Tony Allen-Mills, writing for a paper based out of the UK, has this to say about Mike Huckabee:
THE knives are coming out for Mr Nice Guy. A surprising surge of support for Mike Huckabee, the former Republican governor of Arkansas who had long seemed a rank outsider in the 2008 presidential race, has turned him into a target six weeks before voting in Iowa.
“National media folk rave about what a nice guy Huckabee is,” said Quin Hillyer, a former editorial writer at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper. “If only they did a little home-work they would discover a guy with a thin skin, a nasty vindictive streak and a history of imbroglios about questionable ethics.”
Vindictive streak, eh? Doesn't sound like Mr. "Nice Guy" to me.
Huckabee has portrayed himself as a competent administrator with impeccable antiabortion credentials who nonetheless appealed to liberal voters with his education and healthcare programmes in Arkansas. Yet last week the focus was on his record of alleged ethical lapses. During his 14-year career as governor he became embroiled in 14 official investigations and was fined five times for breaches of state rules.
Most of the complaints against him concerned alleged infringements of rules on political campaign spending, notably when he failed to report that he had paid himself $14,000 to be his own media consultant in a 1992 campaign and did not disclose that he and his wife were the owners of a two-engine plane hired by his campaign for $43,000 in 1994. He was fined $1,000 by the state ethics commission.
Come on, preacher. Get the ethics together!
A little more:
The article by Max Brantley, editor of a Little Rock newspaper, claimed Huckabee had spent public money on a dog kennel, dry-cleaning, stockings for his wife and meals at a fast food restaurant. When he left office last January the governor also became embroiled in a row over a “wedding registry” set up for friends to help furnish his new home, even though he and his wife had been married for 34 years.
Huckabee’s critics have labelled him “tax-hike Mike” for his free-spending record in Arkansas.
Summary of Mike's problems:
The main obstacle for Huckabee, apart from the sleuths sniffing around his Arkansas past, is his lack of campaign funds and full-time staff to carry him into the February primaries.
He has so far raised little more than $2m, roughly what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama collect from their Democrat supporters in a weekend.
When his record gets examined fairly, we'll see Mike slip. His rise was primarily a result of Fred's sudden collapse.
Once the former "Fred-heads" consider what they'd really get with Mike as President, many will go with our man Mitt.
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