Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

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Mike Huckabee is supposed to be the Republican with a heart. He’s the guy who said Mexicans are people too during the 2008 race for the White House. He’s the weight-loss humanist who refused to join that anti-common-sense fringe of his party bashing Michelle Obama for suggesting that children eat more vegetables.

But beneath the veneer of Aw-Shucks-Huck is a public figure, and possible presidential candidate, who has shown a pattern of telling outright falsehoods about himself and the president.

This week, he backstepped from an extraordinary interview in which he had claimed, several times, that President Obama grew up in Kenya. But before that, Huckabee had created a shell of mistruths about a felon he helped to free early when he was governor of Arkansas. This man went on to murder four police officers in cold blood in my home state of Washington.



Here’s what Huckabee said about Obama, from a conversation that is part of the innuendo-laden talk-radio gas that lies across the land like methane from a landfill:

And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, is very different than the average American.

Mike Huckabee has shown a pattern of telling outright falsehoods about himself and the president.

Of course, “what he does know” is completely wrong. Obama grew up in Hawaii, spent some years in Indonesia, and then went to college in California. He visited Kenya, the home of a father he never knew, in his 20s. Mostly, he was raised by his white grandparents in Hawaii.

Facing a storm of criticism, Huckabee turned churlish. He said he had simply “mispoken” while promoting his latest book of tired homilies. He meant to say Indonesia, not Kenya.

That doesn’t wash, given that Huckabee in the same radio interview spun a similar and more elaborate fantasy of how Obama’s world view was shaped by the “Mau-Mau” movement in Kenya. If Huckabee meant to say Indonesia, he would have made up something about Obama hating the colonial Dutch and having a thing against nutmeg.

This colonial construct sounds like something Huckabee picked up from one of the nutty books they promote on Fox.

This is troubling enough for a man who may one day be asked to make momentous decisions based on facts. It also shows that Huckabee will stir the same poison pot about Obama to please a Republican primary base in which half the voters think the president is not an American citizen.

But an even bigger fiction is the one Huckabee tells about the violent felon Maurice Clemmons. Here was Huckabee last month, at an informal gathering of reporters in Washington, after being asked about having granted Clemmons’s plea for early release:

“There was a kid who was 16 years old, he committed a burglary, he was aggravated, but not armed. And for that he got 108 years,” Huckabee said. “One-hundred-and-eight years.”

Sounds awful. Only in Arkansas would they put a black teenager away for 108 years for a single burglary. Except it’s not true, as a routine check of the record, or a look at the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories about Clemmons in The Seattle Times would show.

Clemmons was facing eight felony charges at the peak of a crime spree, not one. He was 17. During a reign of terror, he broke into the home of a cop, stole guns, assaulted and robbed a woman, and broke into the home of state trooper.

In prison, he committed a half-dozen assaults, harassed guards and had sex with inmates as part of a pattern of preying on fellow convicts.

Despite his bad behavior, he would have been eligible for parole after serving 18 years, not 108, The Seattle Times reported. But he got out early, serving 11 years, because Huckabee fell for the oldest con ruse in the book.

While saying he was under “the watchful eyes of the Lord,” Clemmons assaulted two inmates. “God bless you,” Clemmons wrote Huckabee, a Baptist minister, in his plea for mercy. “It is so prayed!”

In that same plea, he claimed to be a model prisoner. In fact, he’d been disciplined 29 times. Had Huckabee checked with prosecutors, prison guards or victims, he would have found grave concerns about letting Clemmons loose on the community. The prison system risk assessment categorized him as “most likely to return to violence.”

And he did, sadly, in late 2009, murdering four officers who sat drinking their morning coffee. Clemmons was later killed during a massive manhunt.

During more than 10 years as governor, Huckabee granted twice as many requests for clemency as his predecessors had over 17 years. Some of the most hardened convicts played the religion card, and went on to further violence.

The pattern here raises two major concerns. He constructs alternative views: a convict is saved by Jesus, instead of using Jesus to get out of jail, or, Obama is a bad president because he’s not really an American.

In one of his lame attempts to explain the Obama comments, Huckabee only added to the character assassination. He said, “Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings, and you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.” In other words, Obama may not be Kenyan, but he’s probably Muslim! (Note to Huckabee: Hawaii has both Boy Scouts and Rotary Clubs.)

The second question is about judgment, always the most crucial thing to consider in a person who wants to be president. If Huckabee can’t see past a crude convict ploy to his heart, how can he judge the North Koreans?

Huckabee makes a very good living from his employer at Fox News, and from more than a half-dozen books about values. One of the books is called “Character Makes a Difference,” and another “Do the Right Thing.”

Preacher: follow your own advice.