Huckabee - from an Arkansas reporter

The Press, like the Republican Party as a whole, is dissatisfied with the main Republican contenders for the nomination, so they are looking at the lower tiers. Many reporters have been charmed by the preacher and ex-Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee. Not enough to actually research him, of course, but certainly enough to write laudable reports on him.

Why not? He looks extremely pleasant and has an excellent TV manner, sounding like he is a nice, easy going Southerner much like his predecessor Bill Clinton. So the national press is giving Huckabee the same polite support they gave G. W. Bush in 2000 - accentuate the positives and overlook the negatives. They haven't asked Max Brantley, who covered him as Governor in Arkansas and has little good to say about the man.

Max Brantley describes Mike Huckabee thus:

Huckabee, in his political debut, was preparing to become the Bible-thumping, abortion-decrying Republican challenger to U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers, the Democratic incumbent. With a playbook straight out of James Dobson, he tried to portray Bumpers as a pornographer for his support of federal grants to the arts.

More important, Huckabee revealed an enduring weakness as glaring as that other Arkansas governor's fondness for women. 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. [Snip]

Huckabee insists he's not one of those harsh, punitive, "angry" conservatives, but again, there are witnesses who might say otherwise if anyone's interested.

Ask the retarded Fort Smith teenager, raped by her stepfather, who sought Medicaid funding for an abortion as federal law required. Huckabee stood in the hospital door, at least figuratively, to prevent state funding. Ask the gay people belittled by his cracks about "Adam and Steve." Ask the scientists who've seen evolution virtually disappear from the textbooks and classrooms of Arkansas with his administration's acquiescence.

Then there are some things he has done as a social conservative that will make the evangelical Republicans love him, but anti-theocrats and Constitution-based Americans will detest him for - if the press ever mentions those items.

Huckabee's administration worked hard and unapologetically to prevent gay people from being foster parents. He avidly supported the state amendment that bans gay marriage as well as civil unions and bans any equal treatment under the law -- such as in health insurance coverage -- for same-sex partners. He professed opposition to alcohol and gambling, but he allowed passage of legislation that made it easier for restaurants to obtain private-club mixed-drink permits in dry counties. Over the angry objection of the church lobby, he sped final action on a bill to allow video poker at the state's racetracks, an act followed not long afterward by a $10,000 campaign contribution from the owner of the state's biggest race track, at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs.

Huckabee is also a typical Republican, one who prefers to restrict and even repress voters. In addition, his environmental actions and statements show no respect for the environment. [I guess that racoons and fish don't give him gifts.]

Because Arkansas Democrats tried to enfranchise more citizens with weekend voting in Arkansas, he called his home state a banana republic on the Don Imus show. He's compared weight loss with a concentration camp. Abortion, even in the earliest microscopic stages, he's called a holocaust. He referred in a Farm Bureau speech to "fruits and nuts" and "wacko environmentalists" in decrying environmentalists as a threat to agriculture. (Yes, this is the same man that gullible mainstream columnists praise for his ringing environmental proclamations.)

He's not an especially good manager - until it comes to covering up his failures, and then he manages that action quite well.

He left Arkansas with a bill of more than $40 million for overcharges of the federal government's Medicaid program. A State Police director left after a tiff over Huckabee's demand that the agency improve his private lake property in the name of security. Troubles dogged both the state's computer services agency and its workforce agency. Youth services have been an unending series of tragedies. The buck never stopped at Huck's desk, you can be sure.

The governor's office records -- triumph and tragedy, sage advice and venom-filled screeds about members of the press and Legislature -- would tell this tale. But, as I've mentioned, the computer hard drive destruction ensured that would never happen.

Then there is the story of how Huckabee released a convicted rape - murderer, Wayne Dumond, from prison so that he could rape and murder at least two more women. Like Giuliani who overrode the advice of subordinates to appoint Bernie Kerik as head of the New York prison system, Huckabee showed the bad judgment to override his advisers and release Wayne Dumond. Brantley goes into this in some detail.

Both the Republicans and the national Press are getting desperate to find a decent Republican nominee for President, and it looks like the national Press is ready to create one if they can't find him. So they are ignoring the Internet and Huckabee's history, trying to create a candidate out of a few short speeches in Republican cattle-calls debates in which no one can say enough to reveal who they really are. From such unpromising evidence the National Press wants to create the republican dream candidate.

It looks like the National Press Corps is trying to coronate anther national nightmare by ignoring and whitewashing Huckabee's real record.