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Flying high with Huckabee the Second Sunday, Dec 17, 2006 By John Brummett Today we offer a smorgasbord of political observations, beginning with the re-election of Mike Huckabee as governor. You're confused. Don't be. At this writing a dozen Huckabee department directors have been rehired by Mike Beebe. Now a Beebe guy is taking me aside to explain that one thing I apparently never understood is that the State Police airplane was always intended for gubernatorial use. The Huckabees and Beebes - that's King Mike I and Queen Jethrine and King Mike II and Queen Ginger - recently shared the plane to get to J.B. Hunt's funeral. Mrs. Huckabee crawled out limping from two knee replacements. Mrs. Beebe crawled out wearing a boot to stabilize her injured foot. Next we'll probably find out that the Beebes are gift-registered at Wal-Mart. ---------- Seriously, Huckabee is a Republican with left leanings and Beebe a Democrat with right leanings. That puts them in the same place three or four days a week. It's why I made a bit of a deal of some of the ironic overtones of Huckabee's partisan obligation to back Asa Hutchinson. As for the plane, there perhaps are legitimate logistical reasons for a governor to avail himself of the State Police craft. He should be able to speak at noon in Rogers, say, without losing a day's office work. Wholesale use of the aircraft for personal out-of-state political travel, undertaken on some kind of supposed "security" concern, would be another matter altogether. ---------- King Mike I may as well run for president and angle more practically to be the logical choice should John McCain need a Southern running mate with religious conservative bona fides and a few centrist or compassionately conservative tendencies. Our lame duck governor's other obvious political option is to run in 2008 against Mark Pryor for the U.S. Senate. I've just seen a new poll that shows Pryor would beat him by a margin strikingly similar to the one by which King Mike II beat Hutchinson. ---------- Something moderately positive seems to be percolating about these "527s," meaning sham nonprofits organized under a loophole in the IRS code. They call themselves independent while they raise undisclosed and unrestricted money to smear political candidates they oppose while carefully avoiding direct expressed advocacy for anyone's election or defeat. You will recall that it was a "527" called the "Coalition for Arkansas' Future" that was a mere funnel this year for nearly a million bucks from the Republican Party of Arkansas and the Republican Governors Association. It used the money to lie about Huckabee the Second's relationship with Nick Wilson, deliberately misrepresent one of my old columns in the process and target rural Democratic state legislators who won anyhow. On Tuesday, term-limited State Rep. Sam Ledbetter of Little Rock, a liberal Democrat, was telling me that he'd been talking with state legislators about whether a state could restrict the activities of these federally organized groups. On Wednesday, a chief benefactor of the aforementioned Republican "527" - state Sen. Gilbert Baker of Conway, newly re-elected chairman of the state Republican Party - said to me with seeming urgency that we need to "get rid of 527s." Please understand that Baker said he didn't want to disarm Republicans unilaterally and that he blames these abuses on a rich Democrat, George Soros. Baker said he didn't want Arkansas to pass a law more restrictive than that of other states and that real reform could come only at the federal level. --------- In that regard, it was announced later Wednesday that the Federal Election Commission had fined the infamous "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" for operating as a "527" when its purpose (smearing John Kerry's war record) was solely political. The FEC said that a "527" could engage in unrestricted political activity only as part of a broader mission. It said that a group set up only to do political activity needed to organize under the law as a political committee, in which case restrictions on contributions would apply. Such a rule, if applied uniformly, might put Huckabee the First out of the presidential exploration business. Wide Body No More is declining to form a presidential exploratory committee because of legal restrictions. Instead, with his usual tackiness and propriety blind spot, our lame duck governor enclosed with his Christmas cards an invitation to a fund-raiser for his "527," which he'll tap to bounce around Iowa and New Hampshire. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
