HOPELESS
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee loves to joke
about coming from the same hometown as former President
Bill Clinton. Given that they both have proven to
be prone to ethical lapses in office, perhaps Huckabee — who
announced his intention to run for the Republican nomination for
the presidency yesterday — should stop trying to draw attention to
his shared, humble, Arkansas roots.
Huckabee once joked that his state was a “banana republic,” and
he certainly appeared to run his state like one. In all, Huckabee
has been investigated 14 times in 14 years for ethics violations
while in public office. He’s been admonished five separate times.
Recently, he was criticized for registering at Target for
housewarming gifts after he and his wife moved into a new home
after leaving the governor’s mansion.
“Huckabee likes to talk about losing more than 100 pounds, maybe
he should focus on losing that Arkansas attitude about running an
anything goes government,” said a spokesman for a Republican
opponent for the nomination who has worked with Huckabee on some
issues in the past. “This is not a candidacy Republicans should be
embracing.”
But as the only authentic Southern Republican in the race,
Huckabee, an ordained minister, is likely to garner strong support,
particularly from social conservatives.
Unfortunately, Huckabee, who appeared at the National Review
Institute’s “conservative summit” on Sunday morning, sounded a lot
like other candidates already in the race. He parroted Sen.
Sam Brownback’s support for a flat tax, for
example.
But his track record in Arkansas doesn’t reveal him to be the
“authentic” conservative that he claims to be. In the past he has
advocated raising taxes on Arkansans. He says he supports President
Bush’s position on Iraq, though sources familiar with Huckabee’s
thinking say that he is looking at “third ways” to propose
regarding Iraq policy while on the campaign trail. As governor, he
supported providing state services for illegal immigrants.
But it’s his ethics lapses — some of them minor, which only
raises questions about his judgment further — that some
conservatives will find most troubling, and which Republican and
Democrat challengers for the presidency will find most fruitful in
attacking him, say political consultants. “Some of the stuff he’s
been dinged on has been a couple hundred dollars in donations,
really small stuff that he just should have known better to
accept,” says a Democrat political consultant. “At least when the
Clintons got hit, it was tens or hundreds of thousands of
dollars.”
Further diminishing Huckabee’s positioning? A Club for Growth
report on Huckabee’s tax and economic growth policies, which many
expect will be embarrassing to the former governor.
MONEY MEMORY
Very quietly, campaign fundraisers for Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton are reaching out to many of their bigger donors
and reminding them that the Senator and her campaign have long
memories. “You can’t support everyone equally and expect that when
the chips are down, the victor is going to remember you after
election day,” says one Clinton fundraiser. “Right now, in our
view, it’s not all right to be maxing out to Senator Obama at the
same time that you claim to support Senator Clinton.”
Both Clinton and Obama have set their campaigns on a collision
course in the financing arena. Both have set up accounts that
indicate they will not be seeking federal matching funds for their
campaigns. Both are aggressively reaching out to Hollywood. Last
week, left-wing movie producers Steven Spielberg
and David Geffen announced plans to hold a major
fundraiser for Obama in Los Angeles. They indicated they would hold
a similar event for Clinton later in the year.
“Hollywood is different,” says another Democrat fundraiser.
“They aren’t interested in getting the same things as many of our
other donors are. I think the ‘you’re with us or you’re against us’
is targeted more toward business, lobbying firms and labor.”
