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Huckabee extols our tough politics Sunday, Jul 6, 2008 By John Brummett In 1993 I found it necessary to defend the meanness of our state's politics. "I must stand up for Arkansas here," I wrote then. "My home state can be a hateful, hateful place." Our former governor, Bill Clinton, had become president and the Republicans had trumped up all manner of allegations under a label broadly headed Whitewater. The ever-smug national punditocracy had proclaimed that all of these matters represented improprieties that had gone unnoticed in Arkansas because of incompetent local media and an inept local Republican Party. It may have been true that the local media were incompetent and the local Republicans pitiful. There certainly are pockets regarding the former and pervasiveness as pertains to the later. But we'd had a big newspaper war. We'd thought we were something. As it happened, Whitewater came to nothing. We in the Arkansas press had missed it for sure, but it wasn't anything to have missed. All it led to nationally was a prudish, zealous Republican prosecutor's wasting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and peeping into the White House to see Bill Clinton and that woman, Monica Lewinsky. Then he presumed to ask Clinton about it under oath. Then Clinton lied, because he didn't think it was a fair question, which, you know, it really wasn't. Then it went all the way to impeachment, which was basically insane. The country was having some post-Cold War emotional issues, apparently. My point in 1993 was that Arkansas politics was plenty physical, thank you very much. Ask Steve Clark. Ask Clinton after his ill-fated first gubernatorial term. Ask Nick Wilson. And, it turns out, you can ask the latest Arkansan to have achieved great laud and praise for political talent out there on the national presidential campaign trail. I was talking by phone the other day with Mike Huckabee on another matter when, somehow, we wended our way to his saying this: "People don't believe me when I say this, but being governor of Arkansas prepared me well for whatever got thrown at me at the presidential level. In fact, and people really don't believe this, I got nothing in the presidential campaign to compare with the contact sport I'd endured in Arkansas. People would come at me with something out there in the presidential race, and I'd think, 'Is that all you got?' " Why, it was enough to warm the cockles of the local journalist. It surely gratifies Max Brantley, the Arkansas Times editor who bedeviled Huckabee, and Jonathan Weil, a business reporter formerly with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette who hassled Huckabee over secret donors to Huckabee's Action America nonprofit organization. I suggested to Huckabee that this was counterintuitive, considering the conventional wisdom of Clinton's case. Huckabee said he'd like to talk to Clinton about that sometime, but that he rather expected that this had happened: Some things indeed were let slide by the local press in Clinton's time, then the local press got nationally criticized. So the local press became determined never to let that happen again and came after him with a vengeance on such things as his acceptance of gifts and crushing of hard drives. I remarked that, in Huckabee' scenarios, Huckabee is always the unfair victim. "I'm not saying I'm a victim," he said. "I'm just telling you what I think happened." Huckabee's most virulent critics while he was a Republican presidential candidate were extreme business conservatives such as the no-tax, no-regulation Club for Growth, which he called the Club for Greed. He and I talked a little about that, too, long enough for Huckabee to say that outfits like the Club for Growth don't understand that you can't always cut taxes at the state level and meet basic needs. Such people would "let an 8-year-old child choke to death on the steps of the Children's Hospital" for lack of Medicaid. I chastised him for his famous and all-too-typical hyperbole. These guys wouldn't really let a child choke. Would they? He said maybe, and maybe not. ------- 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. |
