Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Huckabee
Ernest Dumas of the Arkansas Times expands on my letter to the DC Examiner editor about Mike Huckabee's convoluted record as governor. The last paragraph below by Dumas is a scorcher:
Bipolar politics has always been Huckabee’s strongest suit. No one is better at saying one thing, doing the opposite and getting credit for both, of talking small government and actually promoting big government. Huckabee can do that in Arkansas, a peculiarly bipolar state where people think of themselves as conservative but like populist stands.
[...] But Huckabee’s real troubles may be with the fiscal hardliners. Already, the Club for Growth tails him wherever he goes. After the Examiner article, in which Huckabee said he thought Bush’s tax cuts for the rich should be made permanent even though he agreed that the party often favored the wealthy, the director of government affairs for the rich man’s club wrote a letter to the newspaper accusing Huckabee of trying to falsify his conservative record.
“On the surface,” he wrote, “Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee may come across as a sensible lawmaker with a silver tongue, but if one takes a closer look at his record, you’ll see a hornet’s nest of fiscal liberalism.”
Huckabee has never been a lawmaker, sensible or foolish, but the observation is not so far off the mark. He has not governed as a right-winger. While next door Gov. Haley Barbour, the former GOP national director, has been trying to slash Medicaid benefits to the Mississippi poor, Huckabee has been working twice as hard to expand them in Arkansas. While he signed two modest tax cuts, he has supported and signed even more and fatter tax increases. The number of state government workers has risen 20 percent on his watch and the state’s general-obligation debt has risen by some $800 million — more than the accumulated debt under all previous governors, unadjusted for inflation — and it would have risen much more if the voters last year had not smacked him down on highway and college bonds.
(For the record, I used "sensible lawmaker" to pseudo-describe Huckabee because I thought "sensible politician" was too much of an oxymoron.)
