was going to be a fiscal conservative?

It's not like Bush left a giant mess for his successor; the TX tax burden has further decreased since he left office. Nor did he inherit a bunch of tax increases from the previous administration that made his life easy: the tax burden had also fallen the last few years prior to his governorship.

Huckabee came to office following several years of tax burden increases and at a time of general economic prosperity, so it's not like the previous governor stuck him with a bunch of unsustainable tax cuts (perhaps unsustainable spending increases...). Nothing about the numbers suggests that he can blame the 2001 recession; the large increases in Arkansas taxes happened almost entirely after 2003.

Yes, Huckabee left Arkansas with a large surplus. This suggests that many of those tax increases he's now getting so defensive about (all the claims about how he needed to hike taxes to fix the horrible roads and schools) may not have been necessary after all. In fact, the current (Democrat) governor is now pushing a grocery sales tax elimination that Huckabee opposed .

Huckabee, on the other hand, wanted to issue rebate checks -- not exactly a good way to carry out tax policy. Not that eliminating the sales tax on groceries is the best policy either, but it certainly beats the old political stunt of sending everyone a check in the mail.

Nor are other aspects of his candidacy encouraging. Here's John Fund :

Only he and John McCain have endorsed the discredited cap-and-trade system to limit global-warming emissions that has proved a fiasco in Europe. "It goes to the moral issue," he told an admiring group of environmentalists this month. Alan Greenspan blasts cap-and-trade in his new book as not feasible, noting that "jobs will be lost and real incomes of workers constrained." Mr. Huckabee defends his plan as an "innovative" way to attain complete energy independence from foreign oil by 2013.

There are also some choice quotes in that article about how he "destroyed the conservative movement in Arkansas," "has zero intellectual underpinnings in the conservative movement," and "was pro-life and pro-gun, but otherwise a liberal."

Maybe his campaign website will throw me a few bones? Nope.

His big education plan is to have the federal government encourage arts and music. This is a federal responsibility... how? Nothing about vouchers or education tax credits, and the words "school choice" only appear with the word "public" in front of them.

His only spending proposal is a line-item veto. No word on what specifically he might use that line-item veto to slash. He apparently has nothing to say on how to fix Social Security or Medicare.

He favors farm subsidies .

He makes absurd promises about "energy independence" . In only one sentence does he use the word "market"; that one sentence is directly contradicted by everything else he says on the topic. Nor does at any point he even say what his "plan" is.

Just about the only economic area where I could find that I agreed with more than about 50% of what he said was on health care . But even then, he paints a fairly unrealistic picture of what it will take to fix our health care system, making it sound like there are easy and painless ways to improve things when in fact there are only tough choices.

I'm really not seeing what it is I'm supposed to like about this guy.