Max Brantley, Salon, November 13, 2007
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.
I oppose Mike Huckabee’s presidential bid because I think he’s a theocrat and I know he’s a Repiglican — ’nuff said. The man makes me nervous because he seems so “reasonable” to my wobbly Democratic friends, and he’s rising in the polls. So I sure hope we can find better dirt on him than the dusty puff job Max Brantley just handed us:
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“Other payments went to the family babysitter.”
So we’re to despise Huckabee for paying his babysitter?
“He failed to report that campaign travel payments were for the use of his own personal plane.”
His own plane was probably a lot cheaper to use than a chartered turboprop would have been. What’s the problem?
“The Arkansas Times received no news releases from the governor’s office, no notices of news conferences, no responses to routine questions.”
So the governor cut off a news organization he perceived as a critic and a threat…just as I hope all Democrats do to Fox Noise. You know, what’s good for the gander is good for the goose.
“…he’d crushed computer hard drives so nobody could ever get a peek behind the curtain of the Huckabee administration.”
If that was an illegal thing to do, this would have been helpful information to mention. If it was *legal*, it sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
“…doghouse, dry-cleaning bills, panty hose…”
Get frigging serious.
“He ran the State Police airplane into the ground…”
Assuming this doesn’t mean the governor crashed the plane, I see he comes in for criticism whether he uses his own plane or the state’s. Maybe Huckabee should just walk everywhere he goes?
“…he called his home state a banana republic on the Don Imus show.”
I have never heard convincingly from any source that Arkansas is NOT a banana republic! It might have been the most truthful utterance on the radio that day.
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The various “gifts” and “questionable ethics” sound for all the world like the small-time, Arkansas-sized grubbing that I remember hearing about in connection with another politician from Hope. But I liked Bill Clinton anyway. He brung home the bacon; we all prospered in his time.
Brantley’s article plays out like a personal drama between him and Huckabee. Pretty small-time stuff. The foibles Brantley mentioned wouldn’t corrode our nationhood nearly as much as mere continuance of Repiglican rule…and the fact that Huckabee seems not the worst of the Repiglicans makes him all the more dangerous, IMO.
Rhetor, you have a ready-made issue to smack Huck with that will send the conservatives into screaming fits - he immediately raised taxes in response to deficit in state of Ark.
If his track record is of any use he’s full of crap in his supposed desire to reduce taxes.