WASHINGTON — Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee released what he called an “announcement video” Friday, describing his plans for America as he prepares to reveal his 2016 campaign decision.
Huckabee doesn’t specifically say he is running for president in the video, which will be used to introduce him Tuesday in his hometown of Hope when he declares whether he’s a candidate.
Nor does Huckabee personally mention the Clintons. But the video features pictures of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton holding hands and a shot of Huckabee speaking as the former president looks on.
Former Huckabee campaign manager and spokesman Rex Nelson tells viewers that Huckabee was able to win election “in Bill Clinton’s Arkansas. You had all the apparatus of the Democratic Party aligned against Mike Huckabee. And all of a sudden this Republican comes out of nowhere and wins.”
The video flashes a headline from the Wall Street Journal noting Huckabee’s success in “Bill’s Backyard.”
Huckabee says in the video that he balanced Arkansas’ budget, cut taxes and raised family incomes, despite political opposition from what the video calls “the most Democrat Legislature in America.”
The video is titled Nailed Shut and begins with a man pounding nails into a door frame.
“On his first day in office, Gov. Huckabee’s door was nailed shut,” Nelson said.
One of the doors in his three-room office had been “nailed shut” on the day Huckabee became lieutenant governor in 1993. The secretary of state, a Democrat, had assigned that room to the state’s Martin Luther King Jr. Commission. Eventually, Huckabee was allowed to use the room.
Showing images of the Clintons and talking about Democrats’ control of the Arkansas Legislature sends the message that Huckabee can get things done, said Andrew Dowdle, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville associate professor of political science.
“Huckabee makes an argument that he came in at a time where there was a Democratic super majority, where there was hostility toward him and he was able to still do a lot,” Dowdle said. “He’s able to end up running in a way that other candidates can’t against the Clinton legacy, which is obviously not a very positive thing in terms of the memory of most Republicans’ minds.”
The two-minute, 16-second video was made by Huckabee’s 2008 strategist, media consultant and pollster Bob Wickers and funded by Huckabee’s exploratory committee, Prosperity For All Fund. It can be seen online at https://youtu.be/iCueO9fSDXs
A graphic in the video identifies Nelson, the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities, as working for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Nelson left the newspaper in 1996 to work for Huckabee. He is currently a freelance columnist whose work appears in the newspaper weekly.
Informed Friday that Nelson is no longer employed by the newspaper, Huckabee spokesman Alice Stewart said the graphic will be changed.
The video was shot in Little Rock and Hope last week, Stewart said.
“Every day of my life in politics was a fight and sometimes it was an intense one,” Huckabee says in the video. “But any drunken redneck can walk into a bar and start a fight. A leader only starts a fight that he’s prepared to finish.”
Huckabee won the Iowa Caucus during his 2008 presidential bid, mostly because of the support of evangelical voters and he carried several other states with large numbers of conservative Christians. In the video, Huckabee promises to lead “with moral clarity in a dangerous world.”
“There’s a difference between right and wrong. There’s a difference between good and evil,” Huckabee says. “I’ll keep all the options on the table in order to defeat the evil forces of radical Islam.”
The video doesn’t mention two topics — abortion and gay marriage — that have rallied culturally conservative voters in past elections. Much of the focus is on lower taxes, smaller government and greater economic opportunity.
Huckabee supporters tended to fall into a narrow group of religious conservatives in 2008, Dowdle said, and he has to appeal to a broader group of Republicans.
“In 2008 he kind of hit a ceiling because he wasn’t able to reach outside that niche,” Dowdle said. “If you look at the video, the video in terms of issues does a really good job of reaching out to Republicans in terms of other issues, economic issues, issues in terms of national security. You don’t see a lot of real overt attempts to try to basically reach back out to his base.”
Instead, Huckabee commits to protecting Social Security and Medicare, helping Americans earn their “maximum wages.”
“As governor of Arkansas, I cut taxes and welfare, balanced the budget every year for 10 years, and raised average family income by 50 percent,” Huckabee says. “We didn’t slash, burn, hurt people, leave people impoverished. We empowered people to live a better life.”
Huckabee’s performance as governor will be an issue during the 2016 campaign, critics say.
Club for Growth spokesman Doug Sachtleben said Huckabee’s description of his record cutting taxes in the ad is misleading. In 2008, the group ran ads calling him a “liberal” and slamming his fiscal record.
“If you leave out most of his record, I guess you could say that,” he said. “He’s given a partial look at his record when he says he cut taxes, and that’s where we feel like the rest of the story needs to be told.”
Huckabee’s claim that he balanced the budget for 10 years is “commendable, but required,” Sachtleben said. “Your state constitution requires that you have a balanced budget.”
Sachtleben said that if Huckabee announces a bid, Club for Growth plans to be involved the way it was in 2008.
“On a lot of conservative issues, not the taxing, spending issues, there is a lot of places where conservatives see him as, in some instances, the person he portrays in the ad, but when you come down to the crucial issues, particularly for a president of government spending and taxation of its citizens, his record was abysmal in Arkansas,” Sachtleben said. “That’s where people need to be made aware.”
Stewart said Huckabee’s statement is supported by his record, such as doubling the child-care tax credit and eliminating capital-gains taxes on home sales, both in 1997.
“The governor has a strong, proven record as a governor who cut taxes, reined in the size of government and helped balance the budget in Arkansas,” she said. “The Club for Growth can sit there and dust off their playbook from 2008. It didn’t work then, it’s not going to work this time.”