What The Huck Is Going On? (With Other Friday Night Open Thread Profanities Allowed)
By SusanUnPC on November 30, 2007 at 8:53 PM in Presidential Candidates
NOTE: See the UPDATE at end of the original.
Mike Huckabee is surging in the latest polls in KEY early states. “Huckabee is behind Mitt Romney by only one point in Iowa, and has also moved into third place in both New Hampshire and South Carolina,” reports TPM’s Election Central. Get this: Besides the Iowa poll (28% to 27%), the South Carolina poll is very, very tight: Giuliani gets 23%, Romney hangs on at 21%, and Huckabee is closing in at 18%.
It can’t be the TV campaign ad with Golden Boot-award-winning actor Chuck Norris. (Please tell me it’s not.)
By the way, you can also watch a “webisode” with Mike and Chuck at Gov. Huckabee’s official presidential campaign site. A “webisode” no less.
But, if you’re worried about a Huckabee surge, I’ve got the DIRT that’ll doom his campaign:
The “dirt” comes from an unlikely cranny — the elegant blog of Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor and writer for The New Yorker. Here’s the opening to Hertzberg’s post about Huckabee’s campaign, “Pandering to the Bass, or Rock ’n’ Huck“:
One of several disarming things about Mike Huckabee, whom I followed around for a day in preparation for this week’s Comment, is that he likes rock ‘n’ roll. Likes it, knows it, and plays it: he’s been playing electric bass since he was in high school, and still plays it in his own middle-agers’ garage band, Capitol Offense, which has opened concerts for the likes of Willie Nelson and Percy Sledge. (To get gigs like that, it helps to be governor of your state.) …
Next, Hertzberg recounts his interview of Huckabee, in Seattle, about Jimi Hendrix and Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project.
Huckabee waxes on to Hertzberg about the origins of rock and its debt to blues music, and mentions the Rolling Stones.
Then it comes. Hertzberg’s dirt on the Baptist preacher:
Mention of the Stones brought to mind perhaps the single most disarming fact about Mike Huckabee: as governor of Arkansas, he pardoned Keith Richards.
This happened right at the end of Huckabee’s last term, about a year ago. The Stones had flashed through Little Rock on March 9, 2006, as part of their Bigger Bang tour. (Merle Haggard, not the Capitol Offense, was the opening act.) The Governor wangled a backstage pass. As he and Richards chatted, Richards reminded him that on a previous visit to the state, in 1975, he, Keith, had gotten busted for reckless driving. He’d tried unsuccessfully to persuade the judge that the cause of his swerve had been not recklessness but an urgent need to reach across his passenger, Ron Wood, in order to adjust the car radio. The fine was $162.50.
Huckabee, who was in college at the time, claims to remember hearing the news on the radio and thinking, “The Stones finally come to Arkansas and what do we do? We arrest them.” Backstage, he impulsively promised a pardon. Exactly eight months later, on November 9th, he delivered. “It’s a long process, pardoning,” he told Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone, recently. “It takes a lot of paperwork. And the funny thing is, people said to me afterwards, ‘Governor, you’ll do that for Keith Richards, but you wouldn’t do that for an ordinary person.’ And my answer to that is always, ‘Hey, if you can play guitar like Keith Richards, I’ll consider pardoning you, too.’ “ …
Mike Huckabee pardoned a drug-usin’, alcohol-guzzlin’, womanizin’ near-derelict? Who, I might add, was an “alien” visitor to the United States of America?
Let the righteous uproar begin.
::::
UPDATE, December 1, 2007: Via Michael Lafferty’s comment below, you’ll want to read this reality-check article and send it to your friends and relatives who’re smitten with Huckabee as a “fresh” face: “The dark side of Mike Huckabee” by a journalist who began covering Mike Huckabee in 1991. Here’s just a snippet:
[...]
Huckabee seems to love loot and has a dismissive attitude toward ethics, campaign finance rules and propriety in general. Since that first, failed campaign [16 years ago as an opponent to incumbent Sen. Dale Bumpers], the ethical questions have multiplied.
In the 1992 contest with Bumpers, Huckabee used campaign funds to pay himself as his own media consultant. Other payments went to the family babysitter.
In his successful 1994 run for lieutenant governor, he set up a nonprofit curtain known as Action America so he could give speeches for money without having to disclose the names of his benefactors. He failed to report that campaign travel payments were for the use of his own personal plane.
After he became governor in 1996, he raked in tens of thousands of dollars in gifts, including gifts from people he later appointed to prestigious state commissions.
In the governor’s office, his grasp never exceeded his reach. Furniture he’d received to doll up his office was carted out with him when he left, after he’d crushed computer hard drives so nobody could ever get a peek behind the curtain of the Huckabee administration.
Until my paper, the Arkansas Times, blew the whistle, he converted a governor’s mansion operating account into a personal expense account, claiming public money for a doghouse, dry-cleaning bills, panty hose and meals at Taco Bell. He tried to claim $70,000 in furnishings provided by a wealthy cotton grower for the private part of the residence as his own, until he learned ethics rules prevented it. When a disgruntled former employee disclosed memos revealing all this, the Huckabee camp shut her up by repeatedly suggesting she might be vulnerable to prosecution for theft because she’d shared documents generated by the state’s highest official.
He ran the State Police airplane into the ground, many of the miles in pursuit of political ends. Inauguration funds were used to buy clothing for his wife. He once took control of the state Republican Party’s campaign account … READ ALL.
by Ronald Scott
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