texans they might be able to turn the tide in favor of his conservative candidacy, in which he has stumped for building a Mexican border wall to keep out illegal immigrants and replacing the income tax with a national sales tax.

“Here’s a man who’s not willing to compromise,” said Houstonian Rachel Williams, a coordinator for a major chain pharmacy store. “He’s got guts in today’s political society, where he stands up and says ‘Nope, this is the way it should be, regardless of what the regular politicians say.’ That’s what I love about him.”

Timothy Ruggiero traveled from Decatur to see Huckabee.

“He’s honest, and I think he can be the best representative of people of faith and good Christian family values,” said Ruggiero, 43, a loss prevention manager for a major bookstore chain.

Huckabee’s willingness to carry on his campaign when many say it already is lost is a big draw, Ruggiero said.

“This is a good testimony to him that he sticks with it when times are tough,” Ruggiero said.

The rally crowd ran the age gamut.

Eric Newman, 21, of Pasadena said Huckabee’s conservative views drew him to the event.

“Such as his position on abortion, gay marriage,” Newman said of the former Baptist minister, who is opposed to both.

Huckabee said he may carry on his campaign even if he loses Texas.

Texans’ “willingness to vote for me, to vote for the strong, conservative principles that I think are bedrock to Texas Republicans, will send a very clear message that this is a party that will not move away from the reasons that many people became Republicans,” Huckabee said.

Huckabee trails McCain in delegate count by 957 to 256, with McCain needing 1,191 needed to win the nomination at the national convention this summer.

“He doesn’t have them yet,” Huckabee told the cheering crowd.

Although he is battling McCain for the nomination, he said he considers the Arizona senator an honorable man and believes McCain’s denial of suggestions that he may have engaged in a romantic relationship with a female telecommunications lobbyist.

Huckabee said he plans to spend today raising funds and meeting with supporters in Houston, then move on to other parts of the state in the next couple of weeks.

kevin.moran@chron.com

Anaheim woman was married to the mob

Cammy Franzese’s the reason the ‘Yuppie Don’ walked away from his life in the Mafia.

The Orange County Register

The next time you’re about to go off on your husband for treating the bedroom floor like a hamper or leaving crumbs all over the kitchen counter or returning home from the grocery store with only half the items on the list you gave him, just take a deep breath and invoke the spirit of Cammy Franzese.

This is a woman who stood by her man to a degree that would make even Tammy Wynette flinch if she were still alive.

But by greeting his shortcomings with – now keep an open mind, ladies – love and prayer, she managed to change him.

Cammy Franzese is the reason her husband Michael Franzese – a.k.a. “The Yuppie Don” – became the first high ranking member of the Mafia to publicly walk away from a life of crime and into a life of Little League coaching and churchgoing.

And if she can do that, there’s still hope that you can help your man walk away from a life of crumbs on the counter.

• • •

Cammy grew up in Anaheim, one of seven children born to Irma Garcia, a devout churchgoer, and Seferino Garcia. She graduated from Anaheim High in 1981. While studying dance at Cal State Fullerton, she got a chance to go to Miami as a back-up dancer on the set of the movie “Knights of the City.”

It was there in 1984 that she met Michael Franzese, the producer of the movie. He was young and handsome – and 11 years older, to her dismay. But he was sweet. He told her he was Catholic and had once been an altar boy. He didn’t tell her that he had already escaped five white-collar crime indictments. Or that he was “heir apparent” in the Colombo family.

Cammy returned to Anaheim when the movie finished shooting, but their relationship continued. One day not long after, Mike’s friend Frankie called: Mike had been arrested, something about tax evasion. At this point she still thought her boyfriend was just your average businessman. While the New York papers were having a field day with the Mob charges, it wasn’t making headlines here.

When Michael made bail he flew out to the West Coast and told Cammy he wanted to spend his life with her. The day after their engagement party, he was acquitted. They married that July in Beverly Hills and bought condos on Long Island and in Brentwood. Cammy gave birth to a baby girl.

But the good times didn’t last long. When their daughter was 7 months old, Michael was indicted for racketeering. This time he went to prison. That same year he was listed as the youngest capo on Fortune magazine’s 1986 chart of “The 50 Biggest Mafia Bosses,” according to a Life Magazine article. He was 33 “It was a blessing that I was young and idealistic and naïve at the time,” Cammy says. She didn’t ask her husband questions, fearing she would hear something she didn’t want to. She didn’t read newspapers. Or watch the news. Instead, over the next four years, she visited him every weekend – and prayed for him.

Cammy’s mother counseled her to forgive him and shared her vision. “He’s going to speak to millions,” she told her. “And she was so right. My mother was just so loving and forgiving and she believed in second chances and transformation and miracles,” Cammy says.

Well, Michael finally came home four years later. Law enforcement wanted him to testify against his “associates.” He wouldn’t do it. They threatened to throw him back in prison for a parole violation. He wouldn’t budge. One morning, after 18 months of freedom, he was back in prison.

By now they had two children. Money was tight so Cammy gave up the house with the elevator and nine bathrooms in Brentwood for a condo in Westwood.

“I just thought ‘Oh, my gosh, I can’t do this again.’ I was angry. Michael was still living for Michael.”

But she still loved him. “I used to get on my knees and pray that God would protect him and change his heart … and make him the husband and the father he needs to be …. And bring him home.”

Back behind bars, the Yuppie Don broke. “My heart hurt so much that night, it was the kinda pain I remember,” Michael says. “That night I had nothing but enemies.”

A prison guard walked up and pushed a Bible through the slot. It fell on the floor. Michael threw it against the wall. Then he reconsidered. “Ya know, I’ve got everyone in the world mad at me, I don’t need God mad at me.”

He opened the Bible. It fell on Proverbs 16.7. “When a man’s ways are pleasing to the Lord even his enemies are at peace with him.”

He had let down his wife once again. “My life was in direct contradiction to everything that she was about and believed in,” he says. He remembered back when they first met and he couldn’t take his eyes off of her, and how pretty she was, as she talked to him about God. “Honestly, that didn’t really appeal to me at the time,” he says. “She could have been talking about anything. I was being polite. I wasn’t listening.”

Now he was listening.

“I loved her madly,” he says. “I think the main thing is, she knew that I would do anything for her.”

So finally he did. Michael Franzese renounced his life of crime. Behind bars, he granted an interview to Life Magazine. When “Quitting the Mafia” hit newsstands in 1987 the Warden called him into his office. “Franzese, do you have a death wish,” he asked?

“There’s an old saying that the only way to leave the Mafia is in a coffin,” the Life article began.

Michael was willing to take his chances. During his four years in the hole this second time around he read the Bible inside out and upside down. When he got out, the FBI came knocking. “You claimed you turned your life around, prove it,” they told him. They asked him to be in a video to warn young athletes not to be sucked into organized crime’s web of game fixing.

His videos led to speaking engagements. Today he travels the country, visiting colleges and churches, sharing his story. “Had I not met Cammy, I am certain I wouldn’t have taken the path I took and I would probably be dead or in prison,” he tells them.

Complete strangers have heard more about his double dealings than wife has. “To this day, I’ve never sat down and discussed my past life with her,” he said.

And she has never asked for details.

Michael has written two books, “Quitting the Mob” in 1991 and “Blood Covenant” in 2003. She hasn’t read a single page. “There’s probably a lot of things in there I don’t want to know about. I see it when he’s sleeping and tossing and turning. I can imagine it. I don’t need to see it in black and white.”

She remembers in the days after her husband got out of prison. “Every now and again someone would ask, ‘Are you fearful for your life or your children’s life?’ And I’d think, ‘Oh my God. Why should I be fearful?’”

Next Friday (Feb. 29), Cammy will join her husband on stage at Coast Hills Community Church in Aliso Viejo to speak publicly, for only the third time, to married couples about how they held it together.

“It’s definitely easier to say I didn’t sign up for this and walk away,” she will tell them. “But whatever his old life was, it doesn’t matter, because that’s not the man he is today. I’m married to this man and I’m in love with this man.”

Plus, he’s a super clean freak and would never in a million years leave socks on the floor or crumbs on the counter.

Waukesha – Mike Huckabee implored Wisconsin supporters Wednesday to defy the pundits and his Republican opponent and boost his longshot bid, which he vowed to carry all the way to the national convention.

But the former Arkansas governor, at a rally in Waukesha, also said the election was about upholding the core principles of the party, not just winning.

“It seems like someone forgot to tell you this race isn’t over,” Huckabee told several hundred supporters packed into the Country Springs Hotel. “I’m awfully glad to tell you your vote still matters.”

Huckabee, the former broadcaster and Baptist preacher, pumped up the crowd with his trademark wit, quotes from Scripture, tough stance on illegal immigration and an anti-abortion message that he said GOP front-runner John McCain could not match.

He never named the Arizona senator, instead referring only to “three U.S. senators” from a Washington culture that has turned its back on the country on a host of issues.

He hawked his sweeping tax plan, calling for energy independence within a decade and beefing up the military.

His most emphatic comments were reserved for the abortion issue, and they drew the night’s biggest ovation.

“Our value comes because God created us,” Huckabee said. “We value every single human life,” from the unborn to the elderly in nursing homes.

Of the remaining major-party candidates, only he still backs a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution.

Unless the value of all life is recognized, Huckabee said, “I don’t think we can enjoy the blessings of God.”

Huckabee will be in Wisconsin all day today and into Friday.

Impressing the voters

Scott Judson, a Waukesha man and former Libertarian candidate for state office, showed up at the rally hunting for a conservative he could support. His wife, Candy, said she was similarly undecided.

Economic and foreign policy issues are most important to him, Scott Judson said. But it looks like a weak GOP field, he said before the speech.

After Huckabee’s speech, Scott Judson said he was impressed and declared himself a Huckabee backer.

“He said all the right words tonight,” Judson said.

Judson said he disliked McCain’s opposition to tax cuts that President Bush initiated.

“I’m glad he’s staying in the race to the end,” said Dave Vrba, a Waukesha resident at the rally with his wife, Tammy, and their two young kids. “It gives people like me a voice.”

Vrba said Huckabee’s much-documented weight loss was inspirational, as was his intelligent, open style and sense of humor.

Tammy Vrba, who usually votes Democratic but is backing Huckabee, said she had heard far more specific plans from the former governor than from Illinois Sen. Barack Obama on the Democratic side.

John Sperandeo, a painting contractor, drove from Kenosha to see Huckabee. “I love this guy. I believe a president should be a man of God. He openly declares it, as you should.”

Sperandeo said he thought Huckabee would continue Bush’s war on terror and hang tough in Iraq. Asked about McCain, he said: “He hasn’t shown he’s a man of God.”

Huckabee plans stops in four Wisconsin cities today. His itinerary includes a morning rally in Madison, afternoon events in La Crosse and the Wausau area, and an evening visit to Green Bay.

Huckabee said he had visited Green Bay’s Lambeau Field while campaigning for the national ticket in 2004. While on a tour, he sang the national anthem at the 50-yard line with two other governors, in a darkened stadium near midnight.

He called Lambeau a shrine.

On Friday, he is scheduled to eat breakfast at a pancake house in Milwaukee before meeting with Journal Sentinel reporters and editors.

Addressing a reporter’s question after Wednesday’s rally, Huckabee defended his decision to leave the campaign trail for 36 to 48 hours this weekend to make a paid speech to a young professional group in the Cayman Islands.

“I’m not independently wealthy,” he said.

“If John McCain doesn’t get 1,191 delegates, this goes to the convention, all bets are off,” Huckabee told reporters. “And after the first ballot anybody can end up being the nominee.”

So what if Karl Rove went on CBS’ Face the Nation saying it’s implausible that Huckabee will get the numbers necessary to win the nomination. Huckabee’s response: “Karl Rove has also maxed out personal contributions to John McCain … The fact the opposing team has their cheerleaders and band blowing songs against me hardly motivates me to quit. It only motivates me to play harder.”

For Huckabee, the game is not over.

“I’m really not very persuaded by the party officials and the party establishment who come out now and are saying ‘Oh, well John McCain has 700 delegates, we oughta just quit,’” said Huckabee.

“When they wrote the rules, it said you had to have 1,191. So why did they write the rules for that game of play and now want to change the rules, that’s crazy. And so, you know, I’m playing by the rules that were written for me and I’m not trying to make them and I’m not trying to break them, so we’ll continue doing it.”

Referencing Hillary Clinton’s tearful moments in recent months, Huckabee said, “If I cried and whined every time someone ignored me in this, I’d quit a year ago. But you have to realize that in every stage of this, there’s yet to be a time when the pundits said, Huckabee’s the guy to pull this off…I’m enjoying it if no other reason than to just intimidate the daylights out of all the other people who feel like they have it figured out.”

Following what he called an “overwhelming” win in Kansas and “shocking” victory in Louisiana, Huckabee said he felt “confident” going into Virginia.

“When [your opponents] really don’t think you have a chance, they ignore you. When they say bad things about you, they fear you. So the fact that I’m being asked to leave and all these things are being said, it’s an extraordinary honor. I don’t necessarily enjoy it, but I sure appreciate it.”