Huckabee
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Second, Huckabee ignored the pleas of the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, and actor Richard Gere to save a multiple killer from execution by lethal injection. The man, William Frank Parker, had converted to Buddhism while in prison (hence the appeal by the Dalai Lama and Gere). Twelve years earlier, however, he had shot to death his ex-wife’s parents and attempted to kill his sister-in-law. Then, he took his former wife hostage and drove her to a police station in an Arkansas town, before shooting her and an officer (they would survive). Huckabee refused to commute the man’s sentence to life imprisonment. The Supreme Court of the United States did not take the case, so Parker was executed.
From 1964 to 1990, no capital punishment took place in Arkansas. And there have been no instances of it since 2005. In the fifteen years between, 27 people were executed: 19 white, 8 black, and 1 Latino. Clinton oversaw 4, Tucker 7, and Huckabee 16 (11 white and 5 black). Of those executed under Huckabee, 6 were in his first term, 7 in his second term, and 3 in his third. Not much can be gleaned from these facts alone, due to the back-and-forth nature of capital punishment’s constitutionality or public approval. Neither citizens nor politicians seem to have a firm resolve on the judicial aspects involved, and a governor plays only a small part in the process. People tend to agree with capital punishment more in theory than they do in its actual application, given the racially tinged discrepancies in how executions are handed down by the courts.
Evangelical leaders often are not as pro–capital punishment in private as they are in public. Roman Catholic leaders, less constricted by the opinions of their donors, find more freedom to support the official anti–capital punishment teaching of their church. An evangelical politician, however, knows he gains very little in critiquing the practice. A progressive view goes against the prevailing sentiment of the evangelical and conservative base.
Huckabee has often stated his opinion that there is racial bias within the judicial system as a whole, and in matters of capital punishment in particular. But when he served as governor, he didn’t have the luxury of ivory-tower ethical debate. Real criminals sat on death row—and many of them had lock-shut cases of proven guilt for heinous crimes. In such cases, Huckabee fulfilled his obligation as the chief enforcer of state law and authorized the executions. In the case of Parker, the murderer-turned-Buddhist, Huckabee was called to act just three weeks after his inauguration.
Huckabee said that many of the workers in the governor’s mansion were inmates of the Arkansas penal system. “Nearly every inmate was there for murder,” Huckabee said. “Interestingly, one of the things you learn is that they are the best inmates of all. The people who are there for murder, chances are they did it as an act of passion when they were seventeen, and now they are in their forties or fifties—they’ve long since mellowed out.” Huckabee jokes that he was more afraid of his own staff hurting him than he was of the inmates. “It’s a weird dynamic. One of those things that you don’t expect the public to fully understand, but you do learn, is that people can make horrible mistakes—but it doesn’t mean that they are permanently horrible people. In essence, my kids grew up around people who had committed murder.”16
Another point here is that becoming the “first family” and living in the governor’s mansion took some getting used to—and it wasn’t always pleasant. Once other folks are putting away your laundry, Huckabee said, that’s the end of privacy. Even the refrigerator is not your own. He and his family quickly learned that once they stepped beyond their bedroom doors, they were in a public area—and they were never, ever alone, what with tour groups and staffers traipsing through during the day and troopers patrolling at night and in the early morning hours. As Huckabee said, “There’s no such thing as stepping out of your bedroom in your underwear and going down to the kitchen.”17
A more explicit form of privacy invasion directed against the governor involved people taking great pains to know his family’s private business. They’d grab a receipt to see how big a tip he had left for the waitress. They’d go through the trash on the curb, looking for an incriminating receipt or an old tax return. Or they’d pretend to be from the education department in order to look at his kids’ academic records.
His children lived in a fishbowl enough as it was, without people taking opportunity to invade their privacy. By this time, their oldest son, John Mark, was in college, while David and Sarah were in high school and junior high, respectively. Huckabee guarded his time with his children, blocking out time for meals alone with each of them and taking them on special trips. To this day, they all have a very close relationship, and though they are spread out geographically, the Huckabees see their children (and now grandchildren) on a very regular basis. Though it is hard to be a pastor’s kid, let alone the child of the governor—and the young Huckabees experienced both—they have no bitterness about the life they lived growing up. It provided them with many opportunities they otherwise would not have had, and because their parents gave them lots of their time, they don’t feel like they were cheated of parents because of the vocational choices made by their dad.
Earning his living in politics, Huckabee was glad to know who his friends were, and it was good to have a church family to call home. Rick Caldwell helped on both counts one night while standing in the kitchen of the governor’s mansion. “We’d gone out to dinner, and now we were eating ice cream out of the box with a spoon,” Caldwell said. Huckabee admitted he didn’t know where they were going to attend church. They’d been in Little Rock a few weeks, and didn’t know where to land. Caldwell mentioned to him about a young friend who was starting up a new church. “It wasn’t real big or anything,” Caldwell said, “maybe a hundred people meeting in a warehouse.” Caldwell said his pastor friend got a call at six o’clock the next morning saying, “We want to let you know that Governor Huckabee is planning to bring his family to attend your church.” The pastor, Mark Evans, figured it was Caldwell playing a gag on him until Huckabee showed up with his family. They fell in love with the church and raised their family there; Huckabee played bass in the band. “Now the church runs a couple thousand people—one of the leading churches in Little Rock,” Caldwell said. “Which, of course, I attribute to Mike’s great bass playing in the worship team.”18
People say that one of Huckabee’s greatest strengths as governor was that he would work to build relationships with people—on both sides of the political aisle. Huckabee obliged anyone who wanted to “come and let us reason together” and never let the party label stand in the way. “He used those connection-making skills he had developed as a pastor to work with people throughout the Arkansas government,” Jim Harris said. “As a result, he got legislation passed. He was willing to negotiate—especially since he worked with such a lopsided legislature. Democrats ran the place!”19
Harris recalled how some hard-line Republicans told Huckabee they would rather not pass any legislation at all than to compromise with the Democrats. And Democrats would often say the same thing, in reverse. But Huckabee coached them on a better way, the way of actual governing with what you were given to work with.
One problem Huckabee faced, however, was a lack of Republicans qualified to run state agencies. Some Republicans wanted him to “clean house” and move out all Democrats from appointed positions of employment. But Huckabee knew that, since Democrats had not given Republicans many opportunities to gain experience in running the state over the past generation, there weren’t enough Republicans to fill all the spots. So he left Democrats in positions all over the government, much to the chagrin of some in his own party. Besides that, just because a person was a Democrat didn’t mean that individual had turned in his or her citizenship. As he’d done in his days as president of the Baptist convention, Huckabee chose to work with a wide spectrum of people, not just his own brand.
Huckabee’s friend Randy Sims remembers how Huckabee began to appeal to Sims’s colleag
ues at his work in banking and finance. Though Democrat by DNA, once they met Huckabee in person, they became fans. “I mean, he had such magnetism, such a way of relating to people,” Sims said. “The ability to remember names or to remember the name of a mutual acquaintance. Or to just be a regular guy with them. It was just an incredible gift that he had.”20
In governance, Huckabee started with something small yet extremely practical—improving the process for car registration. Before his reforms, you would have to go down to your county courthouse to prove your vehicle had been assessed. Then you brought your car to a service station where someone would check the basics—your taillights, blinkers, and so on—for a small fee and give your vehicle a “pass” or “fail” mark. Then you would take all this paperwork down to the revenue office, wait in line forever, and finally you were done (unless you had missed something small in the process). And none of this could be accomplished or explained online, because the state didn’t have a website for that yet. Since this entire process could take up to a full day, people had to take off work just to get their car registrations renewed. So Huckabee eliminated the unpopular inspection and streamlined the process, receiving instant affection from his fellow citizens. And within a few years as governor, he had so invested in technology and online tools that many of the forms people once stood in line for could be completed online. By 2000, people across the nation were bragging about Arkansas’s achievements for being a leader in “e-government.”
Huckabee next turned his attention to the plight of uninsured children. Who was going to look out for kids born into lower-middle-class homes—too poor for private insurance but too wealthy for Medicaid? Huckabee’s administration created the ARKids First program to provide insurance for kids who fell into this economic demographic. Time magazine noted that his program “helped reduce the percentage of uninsured Arkansans under 18 to 9% in 2003–04, compared with the 12% for the nation and 21% for neighboring Texas.”21
Then, at the end of 1996, Huckabee campaigned in support of a one-eighth-cent sales tax to support the programs affecting the environment and conservation: the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, the Department of Arkansas Heritage, the Department of Parks and Tourism, and the Keep Arkansas Beautiful Commission.
To create awareness for the benefit of the tax, the Huckabees loaded up in a boat with some staff and traveled from one end of the state to the other, stopping at each point they could to drum up support. (Technically, the governor rode in the bass boat while the first lady skimmed down the river on a jet ski.)
“I campaigned for Amendment 75 and we won,” Huckabee said. “We used that money to completely rebuild our state parks system, fight pollution, purchase thousands of acres that are now set aside to remain natural, and create friendly and affordable places for families to enjoy the outdoors.”22
Huckabee admits that it seemed paradoxical, at least in Arkansas at the time, for a Republican to care about the environment and conservation. And yet his favorite environmental hero, Teddy Roosevelt, was a Republican—though a lot has changed since 1900.23 Huckabee used populist, blue-collar reasoning to support his vision of well-maintained public lands and lakes. He said that in a state where “you have a lot of people who can’t afford memberships in expensive hunting and fishing clubs . . . you never want there to be this sense that you had to be a person of affluence in order to experience just the scenic beauty of a state.”24
One of the first appointments Huckabee made after becoming governor was to appoint Lester Sitzes, his best friend since childhood, to the state’s Game and Fish Commission. Doing so fulfilled a promise he had made to Sitzes, an avid sportsman, as they came home from Boys State in 1972. Sitzes predicted that Huckabee would one day become the real governor of Arkansas. “And when you do,” Sitzes remembers saying, “just remember to put me on the Game and Fish Commission.” Huckabee agreed, and a promise made is a promise kept. Now, the Bois d’Arc lake is part of the “Dr. Lester Sitzes III Bois d’Arc Wildlife Management Area,” named in honor of Sitzes and a lifetime dedication to leaving the outdoors in better condition than he found it (aka the Scout’s pledge).
The “Dr.” in front of Sitzes’ name is for his dentistry. When you go into his office in Hope, just blocks from Hope High School, you’ll find wall after wall covered in either Huckabee memorabilia or pictures of Sitzes with dead deer, ducks, or flopping fish. And if you ask him for his thoughts on his best friend, Mike Huckabee, you won’t be disappointed with the stories he can share.
As Huckabee began his first term, it quickly became apparent that he would need all the help he could pull together in handling the media in Little Rock. The state of Arkansas was full of small towns with newspapers that would be happy to get news and photographs from the governor of the state. A lot of them, however, had come to depend on the news outlets in Little Rock providing them with coverage of what was going on. That worked fine when the sitting governor was a Democrat, but the process began to break down once Huckabee came into office. “They seemed only interested in the news if it was something negative about Mike,” said Jim Harris. “If you did something good, that wasn’t news.”25
Huckabee hired Harris and Rex Nelson, formerly an editor with one of the conservative newspapers, and together they worked with a communications staff dedicated to getting the news out directly to newspaper editors throughout the state. “E-mail had come along at about that time, and so we’d use that to send them news and pictures,” Harris said.26 This doesn’t sound too revolutionary now, but it was at the time, and it enabled Huckabee to keep the knowledge of his administration’s progress from becoming Little Rock’s best-kept secret.
Huckabee’s relationship with the media became polarized—some were fair and others were not. Max Brantley, longtime editor of the Arkansas Times, worked his way into the latter category. “We were so clearly identified by him as being his enemy, his foe, that anytime anybody had anything they wanted to gripe about, they came to us with it,” Brantley said. “So we broke a lot of stories about Huckabee that he didn’t like.”27 Once Brantley was known as the editor who printed news unfavorable to the governor, more of that kind of material gravitated in his direction.
About five years into his being governor, Huckabee wrote, “I have become increasingly amused by editorial writers and self-appointed political reformers who think they know how to solve all the problems faced by the government.” He vented his frustration that those who could never understand the complexity of governing continued to bring “attacks,” “baseless allegations,” and “frivolous lawsuits” that distracted him from his work.28
An ongoing narrative about Huckabee is that he has thin skin, or even worse, he’s just a jerk, especially in his relationship with unfriendly media. Brantley said, “You could ask people who are a lot more admiring of him than I am, and they would tell you Huckabee has a thin skin. That’s not a good thing to have in politics because people can give you a lot of grief sometimes.”29
There seems to be a grain of truth to the idea that early on in Huckabee’s career as governor, he had such negative interaction with a few members of the media that it set him on edge against them. When asked whether he had thinner skin at the beginning than he did at the end of his term, Huckabee said, “Yeah, that’s probably true. In the first few years of politics you know it’s going to be rough, and you know there’s going to be the criticism. But if it’s legitimate criticism, then you say, ‘I deserve that.’ But when it’s ridiculously unfair—so untrue, so manufactured—then it’s hard for it not to be frustrating and hard not to react to it. You want to challenge the reporter and ask, ‘Why did you say that? That’s not true and you know it wasn’t true.’ And, of course, they view that as having thin skin. I view it as being bold and trying to make them accountable for their actions.”30
For Huckabee, the issue was not that the journalists wer
e coming from the left or were Democrats, but that he perceived them to be unprofessional and had flawed ethics. Huckabee’s lifelong habit of making friends out of enemies suddenly had no effect on these people, and it frustrated him. Huckabee eventually cut off Brantley from having any access to the governor’s office.
“It doesn’t have the same emotional effect on me it once would have had,” Huckabee later said. “I became more frustrated about the lack of professionalism than I was worried that it’s going to change people’s perception. Nobody’s getting news from one source anymore anyway. So what if somebody is saying I’ve kicked little puppies and beat up little girls at school? Only a limited number of people are actually going to see that, and of those who do, a very limited number will actually believe it. You just have to remind yourself of that when you read things about yourself on the Internet.”31
In March 1997 a system of tornadoes struck throughout the southeastern United States. Altogether, seven F4 tornadoes touched down, three of them in the state of Arkansas alone. As they ripped through Arkansas, they killed twenty-five people, making it the deadliest tornado outbreak in the state since 1968.32 Much of downtown Arkadelphia, the Huckabees’ college town, was destroyed. President Clinton and Huckabee toured the devastated areas of Arkadelphia together, dishing out hugs and the promise of emergency disaster relief.
One year later, in March 1998, another tragedy occurred, although this time it was not a natural disaster. Two middle school students in the town of Jonesboro brought semiautomatic rifles and handguns to their school, stolen from the grandfather of one of the boys. They set up their weapons on a hillside overlooking the school, and one of the boys ran into the building to pull the fire alarm. As the teachers and students exited the building, the boys took aim and fired on them, killing five and wounding ten. New York Times columnist Frank Rich asked the question, “Why do they do it?” He then quoted Huckabee, who had spoken of a “culture where these children are exposed to tens of thousands of murders on television and movies.”33 Huckabee answered that question in more depth in a book published that year titled Kids Who Kill.34 Brenda Turner, chief of staff for Huckabee, recalled the pastoral sensitivity Huckabee brought to the scene in Jonesboro. With no cameras or reporters around, Huckabee went from person to person, holding them up literally with his arm and spiritually with his prayers. It was a town in pain, and Huckabee brought a full measure of empathy for the situation.35