This is fairly interesting. Via advertiser AltWeeklies, the Arkansas Times has an article on Mike Huckabee. It's a dirty laundry piece, but some of it seems well able to stick, particularly the Dumond story, which strikes as Willie Horton but with an element of Clinton paranoia:
Another issue sure to come up if Huckabee contends for national office is his involvement in the 1999 parole of rapist Wayne Dumond, who went on to murder a woman in Missouri. A 2002 cover story in the Arkansas Times detailed Huckabee's personal intervention in the Post Prison Transfer Board's deliberations about Dumond's release. Huckabee supported Dumond after being influenced by conservative activists who said Dumond got a raw deal because his victim was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton.
I always knew they'd pin a killing on Clinton, I just didn't know the causal factor would be that their hatred for him had become so great they'd begun pardoning rapists whose victims were connected to the family.
Huckabee's wife, incidentally, seems a sort of Hillary Clinton figure, wholly uncontent to wait on the sidelines, and in fact quite comfortable parlaying her husband's celebrity into a campaign for office:
His wife, Janet, has had her ups and downs, but the one public referendum on her wasn't encouraging. She suffered a 62-38 percent defeat in the 2002 election for secretary of state. She is a force of personality in her own right, a genuine outdoorswoman comfortable in camouflage and the duck blind — think of her as the red-state version of Hillary Rodham Clinton or Teresa Heinz Kerry.
Also on the bright side, Huckabee has expanded health coverage for low income kids, raised taxes, and generally proved himself a fiscal pragmatist, though nevertheless a social conservative. I'm not really sure where his constituency would come from in a presidential race, but you never know. In any case, the article's good -- if you're interested in the guy, give it a read.
