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Advice for Mike Huckabee: Stop lying
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Candidate
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| Contributor | DFWDem |
| Last Edited | DFWDem Jan 30, 2007 03:24pm |
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| Category | Editorial |
| Media | Newspaper - Arkansas Times |
| News Date | Tuesday, January 30, 2007 09:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Mike Huckabee made a fine little splash Sunday when he announced on Meet the Press that he was running for president, demonstrating again that if the measurement is glibness he belongs in the top tier of Republican candidates.
Smooth talk, however, is overrated as a political gift. If fair words and a graceful tongue were the yardstick, Alan Keyes (remember him?) or anyone but George W. Bush would have been president the past six years.
It is itself not overly prized in politics, but there is one quality that a fresh and unknown candidate evades at considerable peril: truthfulness. The former governor has always had a problem with it when he seeks to embellish his record or clean up his mistakes. Elegant phrases will go only so far in papering over untruths.
The weakness was in full panoply in Huckabee’s short interview with Tim Russert, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. Russert, who is not ordinarily a nervy interviewer, nailed Huckabee only once on a bit of flimflam, — his role in the parole of rapist and murderer Wayne Dumond — and Huckabee may be lucky enough to avoid much contention over his exaggerations and diminutions of his Arkansas record. But his dissembling will catch up with him before the campaign moves far along.
How much better he would be if he stuck laboriously to the truth and owned up to the errors that befall every officeholder. People are supposed to admire straight talk. Huckabee’s 10-year record as governor is not as spectacular as he makes it out to be, but the truth would adequately support his essential claim in the Republican race, that he is nearly as socially conservative as the most hidebound of his opponents but he has a heart that makes him want to use the government to improve the fortunes of society’s vulnerable, children, the elderly, the disabled and immigrants. |
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