Another Man From Hope
Who is Mike Huckabee?
The business community in Arkansas is split. Some praise Mr. Huckabee’s efforts to raise taxes to repair roads and work with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature. Free-market advocates are skeptical. “He has zero intellectual underpinnings in the conservative movement,” says Blant Hurt, a former part owner of, and columnist for, Arkansas Business magazine. “He’s hostile to free trade, hiked sales and grocery taxes, backed sales taxes on Internet purchases, and presided over state spending going up more than twice the inflation rate.”
Mr. Huckabee told me yesterday he also cut some taxes, and has taken the Americans for Tax Reform no-tax pledge. Former GOP state Rep. Randy Minton is not impressed. In 1999, he was urged by the governor to back a gas-tax increase. “I’d taken a pledge against higher taxes, but he sniffed that my constituents didn’t understand what we have to do in state government to make it work,” Mr. Minton says. “His support for taxes split the Republican Party, and damaged our name brand.” The Club for Growth notes that only a handful of the 33 current GOP state legislators back their former governor.
Mr. Huckabee’s reluctance to surround himself with conservatives was evident as governor, when he kept many agency heads appointed by Bill Clinton. Zac Wright, a spokesman for incoming Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe, was asked this year why 15 Huckabee agency heads had been retained. Most of them were “Clinton people,” he replied, not “Huckabee people.” Mr. Huckabee told me many of his agency heads had “apolitical” responsibilities.
Many Huckabee supporters have told me their man should be judged by what he’s saying on the campaign trail today. Fair enough. Mr. Huckabee was the only GOP candidate to refuse to endorse President Bush’s veto of the Democrats’ bill to vastly expand the Schip health-care program. Only he and John McCain have endorsed the discredited cap-and-trade system to limit global-warming emissions that has proved a fiasco in Europe.
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