Embarrassments Dog Iowa Front-Runner Huckabee
By NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT
Staff Reporter of the Sun
December 11, 2007
Michael Huckabee once accepted $40,000 in contributions from the tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds to campaign against a national cigarette tax proposed by Hillary Clinton. But later, Mr. Huckabee ignored his sponsors and imposed his own tax on cigarettes.
During his years in the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, Mr. Huckabee granted convicted criminals 1,033 pardons and commutations of sentence — including a pardon for a reckless driving charge by the Rolling Stone Keith Richard. The number amounts to about twice as many acts of amnesty as his three predecessors combined, among them President Clinton.
While governor, Mr. Huckabee was also the subject of 16 ethics complaints that forced him to pay $1,000 in fines for failing to report outside income and payments from his campaign fund, and he was investigated for flying Arkansas state airplanes when on personal and political business.
These facts, which have been an embarrassment to Mr. Huckabee — who is now the favorite to win the GOP stakes in Iowa and who in a new national CNN poll yesterday pulled alongside the Republican front-runner, Mayor Giuliani — are the latest to emerge as the former Arkansas governor’s rivals crawl through the minutiae of Mr. Huckabee’s past in the hopes of turning up damaging stories to stop him in his tracks.
More if you have the stomach for it.
9:32 am on December 12, 2007
