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With all due respect for Mr. Norris, I’d say he needs to listen to conservatives from Arkansas and take a good long look at Huckabee’s legacy rather than relying on Huckabee’s own version of the facts.

The “Shiites” of Arkansas, as Huckabee called state conservatives, know the real Mike Huckabee. We would all do well to heed their warnings.

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http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2008/01/09/DavidJSanders/344761.html

"In 2000, Huckabee insisted on controlling the state party’s separate Victory Committee, but the committee’s finances were so poorly handled that a Federal Election Commission investigation resulted in the largest fine ever handed down by the FEC to a state party. That same year Republican Rep. Jay Dickey lost the 4th District seat he’d held for eight years.

In 2001, when conservative Republican lawmakers opposed a higher sales taxes and fees the governor supported, he began calling them “Shiites.” Huckabee’s positions on fiscal policy became indistinguishable from Democrats’ positions. A year later, he openly campaigned against a ballot initiative to remove the sales tax on food and medicine. While he and Rockefeller won re-election in 2002, Sen. Tim Hutchinson didn’t.

In 2003, Huckabee not only begged lawmakers for new taxes to make up a budget shortfall, but he rebuffed conservatives’ (Republicans and a couple of Democrats) plan to cover the shortfall by tapping one-time money and cutting pork. In 2004, President Bush won re-election, but Huckabee campaigned for some Democrats - even some who had Republican opponents - and Republicans lost state legislative seats for the first time since 1990.

In 2005, a term-limited Huckabee frustrated conservatives when he pushed a bill to give in-state college tuition and scholarships to the children of illegal immigrants. The next year, Democrats swept Republicans in every race for statewide constitutional office and Republicans lost legislative seats for the second consecutive election cycle.

Shortly after becoming governor in 1996, one of Huckabee’s top aides predicted that his boss would do for Arkansas what Gov. Carroll Campbell did for South Carolina, meaning that Arkansas would cast aside its Democratic past and whole-heartedly embrace Republicanism by the time he left office.

Yeah ? that didn’t happen."