Alan Greenblatt, a staff writer for Governing, is a former reporter for NPR and CQ.

Mike Huckabee had a pretty good record as governor. It’s too bad he can’t run on it. Better known in recent years for saying occasionally outrageous things as a commentator, Huckabee governed Arkansas for more than a decade as a pragmatist, devoting his attention to basics such as roads, schools and health care. On those issues, though, Huckabee generally took positions too liberal to suit a Republican presidential prospect in 2016—posing a conundrum for him as he plunges this week into the 2016 presidential race.

“Mike Huckabee was the consummate conservative populist,” says Jay Barth, a political scientist at Arkansas’s Hendrix College. “He was very conservative on social issues but pretty activist when it came to the role of government in people’s lives.”


In fact, his record as governor would likely surprise many of those who have come to know him only as a political commentator in recent years.

Just days after Huckabee won election to his final term in 2002, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that the state’s funding levels for education were inadequate. Huckabee launched a campaign to consolidate school districts and did not hesitate to propose a sales tax increase, telling reporters the figure he proposed was “the starting line, not the finish line.”

“He could have demagogued the court,” says Jim Argue, a self-described liberal Democrat who ran the state Senate during part of Huckabee’s time in office. “He could have tried to make political hay out of resisting the court. Instead, he recognized the schools were in fact inferior and that the court decision represented an opportunity to take some giant steps forward.”

Compare that to Huckabee’s remarks last week after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding same-sex marriage. “I respect the courts, but the Supreme Court is only that—the supreme of the courts,” Huckabee told a group of Hispanic evangelicals. “It cannot overrule God.”

Previously, Huckabee has argued that court rulings finding a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry should be viewed as an opinion, “ not the law of the land,” and not something to which states should “ surrender.”

In recent years, as he’s transformed from elected official to talking head, Huckabee has been unafraid to take other strong stands as a commentator for Fox and his syndicated radio program— seeking to slap a “Product of Kenya” label on President Obama; noting on the day of the Sandy Hook school shootings that “we have systematically removed God from our schools” and shouldn’t be surprised they’ve become a “place of carnage”; and telling the Republican National Committee that Democrats “insult the women of America by making them believe they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in” and providing birth control “because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system.”

But such comments would be almost unrecognizable to those who knew him as Arkansas’s popular and effective leader. As governor, Huckabee eschewed culture warrior politics. He signed a ban on the abortion procedure known as partial-birth and found occasional other ways to signal and reflect his social conservative views, such as his promotion of (and participation in) strict covenant marriage. But such issues were not his main focus. Instead, he concentrated on the nuts and bolts of governing. Huckabee was among the few governors to devote all the proceeds from his state’s share of the $206 billion tobacco settlement in 1998 to health care. He also convinced voters to raise their own taxes to pay for road construction.

As governor, Huckabee supported in-state tuition rates and scholarships for students brought to the country illegally—a stance he continues to defend, even while taking a tough line against illegal immigration in general. When Arkansas was faced with some 75,000 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Huckabee took advantage of end-of-summer closings of Christian camps throughout the state to use as shelters, dispersing the influx and mitigating their impact on schools and other services. “He got the job done with a smile and a hug for those who needed help,” the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette noted.

Huckabee’s major achievement was a health program known as ARKids First, which he pushed through in 1997, his first full year in office. It extended coverage to children whose parents earned too much to qualify for Medicaid, but still couldn’t afford private insurance. The number of children without health insurance had dropped from 22 percent when ARKids First was created to 6 percent in 2012.

“That was very unpopular at the time among his base, but immensely popular with the people he was governing,” says Terry Benham, who was political director of the Arkansas GOP while Huckabee was governor. “Instead of trying to play both sides on it, he just owned it, the good and the bad.”

To pay for his various initiatives, Huckabee raised taxes—gas taxes, sales taxes, a tax on beds in nursing homes. In his presidential runs, he likes to brag about cutting taxes more than 90 times, including a significant income tax cut. While he can take credit for that—and Huckabee once mockingly established a “Tax Me More Fund” open to any residents who felt they weren’t contributing enough—the state’s total tax bill increased on his watch, as did state spending and the number of state employees.

This has led to a longstanding feud with the anti-tax Club for Growth, which denigrates Huckabee’s record as governor. The libertarian-leaning Cato Institute has also given him poor marks, once describing him as “the biggest big-government conservative.” “It kills him with the Club for Growth guys, but he was very responsible in supporting higher taxes for needed services like roads and education and health,” says Hal Bass, a political scientist at Ouachita Baptist University in central Arkansas.

Bass, among others, gives Huckabee credit for the manner in which he assumed office. Huckabee was a prominent Baptist preacher in the state when he decided to take on Democratic Senator Dale Bumpers in 1992. The campaign is best remembered for Huckabee calling Bumpers a pornographer for having supported for the National Endowment for the Arts. The veteran senator and one-time governor Bumpers had no trouble dispatching of Huckabee.

Instead, Huckabee’s political career began when the following year he won a special election for lieutenant governor. He was gearing up for another Senate run when Democratic Governor Jim Guy Tucker, snarled in the Whitewater net, was convicted of fraud. Tucker equivocated about resigning, despite his criminal conviction, but Huckabee handled the situation with “dignity and grace,” Bass says.

“When you’re elevated to the governor’s office due to scandal, there’s a sense that the public wants you to do well and end the embarrassment to the state,” Huckabee told me in 2008.

Huckabee faced a Democratic legislature throughout his tenure. It’s worth remembering that legislators in Arkansas can override a governor’s veto with simple majority votes—not the supermajorities required in many other states—yet Huckabee, never a micromanager when it came to legislation, ended up getting much of what he wanted out of the Democrats.

Maybe that’s because he and Democrats often saw eye to eye. It was Huckabee who began referring to far-right Republicans as “Shiites,” a parlance still in use in Little Rock.

“We accomplished a lot in that era,” says Argue, the former Democratic state senator. “Significant increases in teacher salaries. Substantial funding for low-income students. Over $300 million for pre-K that wasn’t even directed by the court.”

Huckabee’s belief in the role of government in shaping people’s lives got great reviews from mainstream media outlets. As he was leaving office, the Democrat-Gazette editorialized that Huckabee “has been the best governor in living memory.” Many others agreed. He had been applauded by Time in 2005 as one of America’s five “ best governors.” Governing, the magazine where I work, singled him out as a “Public Official of the Year.” (It was discomfiting for me when Huckabee, promoting himself to about a dozen reporters at dinner during a National Governors Association meeting in 2006, included my profile of him in his folder of handouts.)

The national media always stood ready to caricature a southern governor. In 2000, when Huckabee and his wife moved into a triple-wide trailer while the governor’s mansion was undergoing extensive renovation, The New York Times couldn’t resist commenting snootily, “This is, of course, a move fraught with risk for any governor, let alone for one whose state already lacks a reputation as the nation’s most urbane.”

During his first presidential run in 2008, Huckabee self-consciously set the fire-and-brimstone aside, routinely telling national reporters, “I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad at anybody.” Always a masterful salesman, he played up his genial appeal, playing bass guitar and bragging about having shed more than 100 pounds after a diabetes diagnosis. (He always claimed not to know the exact figure, since he had topped out at heavier than the 280-pound limit on the scale in the governor’s mansion.) His thin-skinned reactions to criticism—such a familiar aspect of his years in Little Rock—were no longer in evidence.

Huckabee wore out the state police plane promoting himself in preparation for that first presidential race. (It was grounded shortly after he left office as governor, having exceeded FAA mileage limitations.) But at this point he’s long since put the trappings of state office aside. Indeed, Huckabee has mostly left the state behind entirely, living in Florida during his recent pundit years and returning only occasionally to campaign for other Republicans.

Huckabee was never much of a party builder while he was governor. Other southern states all around Arkansas were turning red, but Arkansas remained mostly in Democratic hands through his tenure, and it was only in the last couple of years, as enmity toward President Barack Obama sunk in deeply, that Republicans have come to take control of every important state office and the entire congressional delegation.

Still, Huckabee is returning to Hope, the ideally-named hometown he shares with Bill Clinton, to announce his presidential run on Tuesday. He’ll likely talk about the need to defend religious liberty and to attack Islamic terrorism. What he probably won’t talk all that much about is his record of accomplishment as governor.