Everyone who remembers the 1980 presidential race — when supporters of Pres. Jimmy Carter cheered after an elderly, out-of-touch, warmongering former B-movie actor won the Republican nomination — knows that the old adage “be careful what you wish for” applies one hundred-fold in politics.

A likely predictor of the arc of the Huckabee campaign over the next few months is the 1988 campaign of TV preacher Pat Robertson.

While tempting the gods of irony can invite ugly surprises, no matter how hard Democrats might pray for heaven to confer the 2008 GOP nomination on Mike Huckabee, it ain’t gonna happen.

Still, polls indicate that Huckabee could well win the Iowa caucuses, in part because he is the flavor of the month among the God squad and because as many as 40 percent of Iowa Republicans are evangelicals. Whatever happens at the caucuses, however, Huckabee will stall in New Hampshire, where Southerners are not very popular.

This loss will empower the winner in New Hampshire — quite likely Mitt Romney, who was the governor of an adjacent state — while simultaneously hobbling Huckabee in South Carolina and beyond. In the Feb. 5 “super-duper” primaries, Giuliani will likely clean up in big “blue” states like New York and California, after which, if the nationwide polling holds, the Giuliani juggernaut will likely sweep aside Huckabee and the other also-rans.

In fact, a likely predictor of the arc of the Huckabee campaign over the next few months is the 1988 campaign of TV preacher Pat Robertson. Huckabee and Robertson have much in common. Both are Southern ordained ministers and both have long careers in both evangelical business circles and conservative politics. And Robertson surprised the pundits in 1988 by coming in second in Iowa, behind then-Sen. Bob Dole and ahead of then-Vice Pres. George H.W. Bush. But Robertson came in last in New Hampshire behind Bush, Dole and former Rep. Jack Kemp, after which his campaign faded.

There are differences between Huckabee and Robertson, too, of course. Robertson’s political views are a mix of libertarianism and theocratic fascism, whereas Huckabee’s theocratic fascism is tinged with old-time Southern populism. And, unlike Robertson, Huckabee does not operate a television network nor does he sit upon vast financial resources, including diamond mines in Africa. On the other hand, while Robertson’s core persona — a holier-than-thou jerk — shines through even when he’s straining to be at his most beneficent, Huckabee masks his finger-waggling behind a pleasant-seeming folksy manner, which can snooker some of the people some of the time, as we have seen among the Northeastern media elites lately.

Now however, these same elites are finding that Huckabee’s smooth oratory and down-home bromides can’t drown out the loud rattling of the skeletons trying to bust out of his political closet.

In the right hands — say, for example, the Clinton campaign — if Huckabee’s skeletal record in Arkansas is presented aggressively, members of key voting blocks, especially fiscal conservatives and moderate independent swing voters, will find something not to like:

Freeing rapist Wayne Dumond, who murdered two women upon his release

Much has been said about this, but the great Arkansas-based journalist Gene Lyons says it best:

DuMond was a cunning con-man, a predatory psychopath adept at playing victim. A naïve and inexperienced Huckabee went for it, hook, line and sinker … In springing DuMond, the Arkansas Republican courted praise from the Clinton-hating right-wing press, whose responsibility for the murder the ex-con committed after his release shouldn’t be overlooked.

Here’s the backstory: in 1985, DuMond, a handyman with a long rap sheet, kidnapped 17-year-old … cheerleader Ashley Stevens and raped her at knifepoint… Stevens not only reported the crime, she later recognized the newly cleanshaven perp on the street, and agreed to testify.

While free on bond, DuMond was found castrated on the floor of their remote mobile home by his children, an empty bottle of Jack Daniels nearby and his own bloody footprints everywhere. DuMond’s blood alcohol level was 2. 8, falling-down drunk. His wife asked police if he’d mutilated himself…

Two things made the case notorious. In a touch of Arkansas gothic, the St. Francis County Sheriff (who’d played no role in the rape investigation) exhibited DuMond’s testicles in a jar. Second, although her identity wasn’t initially disclosed, young Stevens was a distant cousin of then-Gov. Bill Clinton.

After Clinton became president, Du-Mond portrayed himself as an innocent victim of the satanic “Clinton machine.” Soft-headed conspiracy theorists who circulated “Clinton death lists” found the notion irresistible…

DuMond became a right-wing cause célèbre… [As soon as Huckabee became governor, he] began talking about commuting the presumptively innocent DuMond’s sentence. He clearly expected to be congratulated. Instead, Prosecutor Fletcher Long erupted. How could the governor even think of doing that without reading the trial transcript?

Abandoning her anonymity, Ashley Stevens invaded Huckabee’s personal space: “This is how close I was to Wayne DuMond,” she said. “I will never forget his face. And now I don’t want you ever to forget my face.” Professed victims wrote agonized letters begging Huckabee to desist…

Instead of backing off, Huckabee got tricky. He held an improper closed-door meeting with the parole board, several of whom say they’d felt pressured. Last week, Huckabee’s then-chief counsel, Olan “Butch” Reeves, basically seconded their claims. After the board voted to parole DuMond to Missouri, Huckabee wrote a “Dear Wayne” letter stressing “my desire… that you be released from prison” — the proverbial smoking gun he can’t now rationalize or whine away.

Angry Missouri cops say DuMond’s victim’s severed bra straps were like a calling card. They found his DNA under her fingernails. Huckabee’s latest book claims that DuMond died in prison before coming to trial. In fact, he was convicted of murdering Carol Sue Shields on Nov. 12, 2003, and at the time of his death was a leading suspect in the murder of a second Missouri woman. You’d think Huckabee might have noticed.

His record as a big goverment, tax-and-spend Republican

The Club for Growth, a standard bearer for the Republican Party’s once-vaunted opposition to taxation and government spending, does not heart Huckabee:

While the former governor will argue that he had no choice and was bound by state law to balance the budget, the 2003 clip is emblematic of Huckabee’s ten-year tenure in which raising taxes was his first resort. Many cities and states have balanced budget laws like Arkansas, but not all governors and mayors embrace higher taxes the way Mike Huckabee did. Some actually cut government spending and waste in order to make ends meet. But under Mike Huckabee’s tenure, the average Arkansas tax burden increased 47 percent. Mike Huckabee’s support for tax hikes include:

- 1996 Sales Tax Hike: Huckabee campaigned for an amendment to raise the sales tax
- 1999 Gas and Diesel Fuel Tax Hike
- 2001 Cigarette Tax Hike
- 2001 Nursing Home Bed Tax
- 2002 Grocery Tax: Huckabee opposed repeal
- 2003 Income Surcharge Tax
- 2003 Tobacco Tax Hike
- Taxes on Internet Access
- 2006 Beer Tax: Huckabee opposed letting the tax expire

“Mike Huckabee is telling folks that he cut taxes 94 times, but the truth is, Huckabee’s tax increases far surpassed his tax cuts, and taxpayers deserve to know the truth,” said Club for Growth.Net President Pat Toomey. “The purpose of this ad is to educate taxpayers so they can ask Mike Huckabee why he supported all those tax increases.”

This record dampens his appeal among mainstream Republicans because, if elected, his administration would exacerbate the damage done to the GOP’s purported fiscal conservatism done in the previous eight years by the borrow-billions-and-spend policies of George Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress.

Questionable ethics and a penchant for living high on the public dime

Here’s Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times:

In his successful 1994 run for lieutenant governor, [Huckabee] set up a nonprofit curtain known as Action America so he could give speeches for money without having to disclose the names of his benefactors. He failed to report that campaign travel payments were for the use of his own personal plane.

After he became governor in 1996, he raked in tens of thousands of dollars in gifts, including gifts from people he later appointed to prestigious state commissions.

In the governor’s office, his grasp never exceeded his reach. Furniture he’d received to doll up his office was carted out with him when he left, after he’d crushed computer hard drives so nobody could ever get a peek behind the curtain of the Huckabee administration.

Until my paper, the Arkansas Times, blew the whistle, he converted a governor’s mansion operating account into a personal expense account, claiming public money for a doghouse, dry-cleaning bills, panty hose and meals at Taco Bell. He tried to claim $70,000 in furnishings provided by a wealthy cotton grower for the private part of the residence as his own, until he learned ethics rules prevented it. When a disgruntled former employee disclosed memos revealing all this, the Huckabee camp shut her up by repeatedly suggesting she might be vulnerable to prosecution for theft because she’d shared documents generated by the state’s highest official.

He ran the State Police airplane into the ground, many of the miles in pursuit of political ends. Inauguration funds were used to buy clothing for his wife. He once took control of the state Republican Party’s campaign account — then swore the account had been somebody else’s responsibility when it ran afoul of federal election laws. He repeated the pattern when he claimed in a newspaper story that his staff controlled the account to stage his second inauguration.

When I filed a formal ethics complaint over what appeared to be an improper appropriation of donated money, he told a different story, disavowing responsibility for the money. He thus avoided another punishment from an Ethics Commission, which had sanctioned him on five other occasions. He dodged nine other complaints (though none, despite his counter-complaints, was held to be frivolous).

In one case, he was saved by the swing vote of a woman who left the chairmanship of the Ethics Commission days later to take a state job. She listed the governor as a reference on the job application. Finally, unbelievably, Huckabee once sued to overturn the ban on gifts to him.

Huckabee hearts hating homos

His anti-gay rhetoric and (I guess) beliefs will help him among Christian nationalist voters in the primaries but in light of recent revelations that supposed red-blooded Republican homophobes like Sen. Larry Craig, Rev. Ted Haggard and others were, in fact, secretly gay, there’s circumstantial evidence that normal people — particularly independent swing voters — are growing weary of the Republicans’ politics of hate.

Huckabee is the only candidate to smear a gay person, Rep. Barney Frank, a 14-term member of Congress, in his stump speech. In 1992, in a published questionnaire, he said HIV-infected people should be rounded up and isolated. He recently denied making that assertion,even though it came from his own published statements.

As one commenter at the ultra-rightwing radical fringe website, Free Republic, put it: “Sorry, but Huckabee was just wrong. By 1992 everyone knew AIDS was transmitted via drug use and sex, mostly gay sex. What he said was ridiculous, backwards and way out of line. If he is the nominee, we are doomed.” (Emphasis is mine.)

Now Huckabee says he would support AIDS research and would fund more study as president, which brings us to…

He’s an egregious flip-flopper

Besides AIDS research and treatment, Huckabee has flip-flopped on states’ rights on abortions, immigration, Cuba and arts and music funding in the schools.

Flip-flopping is a mortal sin when Democrats like John Kerry do it but when Republicans like George Bush, Rudolph Giuliani and, especially, Mitt Romney do it, the “liberal” media gives them a pass. Still, media types probably won’t like Huckabee’s rationale for his changes of heart:

“Rather than seeing it as some huge change, I would call it, rather, the simple reality that I’m running for president of the United States, not for reelection as governor of Arkansas,” he said. “I’ve got to look at this as an issue that touches the whole country.”

In other words, he’s pandering to voters.

He has a fascistic urge to crush dissent

Huckabee has the typical crypto-fascist’s uncontrollable urge to stifle dissent:

Even editorialists and columnists at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the state’s dominant (and Republican-friendly) daily paper, use words like “petty” and “thin-skinned” to describe Huckabee. Then again, he’s compared hard-hitting (and accurate) news reporters for the Democrat-Gazette to the press fabulists Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke. He called liberal columnist John Brummett of Stephens Media “constipated” when that early admirer commenced some gentle criticism. His administration paid $15,000 to settle a suit filed by Roby Brock, the host of a public TV news show whom Huckabee’s people tried to force off the air for his critical commentary.

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All of the above “opposition research” is freely available on the Intertubes, and we can hope — but not assume — that the Democratic nominee would use all of it to undercut the Huckabee post-primary presidential campaign, should such a thing come to pass.

But if these few items won’t do, there is apparently more where this came from:

The world [in Arkansas] is full of disaffected Huckabee campaign workers, former employees and garden-variety Republicans who love to pass on tips about a governor they’d found self-centered and untrustworthy. If you think he left a well of warm feelings in Arkansas, note that Hillary Clinton had raised more money in Arkansas at last report and that a recent University of Arkansas Poll showed her a 35 to 8 percent leader over Huckabee in the presidential preferences of Arkansas residents. Only one-third of 33 Republican legislators have said they will support him for president.

So, go ahead and pray, Democrats. Jesus is probably just as tired of these so-called Christians as the rest of us.