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Huckabee's smoke-filled past Thursday, Dec 13, 2007 By John Brummett It looks bad when you hold public office and take undisclosed money from special interests - like Mike Huckabee, the would-be president, did when he was lieutenant governor in 1993-95. Then if people subsequently learn the identify of those donors, or even one, you can take on a certain additional retroactive unattractiveness, or at least vulnerability. That's the case with Huckabee. He stands newly revealed by Newsweek magazine to have taken $40,000 secretly from tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds into his Action America nonprofit. He always steadfastly refused to name the contributors to this outfit. Huckabee funneled the money to himself to supplement his anemic public salary in that nothing job of lieutenant governor. He effectively paid himself from secret sugar daddies for giving speeches, which is one of the things politicians normally do in their day jobs. Consider, then, what we now know thanks to Newsweek, and thanks to the blabbing to that magazine of erstwhile Huckabee pals J.J. Vigneault and Greg Graves. Then reconsider what happened in the legislative session of 2001, when Huckabee was governor. Nursing homes were whining, justifiably, about stagnant income and rising costs. It's true that health care costs and liability insurance costs were skyrocketing. The industry concocted a "bed tax," meaning a state levy on nursing home long-term care charges, which, magically, would quadruple because of the federal government's 3-to-1 match. State Sen. Jim Argue of Little Rock, famously earnest, was mightily offended by this bed tax. Though primarily designed to open the Medicaid spigot, it had the effect, you see, also of taxing sick old people who'd saved their money and were in nursing homes on a private pay basis. He thought that unconscionable. Argue cooked up an alternative, which was a 7 percent wholesale tobacco product tax increase. The Legislature passed both the industry's bed tax and Argue's tobacco tax, and, thus, the buck - to the governor. Huckabee, who seven years earlier had paid himself a secret salary supplement in part with money donated without public disclosure by R.J. Reynolds, opted to tax the sick old person's life savings rather than the tobacco industry at a wholesale level. My, it does sound bad when you put it like that. When I mentioned that to Argue the other day, he said, "That's been on my mind, too, for the last day-and-a-half," since he'd read Newsweek. That's all he would say. Actually, I do not allege nor seriously suspect a quid pro quo. The fact is that Huckabee went along with cigarette tax increases and tobacco product tax increases at other times in his governorship. By the end of his decade-plus in office, he'd gone on that health kick and become quite the anti-smoking zealot. But then he did hold out for exceptions to the public smoking ban, such as in establishments serving only persons older than 21. What happened was that he had agreed to sign the nursing home industry's scheme, in part because it promised escalating revenues while a wholesale tobacco tax threatened declining proceeds, if, indeed, we were to succeed in getting people to stop smoking. The sin, then, was not the choice he made in 2001. That was merely a dubious if arguable choice. The sin was carrying into the governorship the baggage of having the tobacco industry as an old secret benfactor, even at a time when he held the public trust. The failing was not of policy, but personal ethics. In that regard: I mentioned the other day that Huckabee likened his reporting income from Action America without identifying Action America's donors to lawyers in the Legislature reporting income from their law firms without detailing their individual clients. I called it a decent if not compelling point. To explain that: At least lawyers are bound by professional standards to provide a defined professional service to clients. Huckabee was simply taking money from secret special interests to remunerate himself for giving speeches to totally unaffiliated groups. ------- 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. |
