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As 'Accidental Governor,' Huckabee's Legacy Mixed

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By ADAM NOSSITER and DAVID BARSTOW, The New York Times

Published: December 22, 2007

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - In more than a decade of presiding over this state, Mike Huckabee produced a legacy like few other Republican governors in the South, surprising even liberal Democrats with his willingness to upend some of Arkansas' parochial traditions.

A review of his record as governor shows that beginning in 1996 he drove through a series of changes that transformed education and health insurance in Arkansas, accomplishments that were never tried by most of his predecessors, including Bill Clinton.

He is also remembered in the state for a style of governing that tended to freeze out anyone of any party who disagreed with his plans. He did not, for example, seek Clinton's conciliatory middle or try to court skeptical state lawmakers. Though considered as persuasive a speechmaker as he had been a pastor, Huckabee largely kept his own counsel, in politics, ethics and a singular clemency policy that continues to haunt him.

Against the political advice of his party and his aides, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of hundreds of convicts, including murderers, sometimes over the heated objections of prosecutors and victims. He was cited five times by the state ethics commission for financial improprieties and unapologetically accepted tens of thousands of dollars worth of clothes and other gifts while governor.

Arkansas Republicans Bitter

Republicans in Arkansas, a beleaguered minority, gleefully greeted his ascendancy but wound up embittered, in many cases, over a governor who "sided with liberal Democrats," as one put it.

A constant throughout was his presence at the microphone, the former television preacher delivering his word from the pulpit though hardly mingling in the Capitol's marble halls.

"He would go out and stump and do his shtick and tell his jokes and charm you," said State Sen. Jimmy Jeffress, a Democrat and critic of the former governor. "He has the gift of gab. He's the only person I know, other than Bill Clinton, who can pick up a rock and give you a 10-minute talk on it."

Huckabee was derided by Democrats as the "accidental governor" when he took office in July 1996, stepping up from the lieutenant governor's job when the incumbent governor, Jim Guy Tucker, was forced to resign after a conviction in the Whitewater affair.

The novice governor found the sea legs in 1997 to help enact, with overwhelming support in the heavily Democratic Legislature, a major expansion of health insurance for children of the working poor whose families did not qualify for Medicaid. It was one of the first such expansions in the nation, coming before the federal government authorized them, and it baffled some Republicans in the Legislature.

"None of us understood what he was trying to do," said Peggy Jeffries, then a Republican state senator.

Easily elected to a full term in 1998, Huckabee was emerging as something of an unquantifiable presence in the state capital, sometimes exerting leadership, other times not, and often floating above the details and minutiae of governing.

In November 2002, the Arkansas Supreme Court presented the newly re-elected governor with the biggest challenge of his tenure, ruling that Arkansas' system of financing public schools was inequitable. The court ordered change. More money had to be found, quickly.

Huckabee immediately adopted the path of greatest resistance, to the shock of many in the Legislature: He called for the closing of dozens of wasteful, tiny school districts. Some had fewer than 150 students. It was a volatile step, one that Clinton as governor had avoided, even though reformers had agreed for decades that it was an essential one.

"We certainly didn't want to get too close to it," said Bobby Roberts, one of Clinton's legislative aides in the 1980s.

The governor's plan aroused intense opposition all over the state, particularly as he proposed whittling down the 310 school districts by well over half.

"People don't want to lose their schools," said a veteran legislator, Sen. John Paul Capps, a Democrat. "They think it just ruins the community."

Huckabee did not back down. The fight went on for over a year, and Huckabee's staunchest allies proved to be the most liberal Democrats in the Legislature.

Public Unforgiving About Clemency

Nothing was more controversial about Huckabee's governorship than his use of clemency to grant pardons and commute prison sentences. His clemency decisions produced the first big crisis of his administration, dogged him through a tough re-election campaign and provoked a series of bitter public protests, some of which were still simmering on Jan. 9, 2007, the day he left office.

In all, Huckabee cut prison sentences or granted pardons for more than 1,000 criminals, far more than either his immediate predecessors or governors in neighboring states.

This did not happen by chance.

Driven by a religious belief in redemption and questions about the state's legal system, Huckabee paid close attention to clemency petitions, former aides said. He insisted on reviewing every single application, though they came in by the hundreds most months.

By every account, Huckabee's approach to clemency was heavily influenced by his religious beliefs. As John Wesley Hall, a Little Rock defense lawyer who filed numerous clemency petitions with the Huckabee administration, put it: "He's a Baptist preacher who believes in redemption and second chances."

Some Arkansas prosecutors argue that Huckabee's clemency record reveals a dangerous gullibility about human nature, particularly when it comes to claims of religious conversion. It raises, they say, the basic question of judgment, the precise question one of Huckabee's rivals for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, has raised anew in his Iowa campaign.

Exhibit A in this critique is the case of Wayne Dumond, a rapist who had been implicated in other violent crimes, including a murder and another rape, when Huckabee took office in 1996.

Dumond said he found God in prison, and his case was championed by evangelicals and conservative opponents of Bill Clinton, who was a distant relative of one of the rape victims and who refused to grant clemency to Dumond.

As it turned out, Huckabee did not grant clemency to Dumond; the state parole board released him instead, and several former members of the board have since told reporters that they acted under pressure from Huckabee, a charge he has repeatedly denied.

In 2001 the newly freed Dumond had been charged with raping and murdering a woman in Missouri.

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