Why This Infatuation With Huckabee?

[otterinbham 0]

After all, this is a man with a pretty undistinguished record in Arkansas, a guy who actually raised taxes--and now denies doing so. Here's a breakdown of his record:

• Huckabee claimed to have balanced the state budget every year. He couldn't have unbalanced it if he had wanted to. The law balances it automatically whoever is governor.

• Huckabee claimed to have cut welfare rolls in half. The 1996 federal welfare law did that.

• As for the Club for Growth's criticism that he had raised the sales tax for recreational programs, he blamed that on the voters who had approved it at a referendum. He said he would have violated his oath of office if he had tried to thwart the voters' will. He didn't reveal that he had made that tax a personal crusade, stumping the state for it and taking his big bass boat down the Arkansas River to promote the tax.

• Huckabee claimed that critics are wrong in saying that he had raised the gasoline tax. Arkansas voters passed the tax on diesel, he said. Wrong entirely. The legislature passed his gasoline tax and he signed it into law. He signed an accompanying diesel tax, too, but it went into effect only if voters approved a bond issue. The ballot made no mention of a tax increase. They did not put the tax on the ballot because it would have been defeated. The bond issue passed.

• Huckabee claimed to be responsible for the first broad-based tax cut in Arkansas history (no, there were others), including indexing of the income tax for inflation, an increase in the standard deduction and child-care tax credits. That omnibus tax cut in 1997 was not his but the Democratic tax program sponsored by the Democratic leader of the House. His predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, had proposed it. Huckabee signed it, his own little program having failed.

• Huckabee said the Supreme Court was responsible for the big sales tax of 2003. No, it was his and the legislature's judgment that higher taxes were the best way to comply with the court order to equalize school spending.

• That 50 percent increase in state spending while he was governor that the Growthers cited, he said, was mainly spending under the legislature's control, not his. No, every dollar of spending is appropriated by the legislature and every appropriation is subject to gubernatorial veto. The legislature almost uniformly adopted the governor's spending recommendations.

• He claimed to have cut taxes 94 times. These were nearly altogether tiny deductions and exemptions that the Democratic legislature has passed every session for 50 years. He didn't initiate them.

According to the Arkansas Times, Huckabee was largely a passive executive, who usually left initiative to the legislature. But now that he trots out his faith (As if the other candidates were Buddhist or Muslim or Jewish), people are flocking to his standard as if they were docile little sheep. What gives?

[otterinbham 0]

Or, read this summary by the Club For Growth:

Governor Huckabee's record on pro-growth, free-market policies is a mixed bag, with pro-growth positions on trade and tort reform, mixed positions on school choice, political speech, and entitlement reform, and profoundly anti-growth positions on taxes, spending, and government regulation.

While Governor Huckabee's record displays some flashes of economic conservatism, especially during his early years, the overwhelming evidence of his record and rhetoric over the past ten years leaves the Club for Growth and economic conservatives around the country to wonder if a President Huckabee would espouse the relatively pro-growth policies of Governor Huckabee circa 1997 or the anti-growth policies of Governor Huckabee circa 2004. While the Governor has made a concerted effort to defend his record, calling oneself an economic conservative does not make one so. His recent refusals to rule out raising taxes if elected President-the cornerstone of a pro-growth platform-perhaps indicate which path he would choose.

[otterinbham 0]

Or, lest you read too much into his self-serving piety, this from an Arkansas political reporter:

Huckabee seems to love loot and has a dismissive attitude toward ethics, campaign finance rules and propriety in general. Since that first, failed campaign, the ethical questions have multiplied.

In the 1992 contest with Bumpers, Huckabee used campaign funds to pay himself as his own media consultant. Other payments went to the family babysitter.

In his successful 1994 run for lieutenant governor, he set up a nonprofit curtain known as Action America so he could give speeches for money without having to disclose the names of his benefactors. He failed to report that campaign travel payments were for the use of his own personal plane.

After he became governor in 1996, he raked in tens of thousands of dollars in gifts, including gifts from people he later appointed to prestigious state commissions.

In the governor's office, his grasp never exceeded his reach. Furniture he'd received to doll up his office was carted out with him when he left, after he'd crushed computer hard drives so nobody could ever get a peek behind the curtain of the Huckabee administration.

Until my paper, the Arkansas Times, blew the whistle, he converted a governor's mansion operating account into a personal expense account, claiming public money for a doghouse, dry-cleaning bills, panty hose and meals at Taco Bell. He tried to claim $70,000 in furnishings provided by a wealthy cotton grower for the private part of the residence as his own, until he learned ethics rules prevented it. When a disgruntled former employee disclosed memos revealing all this, the Huckabee camp shut her up by repeatedly suggesting she might be vulnerable to prosecution for theft because she'd shared documents generated by the state's highest official.

He ran the State Police airplane into the ground, many of the miles in pursuit of political ends. Inauguration funds were used to buy clothing for his wife. He once took control of the state Republican Party's campaign account -- then swore the account had been somebody else's responsibility when it ran afoul of federal election laws. He repeated the pattern when he claimed in a newspaper story that his staff controlled the account to stage his second inauguration. When I filed a formal ethics complaint over what appeared to be an improper appropriation of donated money, he told a different story, disavowing responsibility for the money. He thus avoided another punishment from an Ethics Commission, which had sanctioned him on five other occasions. He dodged nine other complaints (though none, despite his counter-complaints, was held to be frivolous). In one case, he was saved by the swing vote of a woman who left the chairmanship of the Ethics Commission days later to take a state job. She listed the governor as a reference on the job application. Finally, unbelievably, Huckabee once sued to overturn the ban on gifts to him.

My newspaper chronicled all this and so much more. Since my paper wrote critically about him, I didn't often experience the "nice" Mike Huckabee that so many national commentators have enjoyed. In fact, ultimately Huckabee ended press services, which are publicly financed, to my newspaper. The Arkansas Times received no news releases from the governor's office, no notices of news conferences, no responses to routine questions. He was condemned for this by journalism organizations.

Truth is, we were happy to be thrown into the governor's briar patch. The world is full of disaffected Huckabee campaign workers, former employees and garden-variety Republicans who love to pass on tips about a governor they'd found self-centered and untrustworthy. If you think he left a well of warm feelings in Arkansas, note that Hillary Clinton had raised more money in Arkansas at last report and that a recent University of Arkansas Poll showed her a 35 to 8 percent leader over Huckabee in the presidential preferences of Arkansas residents. Only one-third of 33 Republican legislators have said they will support him for president.

Thanks to such unhappy people, we've broken numerous stories about Huckabee, from the first early word of his destruction of state computer hard drives (more fully reported by the Democrat-Gazette); to the time and place of his announcement for president; to his sale and purchase of homes; to his infamous "wedding registry." About the last: Three decades after the Huckabees' wedding, his wife registered at department stores so their new home, post-governor's mansion, could be stocked with gifts of linens, toasters and other suitable furnishings. In early 2007, our reporting also prompted the former first lady to decline dozens of place settings of governor's mansion china and Irish crystal that had been purchased with tax-deductible contributions to the Governor's Mansion Association, nominally set up to improve the mansion, not to buy going-away presents for former occupants. (Huckabee's governorship ended on Jan. 9, 2007.)

[otterinbham 0]

Or this from the American Spectator, hardly a member of the vast liberal media conspiracy:

Ask lots of folks in Arkansas, including Republicans, and a fair number will probably tell you that Huck is for Huck is for Huck. National media folks like David Brooks, dealing in surface appearances only, rave about what a nice guy Huckabee is, and a moral exemplar to boot. If they only did a little homework, they would discover a guy with a thin skin, a nasty vindictive streak, and a long history of imbroglios about questionable ethics.

Once, Gov. Huckabee even had the gall to file suit against the state ethics commission. He lost.

Fourteen times, the ethics commission -- a respected body, not a partisan witch-hunt group -- investigated claims against Huckabee. Five of those times, it officially reprimanded him. And, as only MSNBC among the big national media has reported at any real length, there were lots of other mini-scandals and embarrassments along the way.

He used public money for family restaurant meals, boat expenses, and other personal uses. He tried to claim as his own some $70,000 of furniture donated to the governor's mansion. He repeatedly, and obstinately, against the pleadings even from conservative columnists and editorials, refused to divulge the names of donors to a "charitable" organization he set up while lieutenant governor -- an outfit whose main charitable purpose seemed to be to pay Huckabee to make speeches. Then, as a kicker, he misreported the income itself from the suspicious "charity."

Huckabee has been criticized, reasonably so, for misusing the state airplane for personal reasons. And he and his wife, Janet, actually set up a "wedding gift registry" (they had already been married for years) to which people could donate as the Huckabees left the governorship, in order to furnish their new $525,000 home.

According to the Arkansas News Bureau (Feb. 1, 2003), "Huckabee's personal lawyer, Kevin Crass of Little Rock, has said Huckabee believes there should be no limit on gifts short of a bribe." After all, said Janet Huckabee, public officials like her husband should be automatically trusted: "Until you absolutely positively know that the man has outright lied to you, it should be enough that the man's word is that everything was done appropriately, legally, to the best of his knowledge to the letter of the law."

Of course, her reasoning refutes itself: If one is precluded from even questioning "the man's word," how can one possibly find out in the first place whether the official "has outright lied to you"?

It must be said that a fair-minded journalist ought to tread lightly in scrutinizing a candidate's spouse; but in Janet Huckabee's case, she is a politician in her own right, having run unsuccessfully for Arkansas Secretary of State. Voters overwhelmingly rejected her, perhaps because they remembered her propensity for other outrageous statements -- such as the time when she defended secrecy about the donors to her husband's "charity" by saying that a donor's name "wouldn't be enough. [Then] you'd want to know who he was married to, and then his wife would be German descent, and you'd have Mike, you'd have him responsible for 600,000 killings of Jews."

Huh?

Of course, nobody accused Huckabee of genocide. But his skin is so thin that when various underlings in his administration, even for bureaus as small as the state film office, crossed ethical lines (some of them, admittedly, rather minor), the governor consistently and angrily attacked the media for reporting the transgressions rather than demanding that the transgressors make things right.

Finally, Gov. Huckabee had a propensity to be almost as prodigal with pardons as was his famous predecessor by the name of Clinton. Indeed, Hillary Clinton's campaign team is probably licking their chops at the prospect of Huck as the nominee, because one of his pardons, in particular, was so outlandish as to make Willie Horton's case in Massachusetts seem almost child's play by comparison. After Huckabee helped secure the release of already-well-known rapist Wayne Dumond, the released convict sexually assaulted and murdered a woman in Missouri.

All of which leads one to ask two questions: First, how can voters whose primary concerns are moral look beyond so many of a candidate's problems with ethics? And, second, if Republicans in general have concluded, as most of them have, that repeated scandals among Washington GOPers played a huge role in Republican defeats in 2006, how could they possibly nominate somebody who seems to have such big ethical blind spots?

Give this to Huckabee: The man gives a good speech. But so does Duncan Hunter, with the biggest difference being that Hunter's speeches appeal more to the intellect than the heartstrings -- and that Hunter can boast 25 years of leadership for conservative causes, including on taxing and spending issues where Huckabee is notoriously un-conservative.

For that matter, if the question is public ethics, all the other major Republican candidates have rather solid records. With so little scandalous material to look into, why hasn't the usually scandal-ravenous national media delved into the record of the one GOP candidate whose ethics have been repeatedly questioned in his home state?

Has even the cynical big media been fooled by a Huckster?

[WinCrimson 61]

Where does the infatuation come from? He's a Southern Baptist preacher, has had some good one line zingers on Hillary, and is an overall likable guy.

I, for one, don't want another man in the White House just because he's a likable fella. I would enjoy talking baseball with Bush, but don't want him or his ilk running my country.

All of the candidates scare me in some form or fashion with the exception of Rep. Paul. I'm not really a member of his almost cult-like following, but I'm leaning toward giving him my vote.

[otterinbham 0]

Where does the infatuation come from? He's a Southern Baptist preacher, has had some good one line zingers on Hillary, and is an overall likable guy.

I, for one, don't want another man in the White House just because he's a likable fella. I would enjoy talking baseball with Bush, but don't want him or his ilk running my country.

All of the candidates scare me in some form or fashion with the exception of Rep. Paul. I'm not really a member of his almost cult-like following, but I'm leaning toward giving him my vote.

I'm with you on Ron Paul. The more I read about him, the more I like him. That's something no other candidate can say.

[Tiger Al 0]

otter, is this your audition piece to become Huck's fan club president in Alabama?!?

This, I thought, was interesting:

If you think he left a well of warm feelings in Arkansas, note that Hillary Clinton had raised more money in Arkansas at last report and that a recent University of Arkansas Poll showed her a 35 to 8 percent leader over Huckabee in the presidential preferences of Arkansas residents.

[otterinbham 0]

otter, is this your audition piece to become Huck's fan club president in Alabama?!?

This, I thought, was interesting:

If you think he left a well of warm feelings in Arkansas, note that Hillary Clinton had raised more money in Arkansas at last report and that a recent University of Arkansas Poll showed her a 35 to 8 percent leader over Huckabee in the presidential preferences of Arkansas residents.

Yeah, I guess I need to watch what I say. If his performance in Arkansas is any indication, I'll be slapped into a re-education camp hours after he takes the oath of office.

[Tiger Al 0]

otter, is this your audition piece to become Huck's fan club president in Alabama?!?

This, I thought, was interesting:

If you think he left a well of warm feelings in Arkansas, note that Hillary Clinton had raised more money in Arkansas at last report and that a recent University of Arkansas Poll showed her a 35 to 8 percent leader over Huckabee in the presidential preferences of Arkansas residents.

Yeah, I guess I need to watch what I say. If his performance in Arkansas is any indication, I'll be slapped into a re-education camp hours after he takes the oath of office.

If it hasn't happened yet with me then I think you're in the clear!