Persuasive Huckabee changed a state, his way

By Adam Nossiter and David Bar

updated 11:54 p.m. ET Dec. 21, 2007

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - In more than a decade of presiding over this state, Mike Huckabee produced a legacy like few other Republican governors in the South, surprising even liberal Democrats with his willingness to upend some of Arkansas’s more parochial traditions.

A review of his record as governor shows that, beginning in 1996, he drove through a series of changes that transformed education and health insurance in Arkansas, achievements that were never tried by most of his predecessors, including Bill Clinton.

But he is also remembered in the state for a style of governing that tended to freeze out anyone of any party who disagreed with his plans. He did not, for example, seek Mr. Clinton’s conciliatory middle, or try to court skeptical state lawmakers. Though he was considered as persuasive a speechmaker as he had been a pastor, Mr. Huckabee largely kept his own counsel — in politics, ethics and a singular clemency policy that continues to haunt him.

Against the political advice of his party and his aides, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of hundreds of convicts, including murderers, sometimes over the heated objections of prosecutors and victims. He was cited five times by the state ethics commission for financial improprieties, and unapologetically accepted tens of thousands of dollars worth of clothes and other gifts while he was governor.

Republicans in Arkansas, a beleaguered minority, gleefully greeted his ascendancy but wound up embittered, in many cases, over a governor who “sided with liberal Democrats,” as one put it.

Mr. Huckabee is a son of small-town Arkansas, yet he deeply angered many in his rural constituency, touching the third rail of the state’s politics by shutting down money-draining, redundant school districts in the hinterlands. Protesters rallied at the state Capitol, fearful of losing schools, football teams, and age-old identities, but the governor insisted his way was the best and the schools were closed.

He proclaimed himself a fiscal conservative, but startled legislators with his proposals to raise taxes — for roads, in 1999, and for schools, prisons and other services three years later. He sought the electoral defeat of Republicans who opposed him, according to some in the party.

A constant throughout was his presence at the microphone, the former television preacher delivering his word from the pulpit though hardly mingling in the Capitol’s marble halls.

“He would go out and stump and do his shtick and tell his jokes and charm you,” said State Senator Jimmy Jeffress, a Democrat and critic of the former governor. “He has the gift of gab. He’s the only person I know, other than Bill Clinton, who can pick up a rock and give you a 10-minute talk on it.”

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At the same time he was not known to buy pizza for the legislators, as Mr. Clinton had done.

“Huckabee didn’t build bridges,” said State Senator Jim Argue Jr., a Democrat and leader in the schools overhaul effort. “If you didn’t agree with him, he attacked you.”

Charmaine Yoest, a senior adviser to the Huckabee campaign, said it was important to keep in mind that Mr. Huckabee was a Republican governor in one of the most Democratic states in the country.

“Yet here’s a man who managed to fix the roads, improve education and actually govern with the Democrats,” Ms. Yoest said. “People say he was intolerant, but how does that square with him being able to build coalitions and be re-elected numerous times?”

Confounding the Capitol
Mr. Huckabee was derided by Democrats as the “accidental governor” when he took office in July 1996, stepping up from the lieutenant governor’s job when the incumbent governor, Jim Guy Tucker, was forced to resign after a conviction in the Whitewater affair. Mr. Huckabee had not sought the post, having trained his sights instead on the United States Senate, and several legislators recalled a fumbling start.

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It was not helped by what Mr. Huckabee later recalled as a hostile reception to himself and his family, as Republicans of humble background, when they moved into the governor’s mansion in a prestigious neighborhood in Little Rock.

“Dozens of hate-filled letters,” he wrote in his memoir, “From Hope to Higher Ground” (Center Street, 2007), “proclaimed that we lacked the ‘class’ to live in such a fine and stately home.” Mr. Huckabee’s touchiness over perceived slights was to become a byword in succeeding years, as the governor spoke out angrily when reporters and others questioned the startling stream of gifts that flowed in from supporters and friends.

Still, the novice governor found the sea legs in 1997 to help enact, with overwhelming support in the heavily Democratic Legislature, a major expansion of health insurance for children of the working poor whose families did not qualify for Medicaid. It was one of the first such expansions in the nation, coming before the federal government authorized them, and it baffled some Republicans in the Legislature.

“None of us understood what he was trying to do,” said Peggy Jeffries, then a Republican state senator and now executive director of the Arkansas affiliate of the Eagle Forum, a national group of conservatives.

Easily elected to a full term in 1998, Mr. Huckabee was emerging as something of an unquantifiable presence in the state capital, sometimes exerting leadership, other times not, and often floating above the details and minutia of governing.

But he confounded Republicans again when he pushed for a fuel tax increase to finance an ambitious road-building program, and eventually won support for what historians say was the largest highway bond program in Arkansas history.

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