The biggest tax increase during Huckabee’s tenure was the sales-tax increase, which went to education, and it began not with Huckabee but with the Arkansas supreme court. In 2002, the court ruled that the state’s system of funding its schools was unconstitutional and ordered the state government to come up with ways to spend more money on education and distribute it more equitably among the state’s school districts.

Huckabee had to do something. And with a heavily Democratic legislature, it was a sure bet that more money was going to be raised and spent on schools. So along with a tax increase, Huckabee attempted to fix Arkansas’ amazingly chaotic school-district system. The state has 75 counties, and at the time it had 310 school districts, each a separate fiefdom with its own budget and bosses. Some school districts had as few as 100 students in K–12. Huckabee wanted to consolidate districts so that each would have a minimum of 1,500 students. He lost that fight, with the legislature choosing to make the minimum size 350 students. Still, that meant the consolidation of the smallest districts, with significant savings for the state. Even so, when the bill got to Huckabee’s desk, he declined to sign it, knowing that it would become law anyway. “I thought that we were not pushing for the level of efficiency that we should have,” he says.

So what does his record add up to? Well, the charges have not, as Huckabee claims, been pretty much debunked. Some of them are true. But Huckabee also cut taxes on several occasions, and he argues that, in contrast to the senators who want to be president, he was the man in charge who had to make hard decisions. “Unlike the federal government, governors don’t get to print money,” Huckabee tells me. Besides that, a number of his actions were undeniably popular with most Arkansans, with Huckabee working to meet the state’s needs while hewing to conservative principles.

As for the Club for Growth critique — Huckabee has taken to calling it the “Club for Greed” — it’s not the only authority on the subject. Huckabee has signed the pledge circulated by Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, promising to fight future tax increases. That has satisfied Norquist. “He has a troublesome history in supporting tax increases as governor, as did Ronald Reagan,” Norquist tells me. “But in running for president, he has made a written commitment that he would oppose tax increases.” Unless Huckabee breaks his word, he’ll be okay with Americans for Tax Reform.

Finally, Huckabee’s tax bona fides might be helped by his enthusiastic embrace of the Fair Tax, which would eliminate all federal income taxes in favor of a tax on consumption. The movement is strong in some early-primary states and undoubtedly helped Huckabee in the Iowa straw poll. It’s a pretty idealistic position; even if the Fair Tax had a chance of becoming reality — a remote possibility — Norquist and others believe it would be far, far in the future, with many steps in between. Still, Norquist tells me, “There’s nothing wrong with that as a goal.” In the end, whatever the Club for Growth says, Huckabee probably won’t suffer much harm from his record on taxes.

‘DEAR WAYNE’
So much for the standard issues of presidential campaigns. The wild card in Huckabee’s record is his position on executive clemency, a power he exercised fairly liberally as governor of Arkansas. In the bus, I ask him about what is perhaps the single most controversial — and unquestionably the most bizarre — episode of his time in the governor’s office.

It concerned a man named Wayne Dumond. In September 1984, Dumond kidnapped and raped a 17-year-old high-school cheerleader in the small eastern-Arkansas town of Forrest City. Dumond was allowed to remain free while awaiting trial, and in March 1985 two masked men entered his house, tied him up with fishing line, and castrated him. People were stunned; the case, already notorious, became much more so. And that was before the local sheriff, a rather colorful man named Coolidge Conlee, displayed Dumond’s severed testicles in a jar of formaldehyde on his desk in the St. Francis County building. Amid tons of publicity, Dumond was found guilty and sentenced to life plus 20 years.

The case took on a political coloring when it became known that the victim was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton. After conviction, Dumond, who claimed he was innocent, asked Clinton for clemency. Clinton declined.

Dumond also argued that even if he were guilty his sentence was excessive, and his position won him some sympathy, not least on the grounds that he had suffered terribly at the hands of those unknown assailants. In April 1992, when Dumond had served just seven years, Lt. Gov. Tucker, acting as governor while Clinton was out of state campaigning for president, commuted Dumond’s sentence to a level where he would be eligible for parole. That didn’t mean Dumond would go free, only that the state parole board would consider the question. The board declined to free Dumond.

That’s where things stood when Huckabee took office on July 15, 1996. Huckabee tells me he had his doubts about Dumond’s guilt, and also felt sorry for him over the castration attack. On September 20, just weeks after taking office, Huckabee announced that he intended to set Dumond free, saying that there were “serious questions as to the legitimacy of his guilt.” On October 31, Huckabee met with the parole board. Not long after, the board voted to free Dumond, but on the condition he move to another state. Huckabee was pleased, in part because — given that the board had voted to free Dumond — there was no need for Huckabee to commute the sentence or pardon him. So Huckabee denied Dumond’s now-irrelevant pardon application while at the same time congratulating him on his freedom. “Dear Wayne,” Huckabee wrote in a letter to Dumond. “My desire is that you be released from prison. I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction to society to take place.”

But no state would take Dumond. He remained behind bars for two and a half more years, until the board voted to free him in Arkansas. He was released in October 1999 and returned home. The next year, Dumond left the state, moving to a small town near Kansas City, Mo. Within weeks of arriving, he sexually assaulted and murdered a 39-year-old woman at an apartment complex near his home. The day that happened, everyone knew that freeing Wayne Dumond had been a very, very bad idea.

A political storm erupted. Huckabee sought cover by saying that all he had done was to deny Dumond’s pardon application. But some Democrats claimed that Huckabee had pressured the parole board to free Dumond. What actually happened between Huckabee and the board remains unclear to this day, but there is no doubt that Huckabee wanted Wayne Dumond set free. And today, he knows he was terribly wrong.

But he’s still defensive. “My only official action was to deny his clemency,” Huckabee tells me in Iowa. He spreads the blame around, not only to Tucker, who originally commuted Dumond’s sentence, but to Bill Clinton as well. “Tucker could not have done that without Clinton’s full knowledge and approval,” Huckabee says.

I ask about the “Dear Wayne” letter. Didn’t Huckabee want Dumond to go free? “I thought he would, you know, be clean,” Huckabee tells me. “And he had a job, he had sponsors lined up, so at the time, I did not have this apprehension that something horrible like that would happen. I did want him to report in [to parole authorities], because I just didn’t know — you never know about a guy like that.”

As he talks, Huckabee looks down. “I hate it like crazy,” he says. “It’s one of the most horrible things ever that he went off and did what he did. It’s just terrible. There’s nothing you can say, but my gosh, it’s the thing you pray never happens. And it did.”

The Dumond case followed Huckabee around for the rest of his time in the governor’s office. In his 2002 reelection bid, his Democratic opponent based virtually her entire campaign on the issue. And Huckabee’s actions toward Dumond raise larger questions about his views on crime and punishment. Critics, and some friends, too, say Huckabee’s position was deeply influenced by his Christian faith. “When I first met him, I was going through his positions on issues and I said, ‘You’re a conservative, so I’m sure you oppose granting parole for violent felons,’” says Dick Morris, the campaign consultant who ran Huckabee’s first run for lieutenant governor. “And he said, ‘Oh no, I would never take that position, because the concept of Christian duty requires that there is a possibility of forgiveness. The concept of Christian forgiveness requires that we keep open the process of parole — use it sparingly, but keep it open.’”

When I ask Huckabee about that, he reminds me that he was tough on a lot of criminals, too. “Heck, I executed more people than any governor in the history of the state,” Huckabee tells me. “It’s not something I’m bragging about, I’m just saying that if it had been simply a matter of my Christian conscience saying I don’t believe in capital punishment, then I was pretty lousy in my conscience.” Watching him speak, it’s clear Huckabee feels deeply about the issue. If he continues to rise in the polls, it’s likely he’ll be talking about it a lot more.

LOAVES AND FISHES
The preacher in Huckabee comes out from time to time. After his good showing in the straw poll, he hurries from his bus to meet reporters and exult with supporters. “This was five loaves and two fishes, and it fed the multitude,” he tells them, stressing the big results he got from a very small investment of money. “This is David and Goliath, putting that little smooth stone in a sling.”

People see Huckabee on the stump, or in debates, and they like him. He’s sharp and funny and knows his stuff. But there’s more to him than the guy who makes the best joke onstage. He has spent years in a governor’s office, making all sorts of decisions he’ll have to defend should he become a first-tier candidate. If given the chance, he’ll probably be able to do so, and do it well. But his lack of standing on war and terrorism could hurt him badly with Republican primary audiences.

On the other hand, it likely wouldn’t be a problem in a general election, especially considering Huckabee’s strengths in education and health care. “The Democrats won’t be able to use that against me,” Huckabee tells me. “They won’t say, ‘There’s no way an Arkansas governor can be president — he doesn’t have any foreign-policy experience.’ That one’s off the table.”

So it is. But first Huckabee has to win the Republican nomination. And despite his early success, it’s not at all clear whether GOP voters, still deeply concerned with national security, will want to choose their own Man from Hope.

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