Category Archives: Mike Huckabee

Meanwhile, the OTHER conservative dark horse is doing quite well…

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Just as we’re getting this news about Sam Brownback, Mike Campbell sends out this note about Mike Huckabee, the other conservative from out West:

    Just wanted to give you a quick update.
    Governor Huckabee has had a
great week. Great new poll numbers have
come out:
A DesMoines Register poll
shows Governor Huckabee leading among Republicans in Iowa while a new Rasmussen
Iowa poll shows Governor Huckabee at 18% in a virtual tie with Fred
Thompson.
    While Governor Huckabee is quickly rising in national polls,
the most recent Rasmussen polls shows him just one point behind John McCain,
there are only three polls to watch – those in Iowa, New Hampshire, and right
here in South Carolina. These numbers show that with your help Mike Huckabee can
win the only poll that matters – the one that takes place on election day, which
will be January 19, here in South Carolina.
    Also, tonight, Governor Huckabee will be featured
on the Glenn Beck show; on Sunday morning, you can catch him on Fox News Sunday;
and on Sunday night, I hope you will tune into Fox News Channel at 8PM to watch
the next Republican Presidential Debate.

Who does Number Two work for?

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OK, excuse the tacky Austin Powers allusion in the headline there, but I’m on a quest…

You’ll remember (if you live in the S.C. Blogosphere) that The Palmetto Scoop recently claimed that the folks at The Shot are less than pure, having a business association with elements connected to the Romney campaign. I’d like to talk to Tim Cameron about that, but I don’t have a number for him. Let’s see how long it takes him to see this and e-mail me.

But for whom does Adam Fogle of The Palmetto Scoop work, if anyone? He apparently likes John McCain — and there’s nothing wrong with that — but is there more to it? Is there a more formal connection?

To take it a step further, are there some blogs out there that are more (or less) than what they seem? Are any of them fronts for campaigns, but don’t own up to it on their sites?

I’d like to find out, and report on it, here and maybe in a column. If any of y’all have insight into this, either post it here or, if you want to be sneaky about it, e-mail me.

Oh, and as far as disclosures: You know what you’re getting on this blog, because I tell you. Whom do I work for? The State. How much money do I make from my blog? Zippo. I like John McCain. And Joe Biden, and Barack Obama, and to some extent Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee. There are others I don’t like so much. Do I speak for The State when I express these preferences? No. I liked McCain in 2000, too, but we endorsed Bush. I don’t always win these debates.

If you have any other questions for me, ask them. In the meantime, answer some for me if you can:

  • Which blogs are solidly in the pockets of which campaigns?
  • What is the relationship?
  • Is there money involved?
  • How do I get in touch with those responsible?

I’ll be pursuing this in the usual ways, but while I do so, I thought I’d test the theory that blog readers frequently know more about such things than blog writers do. Go ahead; make me proud of you.

The Little Rock Nine, 50 years on

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Last week, I happened to mention what happened in Little Rock 50 years ago in the course of asking the successor of Orval Faubus about his thoughts on race relations today, in Arkansas and the nation.

Mike Huckabee noted that today — Sept. 25 — would be the 50th anniversary of the day that the 101st Airborne Division escorted nine black kids to class at Central High School, to get them past the mob of white racists outside.

To mark that day, I edited a short video clip of the former governor talking about the meaning of those events. He mentions two items of note: First, that his daughter Sarah — seated behind him in the photo below — was attending Central High at the time when the 40th anniversary was marked (which raises yet another point of contrast with a certain other governor); and second, that he takes great pride as a Republican in having won 48 percent of the black vote in one of his elections.

Huckabeesarah

Mike Huckabee on the obligation to govern

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THERE’S A PRINCIPLE that I long thought was a given in American politics. As long as it held true, it didn’t matter so much if the “wrong” candidate won an election. No matter what sort of nonsense he had spouted on the stump, this stark truth would take him in its unforgiving grip, set him down and moderate him.
    Mike Huckabee, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, made reference to this principle when he met with our editorial board Thursday:
    “One of the tough jobs of governing is, you actually have to do it.” That may sound so obvious that it’s foolish, like “One thing about water is, it’s wet.” But it can come as a cold shock.
    Think of the congressional class of 1994. Newt Gingrich’s bomb-throwers were full of radical notions when they gained power. But once they had it, and used it, however briefly, to shut down the government, they quickly realized that was not what they were elected to do.
    Or some of them realized it. More about that in a moment. Back to Mr. Huckabee.
    Mr. Huckabee is a conservative — the old-fashioned kind that believes in traditional values, and wants strong, effective institutions in our society to support and promote those values.
    Many newfangled “conservatives” seem just as likely to want to tear down as build up.
    If Mr. Huckabee was ever that way, being the governor of Arkansas made him less so. “As a governor, I’ve seen a different level of human life, maybe, than the folks who live in the protected bubble of Washington see,” he said. And as a governor who believed he must govern, he was appalled when he saw government fail to do its job. He points to the aftermath of Katrina: “It was one of the more, to me, disgusting moments of American history…. It made my blood boil….”
   Perhaps I should pause again now to remind you that Gov. Huckabee is a conservative: “I’m 100 percent pure and orthodox when it comes to the issues that matter to the evangelical or faith voter, if you will,” he says.
    “But as a governor, I spent most of my time improving education, rebuilding the highway system, reforming health care in Arkansas” — things that are not inconsistent with conservatism.
    “And for that I had the right — had earned the right, if you will — to pass some pro-life legislation,Huckabee2
and strong pro-marriage and pro-family legislation. But I didn’t spend 90 percent of my time pushing that….”
    OK, let’s review: As a conservative, he has a certain set of ideals. But he knows that being governor isn’t just about promoting an ideology, whatever it might be. Being governor, if the job is properly understood, is the most pragmatic form of life in our solar system — except for being mayor.
    People expect certain things of you, and you’ve got to do them. Successful governors realize that, whether you’re promoting ideals or paving the roads, “The wrong thing to do is to go and to try to stick your fist in the face of the Legislature that you know is not necessarily with you, and create a fight.” (Gov. Huckabee had to deal with a Democratic assembly.)
    So what’s the right way?
    “You positively share your message, you communicate it… . If you can’t do that, I don’t think you can lead. Just… quite frankly, I don’t think you have a shot at it.”
    I know someone who needs to hear that. Remember the class of ’94? The only lesson Mark Sanford learned from shutting down the federal government was that it was worth trying again. So last year, he vetoed the entire state budget when lawmakers failed to hold spending to the artificial limits he had decreed.
    Of course, they overrode him. And he knew they would. For him, it was about the gesture, not about governing. It’s about ungoverning. It’s about the agenda of the Club for Growth.
    Gov. Huckabee, being conservative fiscally as well as otherwise, has been known to turn down taxes, but that’s an area where pragmatism can outweigh ideals:
“… We had a Supreme Court case where we were forced to deal with both equity and adequacy in education,” said Mr. Huckabee. “There was no way to do that without additional revenue.”
    Still, he refused to sign the tax bill Democrats gave him.
    “I didn’t think we were getting enough reform for the amount of money. It wasn’t that I didn’t support additional revenue, because I did, so I’ll be honest about that. But… we weren’t pushing for enough efficiency out of the system.” What sort of efficiency?
    “I wanted a greater level of school consolidation in order to fund the efficiency, which was a very unpopular thing.”
    Our governor has said he’s for school district consolidation (as am I), but he’s never done anything effective to achieve it. That would require building a constructive relationship with the Legislature.
    Another time, Gov. Huckabee actually opposed a tax cut. Why? That governing thing again: “Well, I supported the elimination of the grocery tax, but not the timing, and the timing would have meant we literally would have closed nursing homes, had to slash Medicaid. I mean, it’s one thing to trim the fat off the bone, it’s another thing, you know, to start going into the bone itself.”
    That wouldn’t worry the Club for Growth, about which Gov. Huckabee says, “They hate me. I call ’em the Club for Greed. That’s part of why they don’t like me… If people don’t have the courage to run for office, they can just give money to them and they’ll do the dirty work for you.”
    “I think it’s a sleazy way to do politics.”
    The Club for Growth loves Mark Sanford.
    I don’t know what sort of president Mike Huckabee would make, but I wonder whether he’d do another stint as governor….

For video, go to http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Huckabee3

Sunday column video preview

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This video is an amalgam of clips that contain pretty much all of the quotes from Mike Huckabee that you will find in my Sunday column, which is headlined "Mike Huckabee on the obligation to govern." You’ll also find some context for the quotes — as much as I could jam into YouTube’s 5-minute limit.

Please excuse the spots where I didn’t have video, and had to use sound from my little digital recorder. The quality isn’t as good as what I have on the video footage, and the splicing is a little rough — OK, really rough.

Bear with me; I’m self-taught. As Ferris Bueller said about the clarinet — "Never had one lesson."

Huckabee: The quick-and-dirty video

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You can either wait until I’ve had time to go through more than an hour of video clips and find the highlights, or you can have it fast. For those who want it fast, here’s a quick, unedited (except for splicing two pieces together) clip from the opening moments of our interview today with the former Arkansas governor seeking the GOP nod for the presidency. (You can tell he’s a Republican, in case you didn’t know, by the fact that he thinks "Democrat" is an adjective.)

My dumbest faux pas of 2007 — so far

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Neither Mike Fitts nor I have cable TV — at least, not the kind that gives you those 24-hour news channels — so both of us were looking for a place to watch the GOP candidates’ debate tonight. We started calling around to the various campaigns with the intention of each of us going to one of the candidates’ supporters’ TV-watching parties.

I knew of three — McCain, Giuliani and Huckabee. I suspected my contact info on the S.C. staffs for those campaigns needed updating, so I checked around for fresh numbers on Adam Temple with McCain, and Elliott Bundy with Giuliani.

I had a cell number for the last guy to contact me with regard to Huckabee, but somebody gave me a new one. I tried it, and got voicemail. I asked whether this was the right number, sought a current e-mail address, and said I wanted to make sure he was still with Huckabee. Then, on a whim, I tried the old number.

He answered right away. I apparently caught him in the middle of some kind of transaction — it sounded like a checkout, or drivethru, or something. So he was trying to deal with somebody else while I first asked the stupid question, "Is this a good number to call?," immediately thinking "Doh!"

Then I asked the really stupid question, the prizewinner: Are you still with Huckabee?

"NO," he said, completely turning his attention to me. "I’m the executive director of the Republican Party!"

Wow, I said, I knew that. I knew that. I was so sorry…

"MAN!" said Hogan Gidley. I could see him shaking his head through the phone connection.Gidley

Well, you see, I was running down a list, and not really stopping to think WHOM I was talking to…

"Again, MAN!" He had obviously never heard anything so stupid, so utterly clueless in his life. Neither had I, so what was I going to say?

Here’s the worst bit: I left him a message saying the same thing on that other line. He’ll be sharing that with Katon Dawson and other folk who think I’m a big fat idiot anyway. So here’s their confirmation.

If it makes him feel any better, I can’t think — without looking it up — who his counterpart over with the Democrats is right now. I think I know, but it’s not coming to mind. I know their new chair is Carol Khare. Or Fowler, now. (Although on the Web site it’s still Joe Erwin.) But the executive director — no.

I’ll go look now, and say, "Oh, yeah," and feel all stupid again.

(Footnote: That’s Hogan "Chuckles" Gidley in the photo above right. It’s a slightly-enhanced detail from the below photo from our primary interview with Karen Floyd. Almost every time I talked to Mrs. Floyd last year, Hogan was lurking in the background, with an expression almost exactly like that one.)

Lurking

Pelosi column

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The deep, dark secret of politics:
They’re all just people

BUSH: Is this movie gonna be called “George and Alexandra”; is that the name of this movie?
PELOSI: I don’t know. What do you think it should be called?
BUSH: Uhh… I don’t know — “Geourneys with George?” Pretty good one, huh? You can spell it with a G?
PELOSI: G, yeah! (laughs)

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
CONSIDER this to be a last kind word before the madness begins. OK, so it’s already started. But it’s never too late for a kind word.
    Joe Biden’s been hanging out here a year or two. I’m not sure John McCain ever left in 2000. We’ve seen Christopher Dodd, Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, Tom Vilsack. I haven’t actually seen Bill Richardson, but he spoke to one of my colleagues on the phone, so I know he’s thinking about us. Mitt Romney was here last Wednesday. Then Barack Obama on Friday and Saturday, and the other media darling, Hillary Clinton, Monday.
    Rudy Giuliani today, ex-Gov. Romney back on Thursday, and some guy named Duncan Hunter Friday.
    With 18 contenders between the two major parties, I know I’m forgetting somebody. Oh, yeah — John Edwards was down in Charleston the other day, and his experience was a good example of the madness I’m talking about.
    He came to talk about health care. The State’s reporter actually wrote about that. But the traveling press corps only wanted to know about a couple of kids he had hired to blog for him. Really. Not that it was in any way important, but that was The Story of the Day, as decreed by 24-hour cable TV “news” and the always-on-message partisan blogs.
    Brace yourself for a lot of this. Gather your strength. Sit back, relax. Rent a movie, and watch it. Specifically, this one: “Journeys with George,” a documentary about George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign for president, made by Nancy Pelosi’s daughter.
    No, really, it’s good. I was worried, too. I had ordered it from Netflix in late November, thinking it was something I ought to see. Then I let it sit on top of the TV until last week.
    Bush according to Pelosi, I thought each night. Too much like work. Tired. Watch “House” episode for third time instead.
    I broke down last week, at the behest of one of my daughters. Two minutes into it, I called another daughter who was upstairs, told her she had to see this, and started it over. It was that good.
    What was so good about it? Well, certainly not the production values. It was shot with a camcorder by Alexandra Pelosi as a home movie of her year as an NBC producer, traveling with the Texas governor as he sought the presidency. You’ve seen YouTube? Like that, only longer.
    What was good about it was that everybody in the film came across as a human being. If you don’t find that surprising, you need a quick unreality check: Put this down, watch a couple of hours of TV “news,” then visit a few of the more popular blogs.
    See what I mean?
    In this movie, the president-to-be is neither the warmongering demon nor the stalwart defender of all that’s right and true.
    He’s just this guy. The joshing, never-serious, somewhat condescending uncle to the young woman who keeps sticking a camcorder in his face for reasons that aren’t entirely apparent. A little on the goofy side, but no idiot.
    And Ms. Pelosi is neither the Spawn of the Liberal She-Devil nor what you think of when you say “NBC Nightly News” either. She’s not the former because, brace yourself, Nancy Pelosi is actually a human being, too. She’s not the latter partly because she’s a producer, not the on-air “talent” you’re used to. Producers are the ones behind the scenes who get actual work done — arranging travel, lining up interviews, soothing hurt feelings — while the ones you know are checking their hair. Think Andie MacDowell to Bill Murray’s weatherman in “Groundhog Day.”
    She comes across as what she apparently is — a bright, friendly young woman who is very tired of getting up at 6 a.m., herded to airplanes and fed turkey sandwiches all day.
    The two of them are practically friends. When she gets interested in a smiley guy from Newsweek (who later turns out to be a cad), Gov. Bush teases her, then offers semiserious advice. When she reports a little too accurately on her fellow media types and they all refuse to speak to her, George steps in to make peace.
    In other words, they act like people. Likable people, no matter what you think of their politics. So do the others on the bus, including some familiar faces. Nobody took the camcorder girl seriously, so they forgot to put their masks on. Sure, the candidate is deliberately trying to charm the press. What will surprise his detractors is that he’s so good at it. Karl Rove still comes across as a creep, but that’s because it’s real life.
    This brilliant little ditty of a film reveals a deep, dark secret: Like Soylent Green, politics is actually made of people. Real people, whom you are not required by law either to hate or to love. You just hang with them, and see them as they are in the tedium of daily coexistence. People, living their lives. Not symbols, not abstractions, not caricatures.
    I ordered the movie because Columbia attorney Jim Leventis, a perfectly normal guy who belongs to my Rotary Club, is Alexandra Pelosi’s godfather. He describes the speaker of the House as “just a wonderful mom and just a wonderful friend.” Really.
    You should see it if you can, and remember the lesson it teaches. It might ground you enough to preserve your faith in people over the next 12 months.
    I’ll try to remember it, too, as those 18 candidates posture for the extremists in their respective parties. If I forget, remind me.