Nov 28 12:00 PM US/Eastern
By ANDREW DeMILLO
Associated Press Writer

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - Mike Huckabee’s presidential rivals are pointing to chinks in his record as Arkansas’ governor—from ethics complaints to tax increases to illegal immigration and his support for releasing a rapist who was later convicted of killing a Missouri woman.
The Republican presidential candidate has plenty to champion from his 10 1/2 years as governor—including school improvements and health insurance for the children of the working poor. But his record has rough edges, and Huckabee has a habit of playing fast and loose with it.

Other campaigns for the GOP nomination, watching Huckabee’s rise in polls in Iowa, are starting to mine his past for political fodder. Take ethics, for example.

“People are starting to contact us and they’re saying we want everything on Mike Huckabee,” says Graham Sloan, director of the state’s Ethics Commission.

What they’ll find is 436 pages of documents chronicling Huckabee’s various tangles with a commission he’s derided as a political tool of Democrats. It’s a panel that has held proceedings 20 times on the former governor and lieutenant governor.

But the Ethics Commission files don’t cover everything, and this year—anticipating criticism—Huckabee’s campaign set up a “truth squad” to push his side of various stories. It often offers, at best, an incomplete account of his record.

On major issues:

_The truth squad says the only finding by the Arkansas Ethics Commission that Huckabee accepted a gift improperly was tossed out by a state court. In fact, the panel investigated 16 complaints against Huckabee and found five violations. Only one, for accepting a $500 canoe from Coca-Cola, was tossed out.

Two of the complaints against Huckabee pertain to unreported gifts—the canoe and a $200 stadium blanket received by his wife, Janet. Two stem from cash the governor or his wife received but did not initially report. The panel also ruled in 2003 that Huckabee’s campaign violated state law when it used its funds to pay for an event during the summer of 2002 called Gospel Fest

During his tenure, Huckabee accepted 314 gifts valued overall at more than $150,000, according to documents filed with the Arkansas secretary of state’s office. (He accepted 187 gifts in his first three years as governor but was not required to report their value.)

_Huckabee has consistently understated his role in the parole of rapist Wayne DuMond, who had been convicted in the 1984 rape of a distant cousin of former President Clinton.

Two months after taking office, Huckabee stunned the state by saying he questioned DuMond’s guilt and that it was his intention to free the rapist, who had been castrated by masked men while awaiting trial. Huckabee said then he had “serious questions as to the legitimacy of his guilt” and acknowledged later that he had met with DuMond’s wife about the case while he was lieutenant governor. Two months after ascending to the governor’s office, Huckabee met with the woman again.

The ex-governor now blames his predecessor for making DuMond parole eligible—Jim Guy Tucker commuted a life-plus-20 years sentence to 39 1/2 years—but distances himself from his role in DuMond’s release. Huckabee met privately with the state parole board, and two members have said he pressured them for a vote.

“He made it obvious that he thought DuMond had gotten a raw deal and wanted us to take another look at it,” former board member Charles Chastain said in 2001. “Some board members who were usually very tough about letting people out … (later) voted in favor of him, and seemed eager to.”

On his campaign Web site, Huckabee says the parole board was made up entirely of Democrats appointed by Clinton and Tucker. It doesn’t mention that Huckabee reappointed board member Railey Steele days before he voted with three other members to set DuMond free. DuMond was later convicted of killing a woman in Missouri and died in 2005.

_Huckabee likes to say he was tough on taxes in Arkansas, noting a $100 million tax cut in 1997 that until this year was Arkansas’ largest. When asked about a fuel tax increase he backed in 1999, Huckabee says incorrectly that he joined 80 percent of Arkansas voters in approving it.

Huckabee in 1999 supported a $1 billion highway bond program, including costs for interest and lawyers’ fees, but the question on the ballot was only whether the state could take on the debt, not how Arkansas would pay for it. Huckabee had signed the fuel tax increase two months earlier.

Shortly after taking office, Huckabee took a four-day trip by bass boat along the Arkansas River to tout a 1/8th-cent sales tax increase for outdoor programs. (Two nature centers now carry the names of Huckabee and his wife.) Taxes went up $40 million in the months before the $100 million tax cut Huckabee touts.

Other taxes went up as Arkansas changed its property tax system and made improvements to its school system.

_Huckabee’s recent strong stand on immigration, including an intolerance toward companies that employ illegal immigrants, runs counter to the image he crafted in his final years in office. He was battling conservatives within his own party who were pushing for stricter state-level immigration measures.

Huckabee opposed a Republican lawmaker’s efforts in 2005 to require proof of legal status when applying for state services that aren’t federally mandated and proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Huckabee derided the bill as un-American and un-Christian and said the bill’s sponsor drank a different “Jesus juice.”

That same year, Huckabee failed in his effort to make children of illegal immigrants eligible for state-funded scholarships and in-state tuition to Arkansas colleges. At the time, Huckabee said he didn’t understand the opposition to it.

“Ask lots of folks in Arkansas, including Republicans, and a fair number will probably tell you that Huck is for Huck is for Huck. National media folks like David Brooks, dealing in surface appearances only, rave about what a nice guy Huckabee is, and a moral exemplar to boot. If they only did a little homework, they would discover a guy with a thin skin, a nasty vindictive streak, and a long history of imbroglios about questionable ethics.

Once, Gov. Huckabee even had the gall to file suit against the state ethics commission. He lost.

Fourteen times, the ethics commission — a respected body, not a partisan witch-hunt group — investigated claims against Huckabee. Five of those times, it officially reprimanded him. And, as only MSNBC among the big national media has reported at any real length, there were lots of other mini-scandals and embarrassments along the way.

He used public money for family restaurant meals, boat expenses, and other personal uses. He tried to claim as his own some $70,000 of furniture donated to the governor’s mansion. He repeatedly, and obstinately, against the pleadings even from conservative columnists and editorials, refused to divulge the names of donors to a “charitable” organization he set up while lieutenant governor — an outfit whose main charitable purpose seemed to be to pay Huckabee to make speeches. Then, as a kicker, he misreported the income itself from the suspicious “charity.”

Huckabee has been criticized, reasonably so, for misusing the state airplane for personal reasons. And he and his wife, Janet, actually set up a “wedding gift registry” (they had already been married for years) to which people could donate as the Huckabees left the governorship, in order to furnish their new $525,000 home.

According to the Arkansas News Bureau (Feb. 1, 2003), “Huckabee’s personal lawyer, Kevin Crass of Little Rock, has said Huckabee believes there should be no limit on gifts short of a bribe.” After all, said Janet Huckabee, public officials like her husband should be automatically trusted: “Until you absolutely positively know that the man has outright lied to you, it should be enough that the man’s word is that everything was done appropriately, legally, to the best of his knowledge to the letter of the law.”

Of course, her reasoning refutes itself: If one is precluded from even questioning “the man’s word,” how can one possibly find out in the first place whether the official “has outright lied to you”?

It must be said that a fair-minded journalist ought to tread lightly in scrutinizing a candidate’s spouse; but in Janet Huckabee’s case, she is a politician in her own right, having run unsuccessfully for Arkansas Secretary of State. Voters overwhelmingly rejected her, perhaps because they remembered her propensity for other outrageous statements — such as the time when she defended secrecy about the donors to her husband’s “charity” by saying that a donor’s name “wouldn’t be enough. [Then] you’d want to know who he was married to, and then his wife would be German descent, and you’d have Mike, you’d have him responsible for 600,000 killings of Jews.”

Huh?

Of course, nobody accused Huckabee of genocide. But his skin is so thin that when various underlings in his administration, even for bureaus as small as the state film office, crossed ethical lines (some of them, admittedly, rather minor), the governor consistently and angrily attacked the media for reporting the transgressions rather than demanding that the transgressors make things right.

Finally, Gov. Huckabee had a propensity to be almost as prodigal with pardons as was his famous predecessor by the name of Clinton. Indeed, Hillary Clinton’s campaign team is probably licking their chops at the prospect of Huck as the nominee, because one of his pardons, in particular, was so outlandish as to make Willie Horton’s case in Massachusetts seem almost child’s play by comparison. After Huckabee helped secure the release of already-well-known rapist Wayne Dumond, the released convict sexually assaulted and murdered a woman in Missouri.

All of which leads one to ask two questions: First, how can voters whose primary concerns are moral look beyond so many of a candidate’s problems with ethics? And, second, if Republicans in general have concluded, as most of them have, that repeated scandals among Washington GOPers played a huge role in Republican defeats in 2006, how could they possibly nominate somebody who seems to have such big ethical blind spots?

Give this to Huckabee: The man gives a good speech. But so does Duncan Hunter, with the biggest difference being that Hunter’s speeches appeal more to the intellect than the heartstrings — and that Hunter can boast 25 years of leadership for conservative causes, including on taxing and spending issues where Huckabee is notoriously un-conservative.

For that matter, if the question is public ethics, all the other major Republican candidates have rather solid records. With so little scandalous material to look into, why hasn’t the usually scandal-ravenous national media delved into the record of the one GOP candidate whose ethics have been repeatedly questioned in his home state?