Persuasive Huckabee changed a state, his way

Persuasive, intimidating style
Meanwhile, a style of leadership was developing that frustrated Republicans and Democrats alike.

Jake Files, a former Republican state representative, recalled that the governor would call lawmakers into his office and state his plans.

“Kind of like getting called to the principal’s office,” Mr. Files said. “If you don’t line up with him, Katie bar the door.”

Still, this style — equal parts persuasion and intimidation — would prove to be of great value when Mr. Huckabee took on the biggest fight of his tenure, school reform.

In November 2002, the Arkansas Supreme Court presented the newly re-elected governor with the biggest challenge of his tenure, ruling that Arkansas’s system of financing public schools was inequitable. The court ordered change. More money had to be found, quickly.

Mr. Huckabee immediately adopted the path of greatest resistance, to the shock of many in the Legislature: he called for the closing of dozens of wasteful, tiny school districts. Some had fewer than 150 students. It was a volatile step, one that Mr. Clinton as governor had avoided, even though reformers had agreed for decades that it was an essential one.

“We certainly didn’t want to get too close to it,” recalled one of Mr. Clinton’s legislative aides in the 1980s, Bobby Roberts.

The governor’s plan aroused intense opposition all over the state, particularly as he proposed whittling down the 310 school districts by well over half.

“People don’t want to lose their schools,” said a veteran legislator, State Senator John Paul Capps, a Democrat. “They think it just ruins the community.”

Mr. Huckabee did not back down.

“The governor treated me as if I didn’t exist,” said Jimmy Cunningham, then president of the Arkansas Rural Education Association. “He had no compassion for me.”

The fight went on for over a year, and Mr. Huckabee’s staunchest allies proved to be the most liberal Democrats in the Legislature.

“He set a real high bar,” said Senator Argue, a Little Rock Democrat who describes himself as the preacher-governor’s “philosophical adversary,” but who joined forces with him on the issue. “I just give him credit for having the courage and determination to lead,” Mr. Argue said.

In the end, the Legislature whittled Mr. Huckabee’s school-district closing plan by nearly two-thirds. Disgusted, the governor refused to sign the bill, and it became law without him.

Clemency and consequences
Nothing was more controversial about Mr. Huckabee’s governorship than his use of clemency to grant pardons and commute prison sentences. His clemency decisions produced the first big crisis of his administration, dogged him through a tough re-election campaign and provoked a series of bitter public protests, some still simmering on Jan. 9, 2007, the day he left office.

In all, Mr. Huckabee cut prison sentences or granted pardons for more than 1,000 criminals, far more than either his immediate predecessors or governors in neighboring states.

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This did not happen by chance.

Driven by a religious belief in redemption and questions about the state’s legal system, Mr. Huckabee paid close attention to clemency petitions, former aides said. He insisted on reviewing every single application, though they came in by the hundreds most months.

“He would take these files home with him to the governor’s mansion,” recalled Rex Nelson, Mr. Huckabee’s communications director for nine years. “He would read them, study them. He took it very seriously, the political consequences be damned.”

Most of Mr. Huckabee’s clemency decisions were unremarkable; in the vast majority of cases he simply followed the recommendation of the Arkansas Parole Board. But in a small though significant number of cases, he commuted prison sentences for murderers and other violent criminals over the pleas of victims’ families, prosecutors and judges. And as his reputation for granting clemency spread, applications surged.

“We had tons of them,” said Cory Cox, who worked for several years as Mr. Huckabee’s aide in charge of clemency matters. “People, they’d call and say, ‘Please, let the governor look at this. We don’t know who the next governor is going to be.’”

Religious beliefs influence decisions
By every account, Mr. Huckabee’s approach to clemency was heavily influenced by his religious beliefs. As John Wesley Hall, a Little Rock defense lawyer who filed numerous clemency petitions with the Huckabee administration, put it, “He’s a Baptist preacher who believes in redemption and second chances.”

But it also reflected Mr. Huckabee’s broader concerns about the criminal justice system in Arkansas, one of the few states where juries rather than judges impose sentences, which defense lawyers say can produce arbitrary results.

Dana Reece, another defense lawyer, told of one client who received a life sentence for selling six grams of crack cocaine. “He’d still be in prison today if it weren’t for Governor Huckabee,” Ms. Reece said. How many politicians, she asked, would stick their necks out for a crack dealer?

“This was a political hot potato, and he knew it,” Mr. Cox said of his former boss. “But he had a conviction that people could better themselves, and he was open-minded to the idea that a poor black man from east Arkansas convicted by an all-white jury just may have been a victim of injustice.”

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Many Arkansans faulted him, however, for refusing to give public explanations for pardons and sentence commutations, and for responding harshly to those who criticized his choices.

“He just doesn’t want to talk to victims’ families,” Elaine Colclasure, co-leader of the Central Arkansas chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, a victims’ advocacy group, said in an interview last week. “He doesn’t want anyone questioning anything he does. And when you do, he bristles. His compassion is for the murderer and any criminal who says he has found Jesus.”

Dee McManus Engle, another member of the group, recalled accompanying a murder victim’s widow to a scheduled meeting at the governor’s office. “We stayed there half the day trying to talk with Huckabee,” Ms. Engle said, adding, “It was the most important thing in her life, and she was in tears because she could not get to the governor.”

Former aides said that while Mr. Huckabee rarely met with victims or their families, he was never dismissive of their concerns. “I can tell you we listened to victims,” Mr. Cox said. “I mean, it was a no-win situation. The victims, if you granted clemency, it didn’t matter how long you listened to them. It just tore them up.”

As for Mr. Huckabee’s refusal to detail his reasons for granting clemency, Mr. Cox said that was intended to prevent other petitioners from mimicking successful arguments.

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