by Scott Lamb
Another alleged ethical lapse still being discussed on social media fifteen years later is how a fund set up to pay for maintenance at the governor’s mansion wound up being used to pay for some panty hose for Janet, a doghouse (for Jet, his Labrador retriever) and Taco Bell for the kids.11 After these receipts were brought to light, the Huckabees promptly reimbursed the account.
Then there was a time that a friend donated seventy thousand dollars’ worth of furniture for the governor’s mansion. At first, Huckabee said the furniture would be his to take with him when he left. Complaints ensued, and Huckabee reversed his position and said he would leave the furniture behind.12
Another complaint surfaced when Janet’s friends told her they wanted to help the Huckabees get set up in a house after they left the governor’s mansion. What would she need? Did she have a mixer? What about bath towels? Silverware? After living in government housing for a decade, it was true that the Huckabees would be, in some sense, “starting over” when they left. So Janet went to a department store to set up a registry to help her friends know what she needed. She entered her information into the computerized gift registry and when it asked her to state the occasion for the registry (“baby” or “bridal” being her only two options), she chose “bridal.” People took umbrage with what they said was Mrs. Huckabee claiming to need the same perks as a new bride. “My wife has friends; she has lifelong friends. They wanted to do something for her,” the governor responded.13 There was no claim that something wrong had been done—only that it seemed distasteful.
Do allegations of wrongdoing equal wrongdoing? Or, when the Huckabees were shown to have failed to turn in a receipt for a purchase made—a purchase that in and of itself had no ethical taint—does this display a pattern of unethical behavior? Or is it instead a very occasional lack of good record keeping? Out of the ten thousand purchases made or income received by the couple and their three children, spanning a decade, there are only a handful of times when the Huckabees were shown to have made an error in either judgment or bookkeeping.
As for the receiving of gifts from friends, remember that as the governor of Arkansas, the Huckabees were under obligation to document every gift they received. And they did so. But gifts, such as a weekly delivery of fresh flowers, given to the governor’s mansion by a millionaire friend, also fell under the critics’ scorn. Though they were unsuccessful in their search for quid pro quo, there were plenty of receipts for donated floral arrangements.
In 2000, everyone knew that the governor’s mansion was in serious need of renovation and expansion. The rooms were too small for the state functions required of a governor, and the living quarters offered little creature comforts to the family of the chief executive. Janet Huckabee took charge of administrating the renovations and went to work planning the vision and budget for the project.
An immediate question, however, was what would happen to the first family while the yearlong renovations took place? The mansion would be uninhabitable. Advisors looked around Little Rock for appropriate housing—big enough for the Huckabee family while also having adequate security. The rental price for such a residence would not come cheap. But the Huckabees had a different idea, a whimsical plan that would not only save the taxpayers money but would also bind the hearts of everyday Arkansas citizens to their first family. The Huckabees would move into a “triple-wide”—a manufactured house to be put on the grounds of the governor’s mansion. After all, one out of eight Arkansas families lived in a manufactured home, so this was an established part of Arkansas family culture, even if some in Arkansas didn’t want to take pride in that fact. Furthermore, the Huckabees knew it would be easy to find an Arkansas company who would donate the triple-wide in return for the marketing exposure the industry would receive.
So a triple-wide was shipped to Little Rock for the Huckabees, with a banner that read “My other home is a mansion” on the back. From the start, they knew they were going to be smeared by the elites, but it didn’t matter—it was the right thing to do. Besides, given the houses they had lived in growing up, how could they be housing snobs anyway?
In her trademark humor, Mrs. Huckabee explained the situation to the New York Times. “ ‘This is not a trailer . . . Trailers are pulled behind a pickup truck . . . We are not having a trailer on the mansion grounds.’ Nor is it, she explained, a mobile home, since the Huckabees are not going anywhere.
“ ‘Is it a double-wide?’ she continued. ‘The answer is no. It’s a triple-wide. So get it right, O.K.?’ ”14
After Jay Leno made several weeks of jokes about the situation, the Huckabees videotaped a segment with the host of The Tonight Show, to dish it back out to him.
Leno said, “I hope you’re not too upset with some of the jokes.”
Huckabee responded, “I tell you what, Jay, we feel so good about it, I’m going to send you a full set of Firestone tires for your car.” He described the size of the home as “large enough so that we could get you and your chin inside.”
Huckabee didn’t want Arkansas citizens to feel like second-class American citizens, even if they came from modest backgrounds or lived in manufactured housing. He said, “One of the things we want to do is to show that people in Arkansas aren’t all that sensitive about people making light of us. We know who we are.”15
Heading into 2002, the Huckabees geared up for another round of campaigning. If reelected, this would be the governor’s final term of office, being term-limited by the Arkansas Constitution. Would this be his final campaign for elected office, or would there be a future for him after Arkansas? He wasn’t sure yet, so he planned to enjoy every minute of the 2002 campaign.
Not every politician thinks that the campaign trail is fun, but Huckabee does. Both friend and foe admit that he is one of the greatest practitioners of “retail politics.” That means Huckabee is good at the daily grind of meeting crowds of new faces a day and giving a stump speech with fresh enthusiasm, even after he has given it one thousand times before. In this regard, both of the Huckabees are very similar to Bill Clinton: they are extroverted and they take genuine delight in meeting people.
“I freely admit, I love the excitement of campaigning,” Huckabee wrote. “It’s the thrill of the unknown. The frantic pace. Some of us are crazy enough to enjoy it; others see it as a necessary evil. George [H. W.] Bush had great disdain for campaigning. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, is in my same camp in this regard. We both like people, and in campaigning the ultimate goal is to be with people—to share your views, listen, sympathize, and persuade. There’s also the sense that you always have to be at a peak performance level. You never know when you’ll slip.”16
The line “You never know when you’ll slip” helps raise a justified point of criticism, and one that Huckabee admits to. Sometimes, he can talk too much and needlessly get himself into trouble. And when he does, it usually happens because of his use of metaphors and colorful exaggerations that are either scatological or slightly naughty. Which is to say, Huckabee is capable of creating Southern metaphors on the spot, but that ability can become a political liability.
“I’m more spontaneous when it comes to expressing myself. I know what I believe. I have deep convictions. I don’t have to sit around and say, ‘ok, let me think how I answer this because I need to be so afraid that it’s what they want to hear.’ I know what I believe and I am comfortable in that conviction, so I’m going to express it spontaneously. Frankly, sometimes that gets me in trouble. Probably my greatest vulnerability is that I tend to speak freely.”17
Sometimes, the comments are risqué in a 1950s sort of way—no vulgarity, but with a hint of the forbidden. Like the time he was explaining to reporters about who it is who shows up to hear his band, Capitol Offense. Huckabee said, “I keep hearing about these bands that have girls throwing their underwear onstage. . . . But giv
en our demographics, we’re more likely to have old men throwing their Depends at us.”18 Or consider this line at a Values Voter conference: “Nancy Pelosi said, ‘We’re gonna know what’s in this bill when we pass it.’ I said, ‘Really? That’s like saying I’ll know what I just ate when I passed it.’ ”19
Or there was the time Huckabee was being interviewed for a profile in the New Yorker. The author wrote about the exchange she shared with him: “I joked with him once that I would write about his (fictitious) affair with Nancy Pelosi. He e-mailed back, ‘The only thing worse than a torrid affair with sweet, sweet Nancy would be a torrid affair with Helen Thomas. If those were my only options, I’d probably be FOR same-sex marriage!’ ”20
The point is that Huckabee’s strength, when used to excess or carelessly, can also become his weakness. Huckabee seems most willing to toss out these zingers when in a room chock-full of like-minded folks—as though there aren’t reporters sitting in the room or social media making his lines go viral.
The night of the 2002 election was unusual in that it brought both joy and disappointment to the Huckabee home. The joy was because Mike won reelection, defeating Democrat challenger Jimmie Lou Fisher. The race was closer than the 1998 election, but still comfortable, as he won 53 to 47 percent.
The night also brought disappointment, however, because Janet Huckabee lost in her bid to become the secretary of state for Arkansas. “She ran in large part because she had personally tried in vain to recruit people to be a candidate for these empty positions,” Huckabee said. “She’s very politically active and believes in public service—stemming from her own mother’s service as the county clerk of Hempstead. Janet has this real sense about how people ought to run for office.”21
The Huckabees took a lot of criticism at the very idea of them both being in statewide elected office, but her 62 to 38 percent defeat ended all that anyway. “She would have made a wonderful secretary of state,” Huckabee said.22
Janet Huckabee remembers how hard it was during the election season because she was also finishing her baccalaureate degree and the renovations on the governor’s mansion. “That was a busy time, a difficult few months,” she recalled. “We each had our own campaign office and our own bus. One time we passed on the interstate. I called and asked where he was. He said, ‘Oh I’m going down I-30.’ I was too, so we waved at each other as we passed—traveling down the highway.”23
CHAPTER 26
ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
2002–2006
I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the state of Arkansas, and our highest court clearly has told us it’s the duty of the state to ensure equal educational opportunities for all students. . . . It’s not a matter of what we like or might want.
—MIKE HUCKABEE
THROUGHOUT HIS YEARS AS GOVERNOR, HUCKABEE RESISTED falling into a GOP goose step or becoming another brick in the wall of the nostalgic-for-Reagan complex. The official Republican Party line on an issue did not receive an automatic endorsement from Huckabee’s administration, nor did conservative talk-radio criticism count as much to him as the actual real-world implementation of helpful policy. As a result, Huckabee often received the label “prodigal son” or “wayward Republican” from friend and foe alike. “I was never one to just pick up the company line and recite it,” Huckabee told a reporter. “I hate that—I think it’s repulsive. And politics has become more and more where you’re handed this script and told, ‘Don’t improv.’ ”1
The Huckabean tendency to jettison conservative groupthink became even more pronounced during his final four years as governor. Arkansas term limits its governors, so after winning his 2002 campaign for reelection, Huckabee knew he had just four years to accomplish unfinished business. One established priority for his final term would be to improve the level of education within the state. The Huckabees had a vested interest in public education, as their own children attended public schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade. What was good enough for the children of Arkansas was good enough for the governor’s children. But what would educational reform look like? How much political capital would have to be spent to accomplish anything? Should his reforms be modest or bold?
Many of those questions were answered for Huckabee when, just sixteen days after his 2002 election victory, the Supreme Court of Arkansas thrust the issue of education onto the top of his priority list. In Lake View School District No. 25 v. Huckabee, the Court declared unconstitutional the state’s procedures for school funding and ordered the governor and legislature to produce a more equitable system. The basic problem was that each school operated with funding from three sources—local, state, and federal. Affluent school districts, of course, had more financial resources and hence, had better schools. But the idea had been for state and federal monies to help level the playing field—to bring up the quantity of funding and quality of education in the poorest of districts. In 1992, the Lake View School District filed suit to force the state to take action to make things more equitable. Now, a decade later, the court had made its decision and it was time for the executive and legislative branch to respond. The court imposed a deadline of January 2004.
Space doesn’t permit an entire chronicling of what happened over the next two years, and the educational reforms took the hard work of all three branches of government. That said, Huckabee’s administration led in the efforts, even as some conservative legislators and citizens disagreed with a court they believed to be overstepping its bounds. Huckabee ignored the voice of the strict “party line” or “true conservative” pleadings and opted instead for solutions that worked to fix the problems.
Huckabee agreed with the direction of the court’s analysis of the current system, being especially troubled by how the inequality too often fell along racial lines—minorities receiving the inferior educational opportunities. He set out to create and implement a solution. Many felt that too many districts existed in the first place, so consolidation became one mechanism for obeying the court’s ruling. After examining all the school districts with fewer than fifteen hundred students, the Huckabee administration proposed to consolidate the state’s 310 districts into just over 100 and to streamline the administration of the entire system.
Huckabee explained that because of the Arkansas Supreme Court ruling, “it’s unrealistic to claim we can continue to exist under the current structure. . . . I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the state of Arkansas, and our highest court clearly has told us it’s the duty of the state to ensure equal educational opportunities for all students. . . . It’s not a matter of what we like or might want. It’s a matter of complying with federal law and current budget constraints. Here in Arkansas, it’s also a matter of complying with the orders of our Supreme Court.”2
Huckabee admitted that his plan would probably not be politically feasible had it not been for the hand of the Supreme Court in pushing them all to act. “For example,” he said, “the demands for additional rigor at the high school level will force us to make extensive structural changes that probably wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. Boundaries we’ve lived with for years will cease to exist. Powers that traditionally were given to local superintendents will now be handled at the regional and state levels. And, yes, high schools will be forced to merge.”3
In 2004, the legislature came back with their own plan, opting to consolidate only the very smallest of school districts (fewer than 350 students). The Court examined the work of the governor and the legislature and determined that they had walked down the path of compliance with the Court, so they closed the case. Huckabee said he had paid a price for advocating some of these positions, likening the experience to a tooth extraction without anesthesia.4 Such was the freedom Huckabee had as a term-limited governor: he could make some unpopular decisions that he felt were in the long-term best interests of the sta
te.
A second area of education reform Huckabee pushed during his years in office was to raise the performance of both the teacher and the student within Arkansas schools. In his first term, Huckabee created two programs—Smart Start (kindergarten to fourth grades) and Smart Step (fifth to eighth grades), which focused on improving students’ math and reading skills. To quantify the progress, however, would mean more rigorous testing for the students, which in turn would lead to a higher expectation put on teachers to teach more effectively (or some would argue, to teach for the test).
These ideas were at the center of state and national debates at the time, as governors and taxpayers asked, “What are we getting for all our money?” and some teachers and administrators responded, in effect, “Stay out of our classrooms.” Politicians continue to wage war for the public school classrooms, but the specific battles seem to change every few years. Some conservatives forget the origin of the “standards” movement, not remembering the battles their predecessors fought against teachers’ unions who resisted the very idea of holding teachers accountable for the performance of their students.
In 2005, Huckabee responded to critics of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program by saying, “It’s the best thing that ever happened in education because it says we’re not going to let children spend years and years and let taxpayers spend thousands and thousands of dollars only to find out when the kid graduates high school that he’s basically a functional illiterate, that we’re not going to leave him lingering back in those classrooms and that he or she will get a decent education and we will hold accountable those who are responsible for getting that child a good education.”5