Mike Huckabee.(REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE)(Biography)

"The fact that I'm being attacked is a good sign. I'm a hunter. You don't ever point your gun at a dead carcass. A lot of folks are pointing at me."--M. Huckabee.

Michael Dale "Mike" Huckabee's candidacy and message are largely aimed to appeal to the religious right. "My faith is my life--it defines me. My faith doesn't influence my decisions, it drives them," asserts Huckabee, who was a Southern Baptist minister prior to his career in politics. When elected, he became only the third Republican governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction, having served from 1996 to 2007.

Huckabee advocates a constitutional amendment to protect the fight to life. Further, he adds, "I'll veto any pro-abortion legislation [Democrats] pass. I will staff all relevant positions with pro-life appointees." Curiously, though he is adamant about life beginning at conception, he favors continuing embryonic stem-cell research, even though stem cells are available from sources other than embryos.

Congruent with his appeal to the religious right, Huckabee supports the right of parents to home-school their children and disparages federal involvement in schools, saying, "While there is value in the 'No Child Left Behind' law's effort to set high national standards, states must be allowed to develop their own benchmarks." But he never claims that his presidential administration would stay out of schools. In fact, he implies the opposite: "We need to test teachers as well as students, replace teachers who aren't competent, and impose reasonable waiting periods for teachers to gain tenure."

Likewise in regard to healthcare, he also rejects government's heavy hand. But the only specific solutions he mentions to fix healthcare involve more government tampering, not less. He would expand "health savings accounts to everyone, not just those with high deductibles; and [make] health insurance tax deductible for individuals and families as it now is for businesses."

Though Huckabee is positioning himself as a principled conservative, implying fiscal responsibility, author Don Feder wrote in a November 2 article that as governor, Huckabee "raised the state's sales tax by 37%, the gas tax by 16% and the cigarette tax by 103% (all fall particularly hard on the poor). State spending went up a staggering 65.3%--three times the inflation rate. The state's workforce grew 20% and Arkansas' general obligation debt increased $1 billion." In his defense, Huckabee did cut state capital and some of his tax increases were unavoidable ...