K
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
Guest
The dark side of Mike Huckabee
The national media seems to have a crush on our ex-governor, but here
in Arkansas, we know better.
The Pony Express has reached us here in the Arkansas backwoods with
the latest journals from the big cities. So the country correspondents
have taken a break from hand-setting lines of type to read the Beltway
boys and girls rave about our former governor, Mike Huckabee.
"Easy to like," wrote Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. "Who Doesn't Heart
Huckabee?" said the headline over Gail Collins' column in the New York
Times. And those are restrained commentators. If you Google the names
Ronald Reagan and Mike Huckabee in tandem, I understand you get better
than 600,000 hits.
OK. I exaggerate. I have a phone and a computer (and it's 208,000
hits). But you'd think from national press comments that our friendly
state is unreachable by phone or Internet. Do national commentators do
homework? Or is a smiling, shoe-shining parson all it takes to
generate such fluff?
Come to Arkansas. You'll have to look hard to find a long-term
political analyst who'd subscribe fully to the national media
narrative about the latest man from Hope -- fresh face, funny, nice.
Mike Huckabee is fresh to you, maybe. Funny? If barnyard humor is your
shtick of choice. Nice? Well, he did do some good things in his 10
years as governor, but ... read on.
Before we begin, though, a word of warning to any reporters who might
want to repeat, on air or in print, any of the facts recounted below.
Huckabee does not take kindly to journalists who practice journalism.
Even editorialists and columnists at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,
the state's dominant (and Republican-friendly) daily paper, use words
like "petty" and "thin-skinned" to describe Huckabee. Then again, he's
compared hard-hitting (and accurate) news reporters for the Democrat-
Gazette to the press fabulists Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke. He called
liberal columnist John Brummett of Stephens Media "constipated" when
that early admirer commenced some gentle criticism. His administration
paid $15,000 to settle a suit filed by Roby Brock, the host of a
public TV news show whom Huckabee's people tried to force off the air
for his critical commentary.
Then there's me. I'm the editor of an alternative weekly, but I began
covering Huckabee when I was a columnist for the now-defunct daily
Arkansas Gazette in 1991, and Mike and I have been on the outs pretty
much ever since. He once called me and the Memphis Commercial Appeal
bureau chief "junkyard journalists" for our reporting. He also
compared me, in print, to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and, I've been
told on good authority, has wished aloud for my early and violent
demise.
It all began 16 years ago for Mike and me. 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.
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.)
Ironically, I have many good things to say about the governor. The
Bush administration would have done well to emulate Mike Huckabee's
speedy and successful relief effort for Hurricane Katrina refugees. He
raised taxes for schools, highways and children's health. Inevitably,
this expanded government. I say bravo on all counts, though the
conservative Club for Growth has delighted in quoting my liberal
newspaper when it attacks Huckabee's fiscal record.
He was kind to immigrants and favored state help for college-going
children of illegal immigrants. He once even briefly departed from
Republican dogma to suggest to a newspaper in libertarian New
Hampshire that, while he opposed gay marriage, he was open to civil
unions. He's since denied he ever intended such apostasy, but the
comment is on tape. At the Arkansas Times, we welcomed the governor's
conversion to devoted school consolidator. When our state system of
school finance was ruled unconstitutional, he initially decried the
ruling as a usurpation of local control. But he flip-flopped -- and we
applauded the somersault -- and led his Education Department to a
significant reduction in the number of tiny, inefficient school
districts and on the path to more demanding graduation standards.
But a paddling administered by a brute who sometimes smiles still
hurts. 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.
Social issues alone should give moderates pause. He championed a law
in Arkansas making it harder to get a divorce, the so-called covenant
marriage law that has been widely ignored except when he and his wife
recommitted in a Valentine's Day publicity stunt held in a 17,000-seat
arena.
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.
All this is sometimes done with humor, but rarely the sort of gentle
humor the national media has encountered. Huckabee prefers sarcastic
putdowns and hyperbole. 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.)
But the national press has more to examine than rhetoric when it comes
to Huckabee. He is not the man of principle that credulous
commentators describe. Though Huckabee doesn't support embryonic stem
cell research, he took a hefty honorarium and bulk book sales this
year from a diabetes drug maker, Novo Nordisk, which performs
embryonic stem cell research. He has lied when there's been no other
way around admitting embarrassing missteps, such as his advocacy of
freedom for a convicted rapist.
There are also legitimate questions about his skills as a manager. 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.
If I could resurrect one batch of files, it would be those reflecting
the advice of his staff that he not pursue his desire to free
convicted rapist Wayne DuMond. By "advice," I mean I think some of
them all but pleaded with Huckabee not to do it.
Though DuMond's prior record included a conviction for assault and his
alleged involvement in a slaying and one other rape, by the start of
Huckabee's governorship DuMond had become a national figure thanks to
Republican efforts to depict him as a victim of the Bill Clinton
machine. The rape victim was a distant relative of Clinton's.
Huckabee, perhaps persuaded by DuMond's supposed conversion to
Christianity, announced his intention to commute DuMond's sentence
without talking to the victim. Outraged, she stepped forward to
protest publicly. The backlash was swift and powerful. Huckabee backed
away from commuting DuMond's sentence, but in a private meeting
lobbied the state Parole Board to release him. Huckabee said, in
writing, that he supported DuMond's release. DuMond moved to Missouri
in 2000, where he molested and killed one woman and was suspected of
doing the same to another, but died in prison before he could be
charged in the second case.
To this day, Huckabee tries to minimize his responsibility for
DuMond's release. Huckabee's 2007 book "From Hope to Higher Ground"
also fudges the facts, implying that DuMond died before being
convicted of either Missouri murder. In one recent interview, he even
suggested that he had fought DuMond's parole, a statement his own
writings prove to be a lie.
Speaking of Huckabee's writings: I'd recommend the Huckabee catalog to
the national press. It's a ready representation of the man -- quip-
filled, shallow, factually challenged and full of the chip-on-the-
shoulder mentality that has marked so much of his public life. In
"Character Is the Issue," published in 1997, he complained bitterly
about how some congregants of the Baptist church he left in Texarkana
to seek public office didn't want to continue paying his health
insurance. Funny, no employer of mine ever kept paying me after I quit
work.
I digress. It's easy to do. In 10 years as governor of Arkansas, Mike
Huckabee left a rich and complicated history. It is not without points
to praise. But there's so much more, a record that the national media
-- so ready, since 1992, to plumb the tiniest cranny of Bill Clinton's
past -- seems uneager to discover. It's a measure of the loving
kindness with which he's been treated so far by the coastal punditry
that Huckabee has not yet had one of his famous self-pitying public
meltdowns about the unfairness of the media.
But then, you don't have to believe me about any of this. After all, I
live in Little Rock and, as Huckabee has often said, I'm just the
editor of a trashy, throwaway liberal tabloid. Why not look instead to
a conservative voice from the national media? At the American
Spectator, once home to the anti-Clinton Arkansas Project, senior
editor Quin Hillyer, a former Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial
writer, wrote recently, "National media folks like David Brooks [of
the New York Times], 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."
At last, something the national media and the Arkansas media can agree
on.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/11/13/huckabee/
http://perezhilton.com/2008-01-14-headline-of-the-week-weak-74#more-12189
The national media seems to have a crush on our ex-governor, but here
in Arkansas, we know better.
The Pony Express has reached us here in the Arkansas backwoods with
the latest journals from the big cities. So the country correspondents
have taken a break from hand-setting lines of type to read the Beltway
boys and girls rave about our former governor, Mike Huckabee.
"Easy to like," wrote Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. "Who Doesn't Heart
Huckabee?" said the headline over Gail Collins' column in the New York
Times. And those are restrained commentators. If you Google the names
Ronald Reagan and Mike Huckabee in tandem, I understand you get better
than 600,000 hits.
OK. I exaggerate. I have a phone and a computer (and it's 208,000
hits). But you'd think from national press comments that our friendly
state is unreachable by phone or Internet. Do national commentators do
homework? Or is a smiling, shoe-shining parson all it takes to
generate such fluff?
Come to Arkansas. You'll have to look hard to find a long-term
political analyst who'd subscribe fully to the national media
narrative about the latest man from Hope -- fresh face, funny, nice.
Mike Huckabee is fresh to you, maybe. Funny? If barnyard humor is your
shtick of choice. Nice? Well, he did do some good things in his 10
years as governor, but ... read on.
Before we begin, though, a word of warning to any reporters who might
want to repeat, on air or in print, any of the facts recounted below.
Huckabee does not take kindly to journalists who practice journalism.
Even editorialists and columnists at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,
the state's dominant (and Republican-friendly) daily paper, use words
like "petty" and "thin-skinned" to describe Huckabee. Then again, he's
compared hard-hitting (and accurate) news reporters for the Democrat-
Gazette to the press fabulists Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke. He called
liberal columnist John Brummett of Stephens Media "constipated" when
that early admirer commenced some gentle criticism. His administration
paid $15,000 to settle a suit filed by Roby Brock, the host of a
public TV news show whom Huckabee's people tried to force off the air
for his critical commentary.
Then there's me. I'm the editor of an alternative weekly, but I began
covering Huckabee when I was a columnist for the now-defunct daily
Arkansas Gazette in 1991, and Mike and I have been on the outs pretty
much ever since. He once called me and the Memphis Commercial Appeal
bureau chief "junkyard journalists" for our reporting. He also
compared me, in print, to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and, I've been
told on good authority, has wished aloud for my early and violent
demise.
It all began 16 years ago for Mike and me. 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.
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.)
Ironically, I have many good things to say about the governor. The
Bush administration would have done well to emulate Mike Huckabee's
speedy and successful relief effort for Hurricane Katrina refugees. He
raised taxes for schools, highways and children's health. Inevitably,
this expanded government. I say bravo on all counts, though the
conservative Club for Growth has delighted in quoting my liberal
newspaper when it attacks Huckabee's fiscal record.
He was kind to immigrants and favored state help for college-going
children of illegal immigrants. He once even briefly departed from
Republican dogma to suggest to a newspaper in libertarian New
Hampshire that, while he opposed gay marriage, he was open to civil
unions. He's since denied he ever intended such apostasy, but the
comment is on tape. At the Arkansas Times, we welcomed the governor's
conversion to devoted school consolidator. When our state system of
school finance was ruled unconstitutional, he initially decried the
ruling as a usurpation of local control. But he flip-flopped -- and we
applauded the somersault -- and led his Education Department to a
significant reduction in the number of tiny, inefficient school
districts and on the path to more demanding graduation standards.
But a paddling administered by a brute who sometimes smiles still
hurts. 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.
Social issues alone should give moderates pause. He championed a law
in Arkansas making it harder to get a divorce, the so-called covenant
marriage law that has been widely ignored except when he and his wife
recommitted in a Valentine's Day publicity stunt held in a 17,000-seat
arena.
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.
All this is sometimes done with humor, but rarely the sort of gentle
humor the national media has encountered. Huckabee prefers sarcastic
putdowns and hyperbole. 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.)
But the national press has more to examine than rhetoric when it comes
to Huckabee. He is not the man of principle that credulous
commentators describe. Though Huckabee doesn't support embryonic stem
cell research, he took a hefty honorarium and bulk book sales this
year from a diabetes drug maker, Novo Nordisk, which performs
embryonic stem cell research. He has lied when there's been no other
way around admitting embarrassing missteps, such as his advocacy of
freedom for a convicted rapist.
There are also legitimate questions about his skills as a manager. 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.
If I could resurrect one batch of files, it would be those reflecting
the advice of his staff that he not pursue his desire to free
convicted rapist Wayne DuMond. By "advice," I mean I think some of
them all but pleaded with Huckabee not to do it.
Though DuMond's prior record included a conviction for assault and his
alleged involvement in a slaying and one other rape, by the start of
Huckabee's governorship DuMond had become a national figure thanks to
Republican efforts to depict him as a victim of the Bill Clinton
machine. The rape victim was a distant relative of Clinton's.
Huckabee, perhaps persuaded by DuMond's supposed conversion to
Christianity, announced his intention to commute DuMond's sentence
without talking to the victim. Outraged, she stepped forward to
protest publicly. The backlash was swift and powerful. Huckabee backed
away from commuting DuMond's sentence, but in a private meeting
lobbied the state Parole Board to release him. Huckabee said, in
writing, that he supported DuMond's release. DuMond moved to Missouri
in 2000, where he molested and killed one woman and was suspected of
doing the same to another, but died in prison before he could be
charged in the second case.
To this day, Huckabee tries to minimize his responsibility for
DuMond's release. Huckabee's 2007 book "From Hope to Higher Ground"
also fudges the facts, implying that DuMond died before being
convicted of either Missouri murder. In one recent interview, he even
suggested that he had fought DuMond's parole, a statement his own
writings prove to be a lie.
Speaking of Huckabee's writings: I'd recommend the Huckabee catalog to
the national press. It's a ready representation of the man -- quip-
filled, shallow, factually challenged and full of the chip-on-the-
shoulder mentality that has marked so much of his public life. In
"Character Is the Issue," published in 1997, he complained bitterly
about how some congregants of the Baptist church he left in Texarkana
to seek public office didn't want to continue paying his health
insurance. Funny, no employer of mine ever kept paying me after I quit
work.
I digress. It's easy to do. In 10 years as governor of Arkansas, Mike
Huckabee left a rich and complicated history. It is not without points
to praise. But there's so much more, a record that the national media
-- so ready, since 1992, to plumb the tiniest cranny of Bill Clinton's
past -- seems uneager to discover. It's a measure of the loving
kindness with which he's been treated so far by the coastal punditry
that Huckabee has not yet had one of his famous self-pitying public
meltdowns about the unfairness of the media.
But then, you don't have to believe me about any of this. After all, I
live in Little Rock and, as Huckabee has often said, I'm just the
editor of a trashy, throwaway liberal tabloid. Why not look instead to
a conservative voice from the national media? At the American
Spectator, once home to the anti-Clinton Arkansas Project, senior
editor Quin Hillyer, a former Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial
writer, wrote recently, "National media folks like David Brooks [of
the New York Times], 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."
At last, something the national media and the Arkansas media can agree
on.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/11/13/huckabee/
http://perezhilton.com/2008-01-14-headline-of-the-week-weak-74#more-12189
