JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL

Another Man From Hope
Who is Mike Huckabee?

Friday, October 26, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Republicans have won five of the
last seven presidential elections by running candidates who broadly fit the
Ronald Reagan model–fiscally conservative, and firmly but not harshly
conservative on social issues. The wide-open race for the 2008 GOP nomination
has generated two new approaches.

Rudy
Giuliani, for example, isn’t running away from his socially liberal views,
although he has modified them. But he is campaigning as a staunch, even acerbic
economic conservative. Should he win the nomination, conventional wisdom has it
he may balance the ticket by picking former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as a
running mate.

Mr.
Huckabee, on the other hand, is running hard right on social issues but
liberal-populist on some economic issues. This may help explain why the
affable, golden-tongued Baptist minister was the clear favorite at the pro-life
Family Research Council’s national forum last Saturday. And why Mr. Huckabee’s
praises have been sung by liberal columnists such as Gail Collins of the New
York Times and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek.

Mr. Huckabee attributes his support
to the fact he is a “hardworking, consistent conservative with some
authenticity about those convictions.” He is certainly qualified for
national office, having served nearly 11 years as a chief executive. I have
known and liked him for years; on the stump he often tells the story of how we
first met outside his boarded-up office in the state Capitol, which had been
sealed by Arkansas Democrats who refused to accept he had won an upset election
for lieutenant governor in 1993. But I also know he is not the “consistent
conservative” he now claims to be.

Nor am I
alone. Betsy Hagan, Arkansas director of the conservative Eagle Forum and a key
backer of his early runs for office, was once “his No. 1 fan.”
She was bitterly disappointed with his record. “He was pro-life and
pro-gun, but otherwise a liberal,” she says. “Just like Bill Clinton
he will charm you, but don’t be surprised if he takes a completely different
turn in office.”

Phyllis
Schlafly, president of the national Eagle Forum, is even more blunt. “He
destroyed the conservative movement in Arkansas, and left the Republican Party
a shambles,” she says. “Yet some of the same evangelicals who sold us
on George W. Bush as a ‘compassionate conservative’ are now trying to sell us
on 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.

Governors
who served with him praise Mr. Huckabee for his ability to work with others,
but say he was clearly a moderate. “He fought my efforts to reform the
National Governors Association and always took fiscal positions to my
left,” former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, a supporter of Mitt Romney, told
me.

Rick
Scarborough, a pastor who heads Vision America, attended seminary with Mr.
Huckabee and is a strong backer. But, he acknowledges, “Mike has always
sought the validation of elites.” When conservatives took over the
Southern Baptist Convention after a bitter fight in the 1980s, Mr. Huckabee
sided with the ruling moderates. Paul Pressler, a former Texas judge who led
the conservative Southern Baptist revolt, told me, “I know of no
conservative he appointed while he headed the Arkansas Baptist
Convention.”

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.

“It
goes to the moral issue,” he told an admiring group of environmentalists
this month. Alan Greenspan blasts cap-and-trade in his new book as not
feasible, noting that “jobs will be lost and real incomes of workers
constrained.” Mr. Huckabee defends his plan as an “innovative”
way to attain complete energy independence from foreign oil by 2013.

During a visit to the Journal last
spring, Mr. Huckabee joked that one of his biggest challenges is that
“like Bill Clinton I hail from Hope, Arkansas, and not every Republican
wants to take a chance like that again.” But it’s Mr. Huckabee who is
creating the doubts. “He’s just like Bill Clinton in that he practices
management by news cycle,” a former top Huckabee aide told me. “As
with Clinton there was no long-term planning, just putting out fires on a daily
basis. One thing I’ll guarantee is that won’t lead to competent conservative
governance.”