Before going down to Atlanta to join Jimmy Who’s press staff in the summer of 1976, I set out to learn as much as I could about Carter’s term as governor of Georgia. I was sure to be bombarded with questions about it, since the closest thing to the president’s job is a governor’s.

Nothing would have been more predictive of Carter’s eventual performance in the White House, and yet I was never asked a single question about his four years as governor. If you wanted to know about lust in his heart, though, I was there for you.

I’d like to report that things have improved since then, but unfortunately the childishness of the press, being structural in nature, is incurable. Consider the fuss over former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee currently being made by reporters astonished to find among the GOP candidates what appeared to be a human being. There has been nothing to match it since Maureen Dowd went all schoolgirl in the 1999 campaign over the charms of that aging scamp, George W. Bush.

Now consider this from Max Brantley, editor of an alternative weekly in Arkansas:

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 …

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 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.

Posted by Jerome Doolittle at November 30, 2007 06:25 PM

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