Who's paying for ads attacking Mike Huckabee?

The not-so-mysterious case of the coy candidate: Who's paying for those ads attacking Mike Huckabee? Everybody in Arkansas seems to know -- except Huckabee.

by Michael Scherer: As political whodunits go, it was a remarkably easy case to crack. In late August, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee went on Fox News Sunday to ask a nation of amateur sleuths for help. A conservative low-tax group, the Club for Growth, had just spent $85,000 on a television attack ad in Iowa, accusing the former Arkansas governor of "raising taxes like there was no tomorrow" . . . . Huckabee, who claims to be a fiscal conservative in the tradition of Ronald Reagan, said he just didn't know who was behind the attacks. . . .

The Huckabee challenge -- solve the Case of the Huck Attack -- sounded at first like a real grade-A mystery. But under the surface, something was afoot. . . . In the case of Huckabee, the national television challenge amounted to little more than a red herring to throw voters off the scent. The real culprit of the attack ads lay . . . in the backwater squabbles of Arkansas Republican politics. In fact, . . . the political chattering class in Arkansas was already well aware of the probable culprit behind the Club for Growth's decision to run costly advertisements against Huckabee. . . . The ads had been paid for by a spin-off group called Club for Growth.net, which files regular disclosures through the Internal Revenue Service. A quick review of those filings showed . . . a Little Rock neighbor and political rival of Huckabee's named Jackson T. "Steve" Stephens Jr. had given the group $125,000, including a $50,000 check just days before the 2006 election when it was too late to spend more on that election. A member of one of Arkansas' richest families, Stephens also serves as chairman of Club for Growth.net, along with his Arkansas business associate, Gary Faulkner. . . . The battle between Huckabee and Stephens dates back a decade and focuses mostly on their disagreements over the best fiscal policy for the state and the local Republican Party. Huckabee governed as a fiscal moderate; while he cut taxes, he also raised taxes . . . Stephens never made any secret of his displeasure at Huckabee's actions. In 2002, Huckabee decided to oppose a voter initiative to eliminate the state sales tax on groceries and medicine, an effort that Stephens was helping to fund.

. . . In fact, the Case of the Huck Attack was so easy to solve that it presented a second mystery -- the Case of the Coy Candidate. Why was Huckabee going on national television claiming not to know what everyone else knew about his old political foe in Arkansas? And what business did he have impugning the reputations of his rival candidates by suggesting that they were surreptitiously, if not illegally, using a third party to smear him?

In a conference call with reporters . . . Huckabee again repeated his claim that he did not know who was behind the campaign, an information deficit that would make him unique in Arkansas political circles. "I hope he is not involved in the Club for Growth stuff," Huckabee said about Stephens. "I would be disappointed and I would be wondering why." . . . Huckabee boasted of pushing through a state education reform initiative that Stephens supported and enacting other reforms from an advisory panel on which Stephens served. He also mentioned that both Stephens' brother and cousin were supporters of the Huckabee for President campaign. "He ought to love me," Huckabee said. The betting money believes Huckabee knows full well that he is searching for love in all the wrong places. But given the choice of responding to an attack ad and demonizing its backers on national television, Huckabee made the politically prudent choice. He would rather make a mystery out of the obvious. Rather than get bogged down in a discussion of his mixed record as a fiscal conservative in Arkansas, . . . [Full Article]

---

Tags: Arkansas, Club for Growth, Election 2008, Mike Huckabee, Politics, presidential candidate, Republican