Huckabee Pokes Fun At Bush Over Reading Intelligence Reports

The Quad City Times reports:

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee defended his failure to read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran in early December, joking in an interview Monday that President Bush didn’t read intelligence reports for four years.

Huckabee came under fire in early December when, in response to a reporter’s question about the Iran report, Huckabee said he wasn’t aware of it. Huckabee’s lack of familiarity with the National Intelligence Estimate — a report that showed Iran had discontinued its nuclear program — provided fuel for his critics who said he was a lightweight on foreign policy.

“The whole perception was based on an ambush question on the NIE report,” Huckabee said in an interview Monday with the Quad-City Times. “From there, it was like, ‘Wow.’ That was released at 10 o’clock in the morning. At 5:30 in the afternoon, somebody says, ‘Have you read the report?’ Maybe I should’ve said, ‘Have you read the report?’ President Bush didn’t read it for four years; I don’t know why I should read it in four hours.”

His comment about President Bush appears to be a reference to allegations made by Bush’s critics that Bush didn’t pay close enough attention to intelligence reports, particularly in the early years of his presidency.

When asked to clarify, Huckabee said this:

“The point I’m trying to make is that, on the campaign trail, nobody’s going to be able, if they’ve been campaigning as hard as we have been, to keep up with every single thing, from what happened to Britney last night to who won ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ ”

He said the campaign learned from the criticism related to the Iran report and now he gets regular briefings about developments in foreign policy.

Huckabee Would Criminalize Abortion Providers

At The Trail blog at the Washington Post, John Solomon writes:

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, locked in a tight GOP race in Iowa, said Sunday he would seek to punish doctors who took money to provide abortions to women if he succeeded in outlawing the procedure, as he has long advocated.

"I think if a doctor knowingly took the life of an unborn child for money, and that's why he was doing it, yeah, I think you would, you would find some way to sanction that doctor," Huckabee said during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press. "I don't know that you'd put him in prison, but there's something to me untoward about a person who has committed himself to healing people and to making people alive who would take money to take an innocent life and to make that life dead."

The former governor said he would not support penalizing women who sought abortions even if they were outlawed. "I think you don't punish the woman, first of all, because it's not about ... I consider her a victim, not a criminal."

Huckabee, whose campaign surged to the lead in Iowa polls but has cooled in recent days, also used the appearance on the Sunday show to launch his most pointed attack yet on rival Mitt Romney. He accused the former Massachusetts governor of running a "very desperate and, frankly, distorted" campaign for the presidency.

"If you aren't being honest in obtaining the job, can we trust you if you get the job?" Huckabee asked, citing instances in which he alleged Romney distorted Huckabee's record as governor. Huckabee also came to the defense of a fellow rival, saying that when Romney "went after the integrity of John McCain, he stepped over the line. John McCain's a hero in this country. He's a hero to me."

McCain, whose campaign also has been targeted by Romney since it began rising in New Hampshire polls, also got into the mix during an appearance on ABC's This Week. McCain declined to call Romney a "phony" but said "I think he's a person who changed his positions on many issues."

Mike Huckabee on Meet the Press, December 30, 2007

On homosexuality:

Huckabee Stumbles on Foreign Affairs

USA Today reports:

As his campaign has surged, Mike Huckabee has made a series of public foreign policy gaffes, fueling attacks by rivals that he lacks the international experience to be president.

The former governor of Arkansas has confused the status of martial law in Pakistan, raised questions about Pakistanis crossing the U.S. border and wasn't initially familiar with the latest U.S. intelligence assessment of Iran's nuclear weapons program.

While the missteps are his, a tough foreign policy critique has often been lobbed against governors, or past governors, running for president — Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, among them. But what Reagan, Clinton and Bush had — and what Huckabee seems to sorely lack in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination — was a roster of respected foreign policy advisers to reassure voters on national security issues.

On Friday morning, Huckabee listed former U.N. ambassador John Bolton as someone with whom he either has "spoken or will continue to speak."

At a Thursday evening news conference, Huckabee said, "I've corresponded with John Bolton, who's agreed to work with us on developing foreign policy."

Bolton, however, has a different view. "I'd be happy to speak with Huckabee, but I haven't spoken with him yet," said Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

"I'm not an official or unofficial adviser to anyone," said Bolton, who mentioned he'd had conversations with other Republican candidates but declined to name any names.

Asked to explain Bolton's comments, Huckabee aides said the former Arkansas governor had e-mailed with Bolton. Bolton did not immediately respond to a request to address Huckabee's e-mailing claims.

Huckabee said he had also spoken with former State Department official Richard Haass (now president of the Council on Foreign Relations); military analyst Ken Allard; former national security adviser Richard Allen; former House speaker Newt Gingrich; Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative think tank; and a "number of military personnel."

A Gingrich spokesman said the two men had spoken, on an unofficial basis, on Friday.

Council on Foreign Relations spokeswoman Lisa Shields said Haass has "briefed Huckabee on foreign policy issues as well as [briefing] many other candidates" in both parties. Shields stressed that the relationship was not exclusive and that Haass was not affiliated with the campaign.

Reached via e-mail, Allen said an intermediary asked him to speak with Huckabee, but he hadn't yet agreed. "I'm gradually getting older, but am fully capable of recalling with whom I have spoken," said the former Nixon and Reagan foreign policy campaign adviser.

Allard and Gaffney could not be reached for comment.

Huckabee argues that foreign policy is less about experience and more about judgment. "The most important thing a president does is to make tough decisions when confronted with a crisis," he said Friday. As a governor, "you've dealt with the unexpected, a crisis, time and time again."

The confusion over Bolton, however, is the latest in a growing list of foreign policy hiccups by the Iowa front-runner. And to succeed nationally, Huckabee must broaden support beyond his socially conservative base by proving his competency on issues such as national security.

On Thursday, he commented on the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, saying the U.S. needs to consider "what impact does it have on whether or not there's going to be martial law continuing in Pakistan." Martial law, as it turns out, was lifted two weeks ago.

Huckabee clarified the point later that day. "What I said was, you know, it was not that I was unaware that it was suspended two weeks ago, or lifted two weeks ago. The point was continued: ... Would it be reinstated? Would it be placed back in?" he said.

Huckabee also raised eyebrows Thursday when he said that Bhutto's death should prompt "an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there's any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country."

And earlier this month, Huckabee said he was unfamiliar with the National Intelligence Estimate reporting that Iran hadn't had a program to develop nuclear weapons since 2003.

Huckabee's lack of foreign policy experience has fueled a host of critics. On Thursday, rival Sen. John McCain of Arizona said Bhutto's assassination highlights Huckabee's lack of foreign policy experience.

"You know, I don't think it's appropriate to respond in a political way," Huckabee said.

Last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced Huckabee's critique of the Bush administration as having a "bunker mentality" when it comes to foreign policy.

"The idea that somehow this is a go-it-alone policy is just simply ludicrous," she said at a State Department news conference. "One would only have to be not observing the facts, let me say that, to say that this is now a go-it-alone foreign policy."

Remarks on Pakistan Are Tailing Huckabee

The New York Times reports:

In discussing the volatile situation in Pakistan, Mike Huckabee has made several erroneous or misleading statements at a time when he has been under increasing scrutiny from fellow presidential candidates for a lack of fluency in foreign policy issues.

Explaining statements he made suggesting that the instability in Pakistan should remind Americans to tighten security on the southern border of the United States, Mr. Huckabee said Friday that “we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities, except those immediately south of the border.”

Asked to justify the statement, he later cited a March 2006 article in The Denver Post reporting that from 2002 to 2005, Pakistanis were the most numerous non-Latin Americans caught entering the United States illegally. According to The Post, 660 Pakistanis were detained in that period.

A recent report from the Department of Homeland Security, however, concluded that, over all, illegal immigrants from the Philippines, India, Korea, China and Vietnam were all far more numerous than those from Pakistan.

In a separate interview on Friday on MSNBC, Mr. Huckabee, a Republican, said that the Pakistani government “does not have enough control of those eastern borders near Afghanistan to be able go after the terrorists.” Those borders are on the western side of Pakistan, not the eastern side.

Further, he offered an Orlando crowd his “apologies for what has happened in Pakistan.” His aides said later that he meant to say “sympathies.”

He also said he was worried about martial law “continuing” in Pakistan, although Mr. Musharraf lifted the state of emergency on Dec. 15. Mr. Huckabee later said that he was referring to a renewal of full martial law and said that some elements, including restrictions on judges and the news media, had continued.

Mr. Huckabee’s comments on the situation in Pakistan were not the first time he has been caught unprepared on foreign policy matters. Early this month, after the release of a National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003, Mr. Huckabee said that he was not familiar with the report, even though it had been widely reported in the news for more than 30 hours.

Romney and Huckabee's Religious Intolerance

Nonbelievers have long been more tolerant of believers in office than the other way around.

At Salon.com, Joe Conason writes:

Distasteful as all the Bible thumping and ostentatious piety of the Republican presidential aspirants certainly are, the time may have come to address their religious pretensions directly, instead of turning away in mild disgust. For the truth is that no matter how often candidates like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee promise to uphold the Constitution and protect religious freedom, they are clearly seeking to impose the restrictive tests of faith that the nation's founders abhorred.

The most egregious offender against basic American civics today is Huckabee, who told a group of students at Liberty University, the center of higher learning founded by the late Jerry Falwell, that his sudden rise in the Iowa polls is an act of God. He compared the improvement in his political fortunes to the New Testament miracle of the loaves and fishes. He wasn't joking, as both his demeanor and his words demonstrated.

The Rev. Huckabee has proved willing to risk his oversold reputation as the "nice" evangelical with a primary strategy that draws attention to his qualifications as a "Christian leader," in contrast to the suspect Mormonism of Romney. Huckabee was honest enough not to deny that he believes the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a cult -- and in fact, many if not most of his fellow Southern Baptists regard the LDS church as a satanic cult.

In response, Romney delivered an address that simultaneously pleaded for religious tolerance and urged intolerance of what he termed the "religion of secularism." The former Massachusetts governor at once declined to discuss the specific dogmas of his own faith while seeking to convince the bigots in his political party that, like them, he accepts Jesus Christ as the Son of God and his Savior. (Actually, Mormon beliefs about Jesus, which Romney insists he will not abandon, are considerably more complicated than his speech implied and bear little resemblance to the theology of orthodox Christianity.)

Whatever bland assurances they may offer to the contrary, both Romney and Huckabee have implicitly endorsed religious tests for a presidential candidacy. Both suggest that only leaders who accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior are qualified to lead. Huckabee says that we should choose a president who speaks "the language of Zion," meaning a fundamentalist Christian like himself. Romney says that among the questions that may appropriately be asked of aspiring presidential candidates is what they believe about Jesus Christ, a question he endeavored to answer in a way that would assuage suspicions about his own religion.

So if these two worthy gentlemen seek to exploit or extol their own faith, why should we bar ourselves from exploring the subject more deeply? They have invited a discussion of the sublime and the absurd in their religious doctrines, and of how those doctrines would influence them in office. We have already seen the destruction inflicted on America and the world by a dogmatic chief executive who believes that God urged him to wage war. (And let's not forget that Rudolph Giuliani, among others, has echoed the notion that President Bush was divinely chosen and inspired.)

We can begin with Romney's speech Thursday, in which he declared, as Joan Walsh noted with alarm, that there can be no liberty without faith. "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom ... Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

This statement is so patently false that it scarcely deserves refutation. If Romney has studied the bloody history of his own church, then he knows that the religious fervor of its adversaries drove them to deprive the Mormons not only of their freedom but their lives, and that the Mormons reacted in kind. If he has studied the bloody history of the world's older religions, then he knows that the most devout Christians of all sects have not hesitated to suppress, torture and murder "heretics" throughout history. Only the strictest separation of church and state has permitted the establishment of societies where freedom of conscience prevails -- and those freedoms are firmly rooted in societies where organized religion has long been in decline.

Surely Romney knows that Mormonism, in particular, was historically hostile to liberty for blacks as well as women. The founders of his church believed that God had cursed the world's dark-skinned people. They rejected abolitionism and later the civil rights movement. And their acceptance of full membership for African-Americans in the LDS church dates back only 30 years.

If Romney is going to attack humanists and secularists as "wrong," then let him explain why they were so far ahead of his church on the greatest moral issues of the past half-century.

As for Huckabee, let him answer a few pertinent questions about his faith, too. Does he actually believe in creationist dogma that insists the planet is less than 10,000 years old, and that humans once walked with dinosaurs? How would that loony idea influence his science policies as president? Is he a believer in "end times" eschatology, which holds that American foreign policy should be shaped by the coming Armageddon in the Middle East? Would he apply the harsh punishments of the Old Testament to biblical sins such as homosexuality and adultery?

Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals -- including agnostics and atheists -- have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader -- which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid's religion.

Liberals and progressives have no apologies to make, or at least no more than libertarians and conservatives do. Cherishing the freedoms protected by a secular society need not imply any disrespect for religion. But when candidates like Romney and Huckabee press the boundaries of the Constitution to promote themselves as candidates of faith, it is time to push back.

Documents Expose Huckabee's Role In Serial Rapist's Release

At Huffington Post, Murray Waas reports:

As governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee aggressively pushed for the early release of a convicted rapist despite being warned by numerous women that the convict had sexually assaulted them or their family members, and would likely strike again. The convict went on to rape and murder at least one other woman.

Confidential Arkansas state government records, including letters from these women, obtained by the Huffington Post and revealed publicly for the first time, directly contradict the version of events now being put forward by Huckabee.

While on the campaign trail, Huckabee has claimed that he supported the 1999 release of Wayne Dumond because, at the time, he had no good reason to believe that the man represented a further threat to the public. Thanks to Huckabee's intervention, conducted in concert with a right-wing tabloid campaign on Dumond's behalf, Dumond was let out of prison 25 years before his sentence would have ended.

"There's nothing any of us could ever do," Huckabee said Sunday on CNN when asked to reflect on the horrific outcome caused by the prisoner's release. "None of us could've predicted what [Dumond] could've done when he got out."

But the confidential files obtained by the Huffington Post show that Huckabee was provided letters from several women who had been sexually assaulted by Dumond and who indeed predicted that he would rape again - and perhaps murder - if released.

In a letter that has never before been made public, one of Dumond's victims warned: "I feel that if he is released it is only a matter of time before he commits another crime and fear that he will not leave a witness to testify against him the next time." Before Dumond was granted parole at Huckabee's urging, records show that Huckabee's office received a copy of this letter from Arkansas' parole board.

[See the full letters sent to Huckabee's office here.]

The woman later wrote directly to Huckabee about having been raped by Dumond. In a letter obtained by the Huffington Post, she said that Dumond had raped her while holding a butcher knife to her throat, and while her then-3-year-old daughter lay in bed next to her. Also included in the files sent to Huckabee's office was a police report in which Dumond confessed to the rape. Dumond was not charged in that particular case because he later refused to sign the confession and because the woman was afraid to press charges.

Huckabee kept these and other documents secret because they were politically damaging, according to a former aide who worked for him in Arkansas. The aide has made the records available to the Huffington Post, deeply troubled by Huckabee's repeated claims that he had no reason to believe Dumond would commit other violent crimes upon his release from prison. The aide also believes that Huckabee, for political reasons, has deliberately attempted to cover up his knowledge of Dumond's other sexual assaults.

"There were no letters sent to the governor's office from any rape victims," Huckabee campaign spokesperson Alice Stewart said on Tuesday when contacted by the Huffington Post.

Subsequently, however, the campaign provided a former senior aide of Huckabee's who did remember reading at least one of the letters.

But Huckabee and his aides insist that his receipt of the letters is irrelevant because the decision to release Dumond was made by the parole board. Huckabee on Tuesday again denied allegations by former parole board members that he lobbied them to release Dumond. "I did not ask them to do anything," he said. "I did indicate [Dumond's case] was sitting at my desk and I was giving thought to it."

Charmaine Yoest, a senior adviser to the Huckabee campaign, told the Huffington Post: "I think what should be considered here is that if he [Huckabee] could have changed what happened, he would. His whole life has been about respect for life and understanding the value of each individual life. Nobody regrets the loss of life here more than him."

In 1996, as a newly elected governor who had received strong support from the Christian right, Huckabee was under intense pressure from conservative activists to pardon Dumond or commute his sentence. The activists claimed that Dumond's initial imprisonment and various other travails were due to the fact that Ashley Stevens, the high school cheerleader he had raped, was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton, and the daughter of a major Clinton campaign contributor.

The case for Dumond's innocence was championed in Arkansas by Jay Cole, a Baptist minister and radio host who was a close friend of the Huckabee family. It also became a cause for New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy, who repeatedly argued for Dumond's release, calling his conviction "a travesty of justice." On Sept. 21, 1999, Dunleavy wrote a column headlined "Clinton's Biggest Crime - Left Innocent Man In Jail For 14 Years":

"Dumond, now 52, was given conditional parole yesterday in Arkansas after having being sentenced to 50 years in jail for the rape of Clinton's cousin," Dunleavy wrote. "That rape never happened."

A subsequent Dunleavy column quoted Huckabee saying: "There is grave doubt to the circumstances of this reported crime."

After Dumond's release from prison in September 1999, he moved to Smithville, Missouri, where he raped and suffocated to death a 39-year-old woman named Carol Sue Shields. Dumond was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison for that rape and murder.

But Dumond's arrest for those crimes in June 2001 came too late for 23-year-old Sara Andrasek of Platte County, Missouri. Dumond allegedly raped and murdered her just one day before his arrest for raping and murdering Shields. Prior to the attack, Andrasek and her husband had learned that she was pregnant with their first child.

Dumond died of natural causes while in prison on September 1, 2005. At the time of his death, Missouri authorities were readying capital murder charges against Dumond for the rape and murder of Andrasek.

* * *

Huckabee has refused to release his gubernatorial administration's records on the matter, saying that he was concerned for the privacy of Dumond's victims and that the records contain sensitive law enforcement information.

The Arkansas Parole Board also refuses to make public any letters or warnings it received from Drumond's victims. "We don't release comments for or against a clemency application or a parole case," the Board's spokesperson told Huffington Post, "except when they are comments from public officials."

But most of the women assaulted by Dumond and interviewed for this story say that Huckabee could have made information public while guarding their privacy. Law enforcement authorities also scoffed at the idea that anything in the records would have harmed an ongoing investigation since Dumond is no longer alive .

The records revealed in this story -- including correspondence between Dumond's victims and Huckabee, as well as the governor's own file regarding Dumond -- were provided to me in the fall of 2002 by a Republican staffer to then-Gov. Huckabee.

I made the decision not to make the files public at that time because of concern for the privacy of the rape victims and their families. I felt that their right to privacy outweighed the public's right to know, although I understand why many people would disagree.

Now that Huckabee is running for president, and after consulting with the victims and their families, I have decided to proceed, given what his actions on the case - and his attempts to whitewash his involvement in it -- say about his judgment and integrity.

During a 2002 bid by Huckabee to be re-elected governor of Arkansas, the staffer who provided the documents attended a meeting where Huckabee and top aides expressed concerns that information in the files showing that other women had told Huckabee about being raped by Dumond might somehow become public, and thus become an issue for his opponent. The information remained secret, and Huckabee won a tight race for re-election.

The staffer said that during that same period, another senior aide to Huckabee suggested asking other state agencies, which might have portions or even the entirety of the Dumond file, to transfer their records to the governor's office. If the files were transferred, the aide to Huckabee said, they would no longer be obtainable by reporters or political opponents under the state's Freedom of Information statute.

Arkansas has one of the most progressive Freedom of Information laws in the country. People need only to make requests orally whereupon state officials have to quickly respond and make them public. Governors, in sharp contrast, have wide latitude in deciding which of their own files to make public.

"The files had to be disappeared because there just wasn't a plausible explanation for the governor's stance," the former staffer said. "I mean, what could the governor say? That he believes these women made up their stories? That women lie when they say they are raped?"

Asked on Tuesday whether Huckabee would release his file on Dumond, campaign spokesperon Alice Stewart said, "We're not the governor, we don't have the file." Asked if Huckabee would ask the current governor to release the file, she responded, "No. I don't want to see it. You apparently want to see it."

* * *

Dumond raped Ashley Stevens, Clinton's distant cousin, in 1984 when she was a 17-year-old high school student in Forest City, Arkansas.

He was convicted in 1985 and sentenced to life in prison, plus 20 years. In 1992, Jim Guy Tucker, who became governor of Arkansas after Clinton left office, reduced Dumond's sentence to 39.5 years.

Shortly after taking office in 1996, Huckabee announced his intention to commute Dumond's sentence to time served. A public outcry ensued.

Stevens, her father, and Fletcher Long, the Arkansas state prosecuting attorney who sent Dumond to prison, met with Huckabee to protest.

"'This is how close I was to Wayne Dumond,'" Stevens says she told Huckabee at the time. "'I will never forget his face. And now I don't want you ever to forget my face.'"

Stevens now says: "This isn't and was never about politics. This is about a rapist. This is about a murderer. ... I might never forget Dumond's face, but there are other women [for whom] Dumond's face was the last thing they ever saw on this earth... I would hope that Huckabee would remember the faces of his victims."

Stevens, who had been silent about her rape and not identified in the press for more than a dozen years, finally spoke out publicly in 1996 after feeling frustrated by her meeting with Huckabee. Twenty women members of the state House of Representatives protested the commutation proposal. The editorial pages of some Arkansas newspapers questioned Huckabee's judgment and suggested he reconsider.

What the public never knew, however, was that other women who had been sexually assaulted by Dumond had privately written Huckabee about their anguish. Their very private attempts at changing Huckabee's mind, they later told the Huffington Post, were based on concerns that speaking out publicly would have been too painful and traumatizing.

One such letter was from the daughter of a Dumond rape victim:

When you ran for office, one of the reasons I voted for you was the fact you are/were a Baptist preacher. I come from a very strong Baptist background... [O]ne of my grandfathers is also a preacher. I have always been a faithful church member where I am the choir director, yet this is one event that is not so easily forgiven.
I have prayed about these feelings, but once someone hurts your mother, or daughter the way this man hurt my mother I believe that you would feel the same...

Please understand that this letter is coming from my heart.... I would love to have the chance to talk to you about this matter as a daughter of a surviving rape victim.

The woman provided Huckabee with her personal phone number in hopes that he or at least someone on his staff would call. She says that she never heard back.

What was left unsaid in her letter to Huckabee was that she was three years old when, in the 1970s, Dumond raped her mother. The girl was in her mother's bed asleep when the rape occurred. Dumond held a butcher's knife to her mother's throat during the assault.

In an interview, her mother told the Huffington Post how she fought with Dumond to wrestle the knife away from him, willing to risk her own life rather than suffer at Dumond's hands.

But Dumond overcame her resistance. He pointed to her daughter sleeping next to her and threatened: "If you don't cooperate with me, she'll be next."

The woman did as she was told. As Dumond continued to violently rape her, the woman recalled, she lay consciously and deliberately silent. Even as she was being assaulted, she gently stroked her daughter's hair, praying she would not wake up.

When the assault was over, the woman said, Dumond threatened to come back and rape and kill her daughter if she told anyone.

Twenty-three years after the rape, the girl who had been protected by her mother's silence attempted to persuade Huckabee to keep Dumond behind bars. Fearing that the rapist would attack her mother again, she wrote to the governor:

Governor Huckabee, I really wish you could spend one night in my mother's home. Even though twenty years have past [sic?] she still has trouble sleeping at night. The house is never dark...
Friday afternoon when I heard the dreadful news [that Huckabee intended to commute Dumond], I was the one to tell my mother. She was on her way out of town and I didn't want her to hear this on the radio while she was driving. I wish you could have heard the emptiness in her voice.

* * *

In her own letter to Huckabee, the woman who was raped by Dumond in the 1970s wrote that she felt deep guilt over what happened later to Ashley Stevens:

I feel responsible for Ashley's years of suffering at Dumond's hands because I was so naïve as to believe that since Dumond was arrested for raping me that he had learned his lesson and would not do it again. I was raised to take a person at their word, so I believed him when he said he was sorry.
The woman said in an interview that she wrote Huckabee out of concern for him. If she felt so much guilt about what happened to Ashley Stevens, she wondered, what private Hell would Huckabee go through if he commuted Dumond's sentence, and Dumond harmed or even killed someone else?

If Huckabee had any doubt that the woman and her daughter were telling the truth, included in the materials provided to him was a police report in which Dumond confessed to authorities that he had raped the woman.

According to the report, "Wayne stated that he went upstairs to the bedroom, and that the woman was asleep when he went into the room. Wayne stated the woman woke up, and he held a knife on her while he committed the rape, and that the woman's baby was in the bed with her."

When police detectives pressed Dumond to admit his involvement in other rapes, however, he "stated that he desired not to answer any further questions" and also "refused to read, sign, or initial the statement that he had made in the presence" of police officers.

Also in the file sent to Huckabee was a letter from yet another woman who said that Dumond attempted to rape her, with some striking similarities to other accounts of Dumond's assaults.

This woman wrote that she awoke in her bed to find Dumond above her: "Standing there, yielding a butcher knife above his head was the shadow of a man..."

Startled, she asked who was there. Dumond threatened her by saying he would cut her throat. But, as the woman wrote, once Dumond's "eyes got accustomed to the darkness, he saw the figure of someone laying next to me." When Dumond saw her boyfriend, he became frightened and skittish.

"At this," the woman wrote, "Wayne realized we were not alone, jumped up from the bed, and leaped down the stairs in three bounds and I heard him go out the front door...and ran across the street into the darkness."

The woman explained in her letter why Dumond was not arrested: "I was talked out of filing charges by the city police because they said rape cases are hard to prove, that I might be able to charge him with breaking and entering, assault and battery, etc., but that the evidence was slight. I took their advice."

There was additional and compelling evidence available to then-Governor Huckabee that releasing Dumond would pose a threat to society.

Dumond had been previously arrested for violent acts and an attempted sexual assault of an underage girl.

In 1972, Dumond had been arrested for his involvement in the beating death of man in Lawton, Oklahoma. Court records showed that the man who was murdered had been dating an ex-wife of a Dumond friend named Bill Cherry. Enlisting the aid of Cherry's underage daughter to lure the man to a public park, Cherry, Dumond, and a third man bludgeoned the individual to death with a claw hammer.

Dumond was granted immunity from prosecution in the case in exchange for his testimony against the other two men. On the witness stand, Dumond admitted to beating the man repeatedly over the head with a claw hammer, but denied that he struck the fatal blows.

Dumond said that when Cherry asked him to finish off the victim, he refused, only to have one of the others do the deed. Dumond's accomplices, however, claimed that it was he who was responsible for the killing.

The following year, in 1973, Dumond was arrested again, this time for attempting to assault a teenage girl in a parking lot in Tacoma, Washington. He pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to five-years probation.

* * *

In an effort to preempt scrutiny of the Dumond case, Huckabee has said that if the issue were to be raised during the '08 race, it would be because his rivals for the nomination feel threatened by his campaign. "Suddenly I seem to be in the cross hairs of every predator who is out there," Huckabee told reporters recently. "To me that seems to be a good sign of life."

When he was governor of Arkansas, Huckabee similarly attempted to deflect Dumond-related criticism by claiming that those raising the issue -- among them, members of the state's parole board, women state legislators, journalists, and even one of Dumond's victims -- were doing so for partisan political purposes.

"If he makes it about politics, he doesn't answer the hard questions about why he did what he did," says Larry Jegley, prosecuting attorney for Arkansas' sixth judicial district. Jegley is a Democrat who campaigned against Huckabee when he ran for re-election because of Huckabee's actions on the Dumond case, as well as his commutation of the sentences of other convicts who went on to commit additional crimes.

Although Huckabee has yet to give a detailed account as to why he pushed to free Dumond, he provided his fullest explanation to date in his published campaign manifesto "From Hope to Higher Ground." In the book, he wrote that he was moved to act on Dumond's behalf because he believed Dumond might have been wrongly convicted. Ashley Stevens and Fletcher Long confirmed in interviews for this story that when they met with then-Gov. Huckabee, he insisted to them that Dumond might be innocent.

Huckabee also wrote in "From Hope to Higher Ground" that he moved to act on Dumond's behalf out of compassion. He said on numerous other occasions that he felt sympathy for Dumond because Dumond was allegedly castrated while awaiting trial for raping Ashley Stevens. Dumond had claimed that unknown assailants wearing masks broke into his home, hogtied him, and then surgically removed his testicles.

Evidence has since come to light indicating that Dumond might not have been attacked but engaged in an act of self-mutilation. A physician who treated Dumond after his alleged attack told police, according to state police records, that Dumond's own wife asked him "if it was possible for Dumond to have inflicted the wound himself." The Forest City Times Herald, which published a series of articles about the Dumond controversy in 1996, quoted experts on sexual predators as saying it was not uncommon for them to engage in acts of self-mutilation to garner sympathy or because they feel guilt for what they have done.

Huckabee also wrote in his campaign book that his intervention on Dumond's behalf reflected his broad philosophy that the criminal justice system is too harsh, and that his religious faith requires him to take chances to act with compassion towards the accused.

Regarding the Dumond case, a Huckabee adviser says: "It might have been wrongheaded for him to do what he did. But his heart might have been in the right place even though the outcome was horrific. What he did was for reasons of faith and compassion."

But the daughter of one of Dumond's rape victims -- herself devoutly religious -- wrote Huckabee wondering whether his faith was leading him down the wrong path:

You were called to deliver the work of the Lord as you interpret the Bible. [But] the actions you are taking you are taking in regard to Dumond's release makes me believe that you are trying to act as the Lord. There were twelve people on the jury that convicted him of this crime. There have been numerous people on the jury that convicted him of this crime.
* * *

Huckabee has also tried to deflect criticism over his role in freeing Dumond by saying that his two immediate predecessors, Jim Guy Tucker and Bill Clinton, were responsible for Dumond's release.

Huckabee wrote in "From Hope to Higher Ground": "In 1992, while Governor Bill Clinton was out of state campaigning for president, Acting Governor Jim Guy Tucker, the lieutenant governor, commuted Dumond's sentence, making him eligible for parole... While there was speculation at the time that Governor Clinton was unaware that the commutation was going to take place, I know from my understanding of the inner workings of the process in the governor's office how impossible that would be."

Tucker, however, only reduced Dumond's initial sentence of life in prison plus 20 years to a total of 39.5 years -- which meant that Dumond was still unlikely to get out of prison until he was an elderly man, if at all.

Moreover, Tucker told the Huffington Post in an interview that, in stark contrast to Huckabee's advocacy on Dumond's behalf, he had told his parole board that he did not believe Dumond should be paroled. Tucker also said that, contrary to Huckabee's claim, Clinton had entirely recused himself from the matter because Ashley Stevens was a distant relative.

* * *

Huckabee and his aides have always denied that he secretly pressured the Arkansas parole board to free Dumond in an effort to hide his involvement and avoid political fallout.

But, in a 2002 story I wrote for the Arkansas Times about Huckabee's role in freeing Dumond, four board members -- three of who spoke on the record -- said that Huckabee lobbied and pressured board members on the matter. This included a 1996 executive meeting at which the board's recording secretary -- who ordinarily tapes the entire sessions -- was asked to leave the room. Several board members and members of the state legislator have said the secret session violated state law.

Huckabee, in turn, has said that all four parole board members have lied about his role in Dumond's release from prison.

For a full and detailed refutation of that claim, read the 2002 piece here.

* * *

So while Huckabee continues to rise in the polls, Dumond's victims are left with questions as to why the former Arkansas Governor did what he did.

The woman who was raped by Dumond while her 3-year-old daughter lay beside her tells the Huffington Post that one day she worked up the nerve to call Ashley Stevens to tell her how sorry she was. The two began to discuss their shared trauma.

"It was when I first began talking to Ashley that I began to heal," the woman said.

When Huckabee pushed through Dumond's parole, she says, "It was like he believed we were lying and Dumond was telling the truth. I wish he would now say in front of the entire world whether we told the truth or lied. And if he believes we told the truth, explain why he did what he did."

In 2001, the woman ran into Huckabee in her hometown. She wanted to know if he had any regrets in light of the Missouri murders.

"He was down here on a fishing trip," she recalled, "He was in one of the convenience stores and I went in to get me a Coke. And I went up and spoke to him.

"And all he said was, `How are you doing?' That was it."

Transcript of 'Hardball With Chris Matthews' for June 11, 2007

Guests are David Gergen, Mike Huckabee, Jenny Backus, David Frum, Chuck Todd, Linda Douglass

Transcript:

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Why do people hate Hillary? Is Republican Colin Powell backing Democrat Barack Obama? The politics is getting hotter.

Let‘s play HARDBALL.

Good evening. I‘m Chris Matthews. Hillary is out front on the Democratic side, but with half the country not liking her and her getting only a quarter of the independent voters, her winning the nomination could simply set up the Democrats for a loss in ‘08 that should be a win.

So Colin Powell didn‘t like the Bush policy? Then why didn‘t he quit? And what‘s this thing with Obama? Doesn‘t his flirtation with a Democrat make the Republicans look even more out to lunch this year?

And will Bush let his former assistant, Scooter Libby, go to prison if he can‘t get bail this Thursday? If he wants to pardon 12 million people who broke the law coming into this country, an ally on the right wants to know, why not pardon the guy who went down in the cause of pushing his war?

And 20 years ago tomorrow, Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and told Gorby to tear it down. And last night, Tony Soprano had dinner with his family. I watched at the Parthenon restaurant here in Washington, a Greek restaurant, where nobody talked for an hour straight. What‘s up with this thing? We sit and watch a guy play the jukebox? Do we love this guy or what? More on that later.

But we begin tonight with NBC News‘s Andrea Mitchell and David Gergen, a former adviser to four U.S. presidents, on the numbers facing Hillary Clinton. We‘ll get to Tony Soprano in a minute, fellows.

But Andrea, you‘re Hillary Clinton. The Democratic base loves you. You‘ve got minority support. You‘ve got gay support. And you‘ve got women‘s support. And you‘ve got working people‘s support. And yet we got a new number out in the Gallup poll, 50 percent of American people don‘t like you. Can you still win the election with that kind of negatives?

ANDREA MITCHELL, NBC CORRESPONDENT: Yes, you can, because this country is so closely divided that anyone with her kinds of numbers can win the election. I don‘t think that as unfavorable as those numbers are—it‘s one poll—I don‘t think that that is disabling, given how divided this race is and how long a campaign it is.

MATTHEWS: David, you‘ve known Hillary a long time. You‘re very friendly with her. But she‘s got one other number working against her besides those heavy unfavorables, which people tell me are huge by any comparative standard. One in four independent voters likes her. That‘s it. She can‘t win the swing voters yet. What does she have to do to change that thing around?

DAVID GERGEN, FORMER PRESIDENTIAL ADVISER: Well, it‘s an interesting question, Chris. I agree with Andrea, just for starters, that, yes, this is not disabling. But I do believe that it makes it something of a risk for Democrats to nominate Hillary Clinton because the—she may be the only person on the Democratic side who can totally unite the Republican base and force them out. So that‘s—that‘s what the risk is.

But I must say, I think out in the debates, she‘s been the superior candidate on the Democratic side. Out in New Hampshire this past week, I thought she clearly won that debate. She was superior in the conversations about religion. She looked good. She looked better than we‘ve seen her, and she talks very fluidly.

You know, I don‘t discount the possibility that given the intense—the intense hostility to the Bush administration, that she can take places like Ohio. A year ago, she couldn‘t win Ohio. Today, she could.

MATTHEWS: Well, the other question, Andrea, is we all suspect there might be a hidden anti-woman vote that sits out there. Suppose you add that hidden vote to the obvious vote, the 50 who say they don‘t like her. Suppose it‘s 60 or 70 who don‘t like her and aren‘t saying so?

MITCHELL: Sure, that‘s a problem. But all of these candidates have pluses and minuses, and I think it‘s way too early to count anyone out particularly her base, which does include a lot of women who will feel empowered and eager to come out and vote for her, will be more active than they might otherwise have been. More Democrats could turn out. More of her supporters could turn out.

As David just pointed out, places like Ohio could well be in play with Hillary Clinton on the ballot. So I think, like, with all of these candidates—look, there‘s a hidden vote, a racist vote against Barack Obama, if he were the nominee. And there are others who would be against John Edwards for other reasons. There are a lot of pluses and minuses to all of these frontrunning candidates.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about...

(CROSSTALK)

GERGEN: Chris, you just have to weigh that against who the Republicans have.

MITCHELL: Right.

MATTHEWS: I mean, if John McCain were in his prime and were really rolling right now, I‘d have to tell you, I think John McCain would be favored to beat Hillary Clinton. But given the state of Republican candidacies right now, she‘s a much more formidable and much more likely president—future president than she was a year ago.

MATTHEWS: Well, keep saying, you‘ll probably rev up the right.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about the “New York Times” front page today, hardly a right-wing newspaper. “The New York Times” had a piece—it wasn‘t on the front page. It was abut—it was actually inside. The front page story was about Barack Obama last week, about what a great basketball freak he is and how much he loves to play b-ball with his friends. And—which helps him out because everybody loves basketball in this country, and we especially like good basketball players.

Hillary Clinton doesn‘t have a back story hobby like that. I thought it was an odd story for Patrick Healy to write today. He said, Hillary doesn‘t have a humanizing pastime. What you make of that? Maybe this is too weird. Let me go to Andrea Mitchell.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: Andrea...

MITCHELL: Thanks a lot!

MATTHEWS: I know. But is this too weird? We‘re sympathizing—it looks to me like one of those pieces you write, or TV pieces you do, when one side complains so much, you got to balance your act, so they can‘t do a b-ball story on Hillary, so the do a, Gee whiz, I wish she had a b-ball story.

MITCHELL: You know, I think (INAUDIBLE) nation at war and with so much anger about the way this country is headed right now, as we see in all of the polling on “Right track, wrong track,” the basic question that is the real test of how people feel about the future of the country—I don‘t think people are going to vote for a presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat, based on whether they can play baseball, whether they‘re good at tennis, whether they‘re good at softball.

(LAUGHTER)

MITCHELL: I just don‘t think we‘re in that era of, Can you throw the touch football? I think...

MATTHEWS: So you‘d be likability...

(CROSSTALK)

MITCHELL: ... far more serious—

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: OK. Tell me the campaign where we picked somebody we didn‘t like? I mean, the only time I can think of in 50 years of watching this business—the only time we picked someone we didn‘t like as much as the guy we beat, or voted against, was everybody liked Hubert Humphrey—even those who weren‘t Democrats liked him more than they liked Richard Nixon. But it seems to me in all—every other race, the guy who‘s likable or the person likable tends to win the thing.

MITCHELL: But likability is—I mean, what makes you likable? Is it your ability to play baseball or your ability...

MATTHEWS: Well, what is it? Whatever it is, it ain‘t working for Hillary!

MITCHELL: Maybe it‘s...

(CROSSTALK)

MITCHELL: ... give smart answers about some of the issues that people...

MATTHEWS: Oh, you mean...

MITCHELL: ... really are bothered about around the kitchen table.

MATTHEWS: Andrea, are you saying it‘s a meritocracy, picking a president?

MITCHELL: I—well, no, it has not been a meritocracy, but I think that we are at a crisis stage in this country and that whether it‘s John McCain, Romney, you know, Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, Edwards or any of the frontrunning candidates, it‘s what answers they have to the things that people are really bothered about, including the war, including educating their kids and paying for their retirement and paying for gasoline—those answers are going to determine, I think, who‘s going to be elected this time.

MATTHEWS: David, you think it‘s going to be one of those...

GERGEN: Chris...

MATTHEWS: ... gut-check elections, where we ignore whether we like Fred Thompson, the cut of his jib, or we like Rudy or not, and we‘re going to look basically at the hard issues that affect our lives? It‘s going to be a very sober accounting we go through, rather than a personality choice.

GERGEN: Well, the one thing we know she shouldn‘t do, and that is go wind-surfing.

(LAUGHTER)

GERGEN: That was one—and maybe she shouldn‘t bake cookies, either. The—but I—you know, normally, Chris, likability does matter. You know, we like—we want people in the White House that we can relate to, that we want in our living rooms. I do think that one of her problems is that people don‘t necessarily feel comfortable thinking they‘re going to be listening to her over the next four years because she has a tendency to be a little preachy, and her voices is not, you know, a great asset for her.

MATTHEWS: Yes.

GERGEN: It‘s a little—it‘s a little harsh for people. So I think she‘s got to work on some of that stuff. But it doesn‘t always determine elections. Remember, you know, for likability, we would have had President Humphrey, not President Nixon.

MATTHEWS: I agree with that. By the way, you‘re right about the voices. It‘s not fair, but—my old boss, Tip O‘Neill, used to say Ronald Reagan‘s great strength, in addition to his good looks and charm and all that, was that incredible cowboy voice of his, that wonderful western voice. It‘s why so many anchor people come from places like—where‘s Tom Brokaw from? That part of the country...

MITCHELL: South Dakota. Yangston (ph), South Dakota.

MATTHEWS: That‘s where we seem to get our anchor people from, Johnny Carsons, people like that, Dick Cavett...

MITCHELL: Well, that‘s...

MATTHEWS: ... they all seem to come from out there.

MITCHELL: That‘s Fred Thompson‘s big advantage here, as he enters this race, is the voice, the Southern drawl, and the actor quality, the avuncular quality that actually is very close to Ronald Reagan‘s.

GERGEN: Yes, but...

MATTHEWS: Let‘s take a look at the Republican race right now, David.

Let‘s just switch sides for a second here.

GERGEN: Sure.

MATTHEWS: The latest AP poll has it this way. Giuliani‘s still out front at 27 percent, and McCain at 19. Fred Thompson, who has yet to make it quite official, although he‘s pretty much in there, at 17. He has bumped, as we say in airline travel, Mitt Romney already. I think he‘s on the road to bumping McCain. What do you think, David?

GERGEN: I think he is on the road to bumping McCain because John McCain‘s campaign has faltered so badly. But I think that poll understates Mitt Romney‘s strength right now because Romney—while his national numbers are not good, his Iowa numbers and his New Hampshire numbers are very impressive, and you know, if he punches through a couple times, Giuliani could come down real fast and Thompson could be left at the gate.

MATTHEWS: Why do the people in Massachusetts have a problem with Mitt? Every time I ask somebody up there—maybe they‘re all Democrats. I don‘t know.

MITCHELL: Exactly.

MATTHEWS: Every time I talk to somebody up there, they don‘t like the guy. They just don‘t like Mitt Romney.

GERGEN: Well, look, you know, the guy started out as a conservative in Massachusetts. Then he became sort of a Massachusetts-type Republican, very progressive, and now he‘s gone back to more conservative ways. But he also has—I think people really take umbrage here in Massachusetts at the way he‘s gone around dissing the state.

MATTHEWS: Yes.

GERGEN: You know, after being the governor—you want somebody to be proud of the job he‘s done and the people he‘s served. And for him to go around sort of knocking people in Massachusetts...

MATTHEWS: Yes.

GERGEN: ... has not gone down well.

MATTHEWS: Andrea, do you think—what is your sense, reporting around the country? Is this guy liked? I hate to go back to like ability, but it‘s one of the things we have to work with right now. Is he likable enough to be president, this guy? He‘s perfect-looking, I suppose, but what do we make of that?

MITCHELL: Well, he could be too perfect-looking, but he certainly is very smooth, and his pat speeches and his answers in the debates are very, very effective. So he‘s a good performer, and he does have that special quality of being able to sell himself, which is something that candidates have to be able to do.

MATTHEWS: Don‘t you have to say one thing at least that hasn‘t been poll-tested for people to believe anything you say?

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: It seems like everything he says passes muster with the majority of Republicans. It‘s almost like you would think he was focused-grouped before he wrote the speech, or had the speech written.

MITCHELL: One could argue that, but of course, he then has to also figure out how to deal with all of the things he did when he was governor of Massachusetts which were not poll-tested for the Republican electorate.

MATTHEWS: OK. Andrea, what really happened last night on “The Sopranos”? Is he going to get hit, or was he just going to have another dinner with his wife and kids?

MITCHELL: It was such a clever ending, and it left all of us initially thinking, Oh, God, is that all there is? And then you realize that, you know, he could get whacked...

MATTHEWS: Right.

MITCHELL: ... very easily, indicted. The guy who went into the bathroom, the other two guys who came in...

MATTHEWS: Yes.

MITCHELL: I mean, the whole sense of foreboding...

MATTHEWS: I know!

MITCHELL: ... as they sat there with the onion rings, it was unbelievable.

MATTHEWS: I was in a restaurant, you know, the Parthenon up on Connecticut Avenue. I got to tell you, there was 10 people at the bar. Everybody was watching like we were in the restaurant with him. It was intense, and then it went to black. David, what‘s your—what‘s the rest of the story here?

GERGEN: The people in Massachusetts don‘t watch “The Sopranos.”

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: You‘re kidding!

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: I was just at the North End yesterday having pizza at Regina‘s Pizzeria. (INAUDIBLE) there are so many Italians up there. Give me a break. Of course they watch it.

(CROSSTALK)

MITCHELL: David, you‘re just not ethnic enough.

GERGEN: Oh, I don‘t know. Listen, people up here love it, too. I did happen to be off in Vermont in the hills, and without...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: You‘re not pulling the WASP thing on me, are you, David?

GERGEN: No, no, no, no.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: ... highbrow on me, are you?

(LAUGHTER)

MITCHELL: This is Howard Dean country!

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: Anyway, regular people watched “Sopranos” last night. I can‘t wait to see the numbers. I like the guy. I like him immensely. There‘s some weird thing about likability. Once you decide you like a guy, no matter how bad he is, you like him. Anyway, thank you, Andrea Mitchell. I like his wife, to. The kids are no day at the beach. Anyway, David Gergen, thank you for the analysis.

Coming up, presidential wannabe Mike Huckabee.

You‘re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL. He may not be the leading the Republican pack of presidential candidates right now, but Governor Mike Huckabee is getting lots of ink and lots of TV time. Does he have a message, however, that could sell to a party in search of a savior? Governor Mike Huckabee joins us right now. Governor, Huckabee, the Ted Kennedy question from 1980. Why do you want to be president??

MIKE HUCKABEE ®, FORMER ARKANSAS GOV., PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE:

Well, I could tell you that I didn‘t not make the final cut on “American Idol,” but I think you‘re looking for something more substantive than that.

I want to be president because this country needs some leadership right now

that‘s positive optimistic and that can bring the country together not on

the left and the right and the Democrats and Republicans but that leads not

horizontally but vertically. I think I can do that. And I believe that if

the American people will give me the opportunity, we can really tackle some

of these problems that have divided us. And that‘s urgent, urgent for this

country

MATTHEWS: Well, this country is divided, However. Let‘s take a look at all these cultural issues, whether it‘s stem cell or it‘s abortion rights or gay marriage. Where‘s the middle ground on all this stuff?

HUCKABEE: You know, I don‘t think people have to give up their convictions. They have to be willing not to be angry at people who don‘t agree with them. No one expects to agree with somebody all the time. I don‘t agree with my wife all the time, and she certainly doesn‘t agree with me all the time, but we stay together. This country has to stay together when we understand that there can be mutual respect, we can have differences, we can be strong conservatives, strong liberals, we don‘t have to be mad at each other over it.

MATTHEWS: But many people believe that we should put doctors in jail for performing abortions.

HUCKABEE: Well, I...

MATTHEWS: (INAUDIBLE) people in jail for that. That‘s hardly...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: ... the language of love.

HUCKABEE: That‘s the wrong focus for the pro-life community. We need to be talking about what we really care about, and that‘s the life of the child, not punishing somebody but protecting somebody. The heart of the pro-life movement, the heart of my own pro-life convictions, is not punishing, it‘s protecting. And I think when we start talking about that it‘s about life, it‘s not about seeing what we can do to injure somebody else, then we change the rules of the debate.

MATTHEWS: Well, what about the pro-science argument, that we need stem cell research to protect life, that we need to have controls over CO2 emissions if we‘re going to protect life on this planet? Those are pro-life issues, broadly defined, and yet you never hear people on the cultural right saying, Let‘s do something about climate change. They make fun of Al Gore. If it comes to stem cell, they all say no federal funding. So if you‘re pro-life on life before birth, why not take other positions with regarding these other issues?

HUCKABEE: There‘s a great article on the front page of “The Washington Post,” Chris, on new developments in the science that we may be able to actually use stem cells from our skin that would be just as effective as embryonic.

MATTHEWS: I saw that.

HUCKABEE: I don‘t know anyone who‘s against looking for cures for cancer and Parkinson‘s disease and Alzheimer‘s‘s disease. We all want to do that. And again...

MATTHEWS: Can you do that and teach Genesis in biology classes in high school? John McCain the other night—and you‘re a Republican—you‘re laughing, but this is—I never thought evolution would become an issue in the 21st century. But when people say, Well, the school board should decide whether to teach Genesis or biology or both, I mean, it seems to me you got to make up your mind. Do you believe in biology and science or don‘t you? Or do you say, No, instead of teaching the kingdoms of animal life and vegetable life and the (INAUDIBLE) everybody‘s prepared to be medical doctors in this country today, no, we‘ll also teach this other version, which is it was six days of creation and a day of rest, and we‘ll teach that as if that‘s science.

Don‘t you have to keep religion and science separate?

HUCKABEE: Well, I think the real debate is whether or not the president of the United States ought to be deciding the science curriculum in Dubuque, Iowa, and the answer is no.

MATTHEWS: No, but you were for things like charter schools and things like that.

HUCKABEE: Well, but what‘s charter school have to do with evolution?

Charter schools are...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: ... Genesis. You‘re going to teach the Bible instead of biology?

HUCKABEE: No. Charter schools are not about teaching Genesis. Charter school‘s about creating a competition in the environmental sector so that schools that fail have some options for the parents to put their kids in a school that might work, give them an arts school. If we were doing more to teach music and art, we‘d be having fewer kids with their heads on their desks, sound asleep.

MATTHEWS: Yes, well, I‘m all for that, too, but why are we going back to questioning science?

HUCKABEE: I don‘t think we are.

MATTHEWS: Why are we going back to—well, you said the other night we‘re not descended from primates. That‘s fighting words. You know what you were saying.

HUCKABEE: What I was saying...

MATTHEWS: You said—you were saying...

(CROSSTALK)

HUCKABEE: Wait a minute, Chris.

MATTHEWS: If you want to believe that we‘re descended from the monkeys, you can believe what you want. That was fighting words.

HUCKABEE: It wasn‘t to me. And it wasn‘t...

MATTHEWS: It sounded like the Scopes trial. It sounded like that play on Broadway right now, “Inherit the Wind.”

HUCKABEE: Chris, the whole purpose of that question being asked was to see if we could stir something up and throw a—spark...

MATTHEWS: To see if you guys are Neanderthals or not.

HUCKABEE: No. It‘s to try to find out if we believe that there was a...

MATTHEWS: That‘s what Tom DeLay said the other night.

HUCKABEE: ... a—a god involved in this or not.

MATTHEWS: He said, the only reason Wolf asked those questions the other night, CNN—because he‘s a little bit conspiratorial, Tom DeLay—he said...

HUCKABEE: Yes.

MATTHEWS: ... was because they—a liberal network, CNN, was trying to nail you guys as a bunch of Neanderthals, a bunch of troglodytes.

HUCKABEE: I don‘t think he—he—that worked. If that was the—if that was the goal, it miserably failed.

MATTHEWS: Well, we have got three guys in our debate that said, including you and Tancredo...

HUCKABEE: Yes.

MATTHEWS: And who is the other fellow? Brownback.

HUCKABEE: Brownback.

MATTHEWS: Who said you believed—that you didn‘t believe in evolution.

HUCKABEE: No. I—I believe in God. I believe that God created the...

MATTHEWS: So do we all.

HUCKABEE: ... the heavens and the Earth.

MATTHEWS: Sure. We all believe that.

HUCKABEE: OK. Then—then what is the conflict?

MATTHEWS: The conflict is whether he did it in six or seven days and whether this Earth is only 6,000 or 7,000 years ago, if you only add up the begats in Genesis, or whether there was millions of years of history before us.

HUCKABEE: And here we are in the middle of a presidential campaign.

MATTHEWS: And you—and you—and you don‘t want to say there‘s millions of years before us, because that would challenge...

HUCKABEE: And here we are in the middle of a presidential campaign, and, Chris, I doubt there is an American family in America tonight sitting at the dinner table having a discussion on what the president, the next president, is going to believe about evolution.

They want to know, why are my gas prices too high?

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: OK. Let me ask you.

(CROSSTALK)

HUCKABEE: What about my kid‘s education?

MATTHEWS: So, you say it‘s not relevant?

HUCKABEE: I don‘t think it is for the presidential election.

MATTHEWS: Is it relevant...

HUCKABEE: I think we ought to be talking about...

MATTHEWS: ... where you stand on stem cell research?

HUCKABEE: Only to the degree that, if a president says, I don‘t believe in research, I don‘t think in medical advancements, yes, that‘s a real issue.

But I do believe in that.

MATTHEWS: OK.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MATTHEWS: 2007, and we‘re fighting the monkey trial all over again.

Tonight, we‘re going to stay with Huckabee. We will be back.

And later: Should President Bush pardon Scooter Libby? That‘s our big debate tonight.

You‘re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.

Here‘s more of my interview with Republican presidential candidate and former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATTHEWS: We had a president just recently—President George W.

Bush, until recently, was basically challenging global warming.

Now, that—you could argue—some people would say, that is anti-science, because you look at Greenland on the front page of the newspaper today, and the harbor is ice-free in the middle of winter. So, what is going on?

So, do you challenge global warming?

HUCKABEE: No, I think the real issue is, we need to take more into account for conservation.

A true conservative...

MATTHEWS: So, you would like to see a mission of controls?

HUCKABEE: A true conservative—well, let me finish.

MATTHEWS: Right.

HUCKABEE: A true conservative is a conservationist.

MATTHEWS: I agree.

HUCKABEE: You know one of things...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Teddy Roosevelt started it.

HUCKABEE: A consumption tax, instead of the current tax, would force people to be more conservative in their expenditures of energy. If we really want to say...

(CROSSTALK)

HUCKABEE: ... let‘s do some conserving...

MATTHEWS: Boy.

HUCKABEE: ... have a consumption tax.

MATTHEWS: And that wouldn‘t hurt the economy?

HUCKABEE: No, it would help the economy. It would...

MATTHEWS: Would it hurt...

(CROSSTALK)

HUCKABEE: ... fire up the economy.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: ... because a consumer tax would say, basically, if you save the money, you don‘t have to pay taxes. And people say, God, if I don‘t buy the car, I‘m making money.

HUCKABEE: But the point is, Chris, people are going to buy cars.

But you know what? Right now, we penalize productivity. We penalize...

MATTHEWS: OK.

HUCKABEE: ... people for doing well.

MATTHEWS: Let me get the Mike Huckabee story straight.

HUCKABEE: OK.

MATTHEWS: You believe that we shouldn‘t be talking about pro-science, anti-science, evolution vs. Genesis, that those issues are divisive?

HUCKABEE: There are issues Democrats and Republicans ought to be talking about they can agree on. Why do we have two kids every 60 seconds dropping out high school?

MATTHEWS: I agree.

HUCKABEE: Why are kids laying their heads on the desk and sleeping, in the most expensive nap in America? We need to be talking about fixing that, so we don‘t have a whole generation of uneducated kids.

And I‘m going to tell you, Chris, Democrats and Republicans ought to be coming together and agreeing on doing that.

MATTHEWS: OK. Here‘s a way to come together.

Rudy Giuliani is leading your polls in your party right now. And I have—I have said he has a lot of appeal. A lot of people disagree with me. But he is doing quite well in the polls. I don‘t know who is going to win your—you could win the nomination.

But suppose it works the other way, and Rudy Giuliani wins your party nomination, a pro-choicer, a guy is open to gay rights, and has other liberal positions. And he comes to you, Mike Huckabee, and says, I need a governor on the ticket with me. I need a guy who has different values than me, because I want to sell unity in my party, like you were saying.

Would you be part of a unity effort, if he said, either end of the ticket—suppose you—would you pick Rudy for your ticket, or would he pick he? Would you go for either one?

HUCKABEE: You know...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: I‘m just asking you to back up.

HUCKABEE: Yes.

MATTHEWS: You said, you want unity; you want to bring people together.

HUCKABEE: Right.

MATTHEWS: Will you join a fusion ticket, one way or the other, with a Rudy Giuliani?

HUCKABEE: If you give me a couple of hours with Rudy, I think I will have him pro-life, pro-guns, and get his whole position straight on these issues.

MATTHEWS: Who are you, Saint Augustine?

HUCKABEE: And we would be a great...

MATTHEWS: Who are you? This is like one of these old debates with the Calvinists. Which—are you going to...

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: You are going to—you‘re going to turn Rudy around in a couple hours?

HUCKABEE: I‘m—I am in the conversion business, Chris. I think we can do it. So, that‘s—that‘s what I will say.

MATTHEWS: So, you must have gotten to Governor Romney a few years ago.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: Anyway, thank you very much.

HUCKABEE: Thank you, Chris.

MATTHEWS: You‘re a great—I see your appeal out there. You‘re a very—a very popular fellow.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MATTHEWS: Up next: President Bush is standing by Alberto Gonzales, but will he let Scooter scoot?

You‘re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MARGARET BRENNAN, CNBC CORRESPONDENT: I am Margaret Brennan with your CNBC “Market Wrap.”

With little economic or earnings news today, stocks barely budged. The Dow Jones industrial average was up just fractionally, while the S&P 500 gained about a point-and-a-half. The Nasdaq lost more than a point.

After a big drop on Friday, oil prices climbed today, rising $1.21 cents in New York‘s trading session, closing at $65.97 a barrel. There‘s good news about gasoline prices, though. The latest Lundberg survey shows that the average nationwide price for regular unleaded dropped more than 7 cents over the past several weeks to $3.11 a gallon. It‘s the first drop in almost five months.

A setback in the Supreme Court for cigarette-maker Philip Morris—the court blocked the tobacco giant‘s bid to move a class-action lawsuit over light cigarettes from state court to federal court, where damage against the company would be limited.

That‘s it from CNBC, America‘s business channel—now back to

HARDBALL.

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.

With the Democrats pushing hard for a vote of no-confidence against embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, why is President Bush hanging so tough in defending his old friend?

And with Vice President Cheney‘s former aide Scooter Libby sentenced to two-and-a-half years of hard time, why are so many Republicans unhappy with Bush hanging tough in not suggesting any kind of help is forthcoming for his hawkish lieutenant?

It‘s a HARDBALL debate tonight with former Bush speechwriter David Frum and Democratic strategist Jenny Backus.

Good evening. Thank you.

Should the president intervene in the judicial process with regard to Scooter Libby? Let‘s start with him...

DAVID FRUM, FORMER SPEECHWRITER FOR PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Well...

MATTHEWS: ... David.

FRUM: ... he has got a lot more options than I think people understand.

We had a very interesting discussion on “The National Review” Web site. One of the president‘s powers is the power of respite. That is, he doesn‘t—he doesn‘t have to give him a full pardon. He can simply say, you don‘t go to jail until your appeals are exhausted. As this judge...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: What is the precedent for that?

FRUM: Oh, President Clinton did it. President Truman did it. It goes back. Many, many presidents have done it.

And it allow—you just say, the sentence doesn‘t go into effect pending the completion of the appeal. Normally, the idea that you would send somebody to jail, when he has such powerful appeals as Scooter Libby has got, that is very unusual. And—and Judge Walton‘s...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Not for Judge Walton, it‘s not.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Go ahead, Jenny. Should he be...

JENNY BACKUS, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Well...

MATTHEWS: Should the president intervene in this legal case or not?

BACKUS: Absolutely not.

I think it‘s, A—I think he should not do it because it‘s the wrong thing to do, but he should also not do it because it is another thing that he‘s doing to—to really harm the chances of these Republican candidates in 2008.

Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Law and Order Prosecutor, you heard him talk in that CNN debate. I thought he was, like, channeling some gooey liberal Democrat. I mean, it was—he was—he was Mr. Anti-Law and Order. What about the rule of law in this country?

You do something wrong. You‘re found guilty by the system. The Republican Party is rocketing away from truth, justice, and the American way. And Super—Superman...

FRUM: Respite and pardon, those are—those are some of the rules of law.

(CROSSTALK)

FRUM: They are rules, too.

BACKUS: You sound, to use you guys‘ expression, Clintonian on this.

I mean, what—this...

FRUM: Well...

BACKUS: What...

(CROSSTALK)

FRUM: ... if—if President Clinton had been willing to—had been willing to take a pardon, that would have been terrific. What he did was, he—he just actually violated the rules.

And this—this—what is happening—what has happened with Scooter...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: OK. Let me ask you...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Go ahead.

FRUM: ... is just—is an attempt to say, look, he was convicted.

(CROSSTALK)

BACKUS: And now—but he shouldn‘t go to jail?

MATTHEWS: What would be...

BACKUS: It‘s like Paris Hilton in the legal world.

MATTHEWS: ... the president‘s motive for intervening in this particular case? What would he say to the American people when he did such a thing? You can call it respite. You can call it commutation at some point. You can call it pardon at some point.

What would be his statement to the public when he did so...

FRUM: Last...

MATTHEWS: ... intervening in a judicial case?

FRUM: Last week, a woman who had been wrongly treated by her husband, went into his bedroom, shot him dead with a shotgun, and got a sentence about as tough the sentence that Scooter Libby got...

MATTHEWS: Right.

FRUM: ... for misremembering, or you can say he lied, but whatever it was he did, that he, in a case where there was no underlying legal infraction, and where the actual wrongdoing, the person who actually did the offense that is supposed to justify this enormous sentence, is sitting on boards of directors...

BACKUS: People—people...

FRUM: ... is a respected member of the Washington establishment.

(CROSSTALK)

BACKUS: People who lie to grand juries...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: But that‘s the president‘s call. In other words, the president, you believe, should intervene in this case?

FRUM: The president should intervene, certainly stop the sentence from going into effect, let Scooter Libby win his appeal.

MATTHEWS: Why? Why should he do that?

FRUM: Because the punishment is just so out of line with reality.

(CROSSTALK)

FRUM: I mean, Richard Armitage...

MATTHEWS: OK.

(CROSSTALK)

FRUM: ... if you believe—suppose—let‘s...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Perjury...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: The charges...

(CROSSTALK)

FRUM: ... believe that this is a serious crime...

MATTHEWS: I just want to ask you. Perjury and obstruction of justice are the very charges leveled against President Clinton.

FRUM: Yes.

MATTHEWS: They were the basis for him to be impeached by the Congress and almost convicted in the Senate, with 50 Republican votes voting for his removal from office, for the charge of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Why did it justify that extreme, historic step...

FRUM: Mm-hmm.

MATTHEWS: ... and this doesn‘t?

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: It doesn‘t justify two-and-a-half years in prison?

FRUM: He is—Scooter Libby is punished. He has—he faced fines.

He‘s...

BACKUS: How is he punished, if—if his sentence is respited or commuted or pardoned?

FRUM: Oh.

BACKUS: How is that a punishment?

FRUM: A pardon does not wipe away the fact...

(CROSSTALK)

FRUM: ... will not wipe away the requirement that...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Should President Clinton—should President Clinton have been impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice?

FRUM: I think the president—that Republicans did right to impeach President Clinton, which all—which would have...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Why?

FRUM: It would have removed him from office, which—which Scooter Libby has also been removed from office.

BACKUS: Isn‘t—isn‘t...

FRUM: But it is sort of shocking. If there had been two presidents at the same time, both of whom had done the exact same thing, and one were punished, and the other not, I mean, the Armitage question...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: You can jump in here, but it seems to me you have made an argument that I have heard before, which is, there is no underlying crime here.

What was the underlying crime that Bill Clinton committed?

FRUM: The underlying...

MATTHEWS: What was his underlying crime?

FRUM: I‘m not saying, in the Scooter Libby case, that there‘s no underlying crime. I‘m saying the person who committed the underlying crime has gone away scot-free.

(CROSSTALK)

BACKUS: Is not lying to a grand jury an underlying crime?

FRUM: Absolutely.

BACKUS: Is perjury an underlying crime?

FRUM: Absolutely, it is.

BACKUS: Well, people...

FRUM: The question is what...

BACKUS: ... routinely do that and go to jail.

FRUM: But...

(CROSSTALK)

BACKUS: Why—what is—what is different about Scooter Libby?

FRUM: Look, the question is...

(CROSSTALK)

BACKUS: He is the Paris Hilton.

FRUM: The—the question is, what...

BACKUS: It‘s like getting special treatment.

FRUM: ... what—what kind of—what kind of punishment should he get?

BACKUS: He...

(CROSSTALK)

FRUM: And presidents have pardons. They can say, the punishments look severe. They can say—they can have all kinds of reasons for saying, as President Clinton did with—with a whole...

(CROSSTALK)

FRUM: ... host of people on his last day, this punishment seems out of line to me.

(CROSSTALK)

BACKUS: This—Scooter Libby is the highest—highest-level official since the Reagan era, since Iran-Contra, to have been prosecuted. So, I don‘t think the comparison—the comparison with the Clinton administration is fair.

But—but here‘s my question to you. What kind of message does it send to the American people when this president, this president says that the law doesn‘t count for him? Don‘t you that think they‘re just walking into the same...

(CROSSTALK)

BACKUS: It does.

FRUM: It‘s just bizarre to say, after a trial, after an investigation, after conviction...

BACKUS: Where he‘s sentenced...

(CROSSTALK)

FRUM: ... that the law doesn‘t count. The question is, what should the punishment be?

MATTHEWS: OK. Let me ask you this. Do you accept the Burdick precedent that, if you accept a pardon, you have accepted guilt?

FRUM: I—I...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Jerry Ford believed in that. That‘s why he gave Nixon the pardon.

Do you believe that Scooter Libby should accept guilt as implicit—implicitly accept guilt as—in accepting a pardon?

FRUM: I—I—I—you—you mean as a legal matter or as a psychological matter?

MATTHEWS: No. No, legally.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: No, accepting—according to the precedents in the court...

FRUM: Mm-hmm.

MATTHEWS: And this came through in all the discussions of the Nixon pardon.

FRUM: I‘m really not sure I understand the question. Like, should he make some kind of statement, or—or what?

MATTHEWS: Do you believe that it carries the implication of acceptance of guilt, if he accepts a pardon?

FRUM: No, I don‘t think it does. I mean, I think you could say...

MATTHEWS: Well, that would be breaking with precedent.

FRUM: You could say—if you were somebody—if you are the person, and you think you have been wrongly convicted, and you accept a pardon...

MATTHEWS: Well, then Nixon never accepted guilt, then, you‘re saying?

FRUM: I have no idea.

MATTHEWS: Well, that is what Jerry Ford thought.

(CROSSTALK)

BACKUS: I—I‘m with you on this.

I mean, look, I think—I think that that is what Bush—that Bush is going to try to justify that, that Scooter Libby accepts that he is wrong, but he does not really have to be punished as much.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: So, there‘s no remorse in this case? There‘s a lot of factors you usually get in a case involving a pardon.

And, in this case, there has been no remorse or admission of guilt, even implicitly or explicitly. So—so, I am...

(CROSSTALK)

FRUM: Sorry. You‘re saying, if you, as president, are convinced that there‘s been a monstrous perversion, error of justice, and things have been done wrong, that you can‘t pardon the person...

MATTHEWS: Yes, you can.

FRUM: ... unless you think the—that he was...

MATTHEWS: Yes, you can.

FRUM: You can only pardon the people you think are rightly convicted?

MATTHEWS: The precedent—the precedent...

FRUM: You can‘t pardon the people you think are wrongly convicted?

MATTHEWS: No. David, the precedent is, if you accept a pardon, you have accepted guilt. That‘s the precedent.

FRUM: So, a person who believes he was wrongly convicted cannot accept a pardon? That doesn‘t make any sense.

MATTHEWS: Well, that‘s the question of whether he chooses to do so.

FRUM: That—so, you say, OK, I think—because I think I am innocent, therefore, I am going to spend 20 years in jail?

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: No, because a pardon is not a legal—it‘s an extralegal method of getting a person sprung.

FRUM: Yes, I...

MATTHEWS: It‘s not saying you are innocent.

FRUM: Right.

MATTHEWS: See, pardon is not to say the person was innocent.

FRUM: So, you‘re saying a person who believes he‘s innocent should stay in jail?

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: No. I‘m saying, if a person accepts a pardon, you are accepting an extralegal method of springing them. They‘re not accepting acquittal. It is not an acquittal.

FRUM: Look, obviously, it will not be as good for Scooter Libby if...

MATTHEWS: If you want to—if you want to have it both ways, where the guy accepts a pardon, and is perceived to be innocent...

BACKUS: And then says...

(CROSSTALK)

BACKUS: .. innocent...

MATTHEWS: ... that‘s extraordinary.

FRUM: I concede that, for—from Scooter Libby‘s own point of view, it is not as good to be pardoned as it would be to be acquitted. Obviously, that is right.

BACKUS: But...

FRUM: And I think—I think that is one of the reasons why I think this idea of a respite is attractive, because it allows an appeal to go ahead.

(CROSSTALK)

BACKUS: Whatever happened to doing the time if you do the crime?

MATTHEWS: OK. Thank you, David. Thank you for coming. It is a difficult case.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: Do think he should be pardoned?

FRUM: I hope he will not go to jail.

MATTHEWS: But you—ultimately, you think he should pardoned, rather than serve jail?

FRUM: I would ideally like to see him win on appeal. That would be the best possible outcome...

MATTHEWS: Yes.

FRUM: ... after a respite. If—if he loses on appeal, then I think that the president should pardon him.

MATTHEWS: There‘s such an uproar out there I hear from friends of mine who want him, who really want this guy pardoned. I hear it from so many people...

FRUM: Mm-hmm.

MATTHEWS: ... and especially Fred Thompson, who has made it into a cause celebre.

BACKUS: Well, but Fred Thompson...

MATTHEWS: I think he will be pardoned. I think the pressure is overwhelming.

Do you think he will be pardoned?

BACKUS: No, I do not. But I think that if he does get pardoned, Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani are in big trouble—and John McCain—in the presidential race, because --

MATTHEWS: They can‘t let this guy go to hard time, because I think he was serving the president‘s policies throughout everything he did. Anyway, thank you David Frum. It is an ironic situation. Anyway, Jenny Backus, thank you. Up next, half the country has an unfavorable opinion of Hillary Clinton. Can she do anything about it? This is HARDBALL, only on MSNBC.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL. We‘ve brought you the biggest headlines, now it is time to see what it all means. We begin with top political reporter Linda Douglass, who has recently joined our partner “The National Journal.” You have seen her on TV reporting from Capitol Hill for several years, out in the campaign trail, of course. Now it‘s on to “The National Review.” Also joining us right now, NBC‘s political director Chuck Todd.

First up, loving and hating Hillary. Even though Hillary Clinton leads most national polls for the Democratic nomination, does she have a likability problem? The latest issue of “Newsweek” takes a look at the gap between those who like her and those who don‘t. Forty six percent have a favorable view of her, which is high. But an even higher number don‘t like her. Exactly half the country views her unfavorably.

Can she deal with that? Is that too many people against you to start with her. She has another problem. Only one in four people in the center like her. Linda Douglas, you are an expert. I‘m going to build you up now. Can you win a general election if you only have one in four of the independents—those are the people in the middle—and half the country is already saying they do not like you?

LINDA DOUGLASS, “NATIONAL JOURNAL: Well, I think it is very hard. I mean, obviously this is early, so a lot of these numbers are like funny money right now. But I think that Hillary Clinton has a couple of problems, one of which just simply has to do with being female. It is very hard to do what you have to do as a woman and be strong, without appearing to be cold. That‘s number one.

But number two, this is a woman who has been on the defensive throughout her political career, all the way through President Clinton‘s first campaign. She was on the defensive about being a feminist, about being her own person. She was angry. We saw her as angry about being asked about his infidelity. She was angry about what she thought was the vast right-wing conspiracy.

So the country has seen her angry. I think that it is hard sometimes for people to put their arms around a woman who they see as angry.

MATTHEWS: Can you really help me digest why it is that people don‘t like her? A lot of people do like her. But why do so many people not like her? What is the not like about? You say it is her gender.

DOUGLASS: I think that‘s part of it.

MATTHEWS: People do not dislike Dianne Feinstein. They don‘t dislike

I mean, there are other people who have been out there politically, not a whole lot, I admit. You know, Jennifer Granholm in Michigan, although she had a very tricky reelection, Kay Bailey Hutchison in Texas, very popular.

Now, maybe they haven‘t gone for the brass ring. Nancy Pelosi, of course. What is it about—is it just—well, what is it? Is it people think she thinks she is better than us? Just guessing here.

DOUGLASS: Well, that is a guess. That certainly is a guess that many people would make, because she has been pushing back a lot. She is a fighter. And, again, she has been on the defensive.

MATTHEWS: Do people think she is honest?

DOUGLASS: Well, I think that certainly the Clinton team, whether fair or not, has been accused of having an ethical tenure throughout the Clinton governorship—

MATTHEWS: You mean the 100,000 dollars she made in cattle futures?

DOUGLASS: Which was something that was debunked during the president‘s presidency.

MATTHEWS: How was it debunked? I‘m still mystified how you can pick up 100K in a field you know nothing about.

DOUGLASS: Well, certainly they thought they debunked it. It went away. I would predict it is going to come back, by the way. I would also predict that the Mark Rich pardon is going to come back to haunt Hillary Clinton.

MATTHEWS: Bill Jefferson is probably going to federal prison for 100,000 dollars.

DOUGLASS: Well, and the cattle futures, again, was never proved to be a crime or not a crime. It was certainly an issue that will be revisited.

MATTHEWS: Well, it is found money. Let‘s put it that way, found money.

DOUGLASS: Every other one of the things that was thrown at the Clintons, some of which—what 70 million dollars was spent investigating Whitewater, and it turned out to be nothing. A lot of that stuff turned out to be nothing, but it will all come back. And that is why many Democrats are worried about her.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Chuck, about this. Is this the—you know, Dick Cheney gets away with secrecy. He won‘t let people even know who visits at the vice presidential residence. He certainly won‘t let anybody know who helped him with energy policy, although you can assume they‘re all oil guys and the gas people. Right?

But maybe he is hated as much as Hillary? I don‘t know. Maybe he

only has like 23 percent popularity. Maybe they‘re both guilty of the same

CHUCK TODD, NBC NEWS POLITICAL DIRECTOR: He is hated more than Hillary.

MATTHEWS: Tell me about it. Is it secrecy, superiority?

TODD: Linda is working for the second best company in town, “National Journal,” as opposed to hear.

MATTHEWS: No, we‘re working together.

TODD: Exactly, we‘re together. Look, I think she is polarizing. Unpopular I think is the wrong word. I think some of it is fatigue. I think some of her unfavorability rating is not about hating or about her. I think it‘s fatigue of the Clinton name and fatigue of Bush. I think some of Bush‘s unpopularity rating is rubbing off on her, and that is something that I think that they worry about.

They worry about this whole—you know, the stat that they think that an Obama can throw, you know, hey, we need to turn the page. Do you realize there‘s been a Bush or a Clinton on the national ticket since 1980.

MATTHEWS: But people still buy Hershey Bars and M&Ms and they buy Exxon gas. People get into habits of voting. Don‘t they? Look at the people who get elected because their father was famous.

TODD: But in a change election—I have had this theory on Clinton, watching her in this campaign, which I think she is running a perfect campaign if she were running against an incumbent president of the United States. She should have—this campaign she is running now would have been the right campaign to run in 2004.

It may end up being the right campaign and she may get there. But she is running a much better cautious change, competent change campaign that would have worked a lot better in 2004, and a lot better than John Kerry could ever could have pulled off. She might have beaten Bush.

MATTHEWS: Every time I talked to somebody, they have a problem with her, male, female, mostly female. I cannot figure it out.

(CROSS TALK)

MATTHEWS: I look at these polls, and she is leading all the polls.

DOUGLASS: And yet she has a lot of support from women. That really is her base. It mean, hasn‘t that been her base throughout this campaign?

MATTHEWS: Not in the chattering class I hang around with. Anyway,

next up, why didn‘t Colin Powell just resign? Former Secretary of State

Colin Powell has criticized this administration since he left office. But

why did he salute the boss if he did not fully support the war? Where was

Powell‘s tough talk against the administration when it would have counted

the most, before the invasion of Iraq? Here he is on Sunday‘s “Meet the

Press:”

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TIM RUSSERT, “MEET THE PRESS”: After your presentation to the United Nations, and you realized that the information that you had been giving was faulty, did you ever think of resigning?

COLIN POWELL, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: No. The information was faulty. But it wasn‘t faulty because people in the intelligence community were lying or trying to deceive. It was faulty because intelligence can sometimes be faulty. And it was not managed properly. It wasn‘t processed properly. And we should have realized the inadequacy of some of our sourcing earlier. But it was (INAUDIBLE) on the part of the intelligence.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: What do you make of that? I know what I think.

TODD: He has always been the ultimate cautious guy.

MATTHEWS: Why is he covering. Why is he saying—

TODD: He is a loyal soldier. I can‘t tell you how many people on the left—you know, when he sort of dropped these hints that he might endorse a Democrat, I‘ll tell you their are a lot of people on the left who lost a lot of respect for Powell because he did not resign, because he didn‘t—

Because the whole point of him being in this administration, for those in the middle that did vote him—I have some relatives who ended up voting for Bush over Gore because they though Powell will make sure. And Powell wasn‘t there to stop it.

MATTHEWS: He helped sell this war on the two grounds most people bought it. There was a nuclear threat from these people in Iraq, and it was somehow connected to 9/11. All this stuff—he‘s talking about all this stuff when it‘s not proven. No, it‘s the stuff that was pushed that was not ever true that bugs me.

DOUGLASS: He laid—During this interview with Tim Russert, he laid this all on the intelligence, which was mismanaged he said, not in a venal way, he said.

MATTHEWS: I‘m sorry, it won‘t sell, because they sold us on the fact that he had a nuclear weapon. He was coming to get us with it in some balsa wood plane. And he was somehow involved in 9/11. And Cheney was right in the middle of it. It was not the intelligence community; it was the politicians, of which he was one of them.

He was part of this team that sold this war was based on bogus information, and the fact that they chose to use it was their decision. Nobody else in the world bought it. Nobody else went to war.

DOUGLASS: There was a lot of information that was out, even right before the war. I mean, Henry Waxman, Congressman Henry Waxman, who‘s now committee chairman, was debunking the fact that Iraq was trying to buy from the country of Niger this enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons.

(CROSS TALK)

MATTHEWS: -- were a joke. We knew they were bogus. Who knows which side of the war hawk crowd put up that information? Everybody on the inside knew this. It was not a question of taking the bad advice of George Tenet or anyone else. It was a question of—well, you know all this.

TODD: It was cherry picking.

MATTHEWS: Picking out stuff that would get us into the war, and that‘s why they selected it. Anyway, Linda Douglass and Chuck Todd are staying with us. You‘re watching HARDBALL, only on MSNBC.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTHEWS: We‘re back with the “National Journal‘s” Linda Douglass, who has just joined our grand team here, and NBC‘s political director Chuck Todd. Next up, 20 years ago “tear down this wall.” On June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate, demanding that Michael Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall, a symbol of communist oppression.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RONALD REAGAN, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

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MATTHEWS: Peter Robinson wrote that, one of the great speeches of the Ronald Reagan era. What‘s its significance?

DOUGLASS: What it reminds I think all of us is that this was a very, very popular president at the time of America‘s probably all-time popularity. I mean, it was such a different time, where you had a president who was able to certainly have the appearance of making these things happening, of contributing to bringing down the wall and to ending the communism that was sweeping through the Soviet Union and elsewhere.

MATTHEWS: Do you think Reagan was that popular in Europe?

DOUGLASS: Reagan was respected. Reagan was larger than life.

MATTHEWS: I wouldn‘t over-state that. I think they still don‘t like cowboy Republican presidents in Europe.

TODD: We are more liked than the Russians, than the Soviet Union. In comparison, we looked good.

MATTHEWS: -- we grew up praying for in church wanted out. By the way, do you know how you knew that? They had to build a wall to keep them in.

TODD: The biggest problem that this president and any U.S. president has now is there‘s no enemy. There‘s nobody to compare ourselves with, to be able to say, do you really want be under that regime. You know, it used to be, do you want to be the United States or do you want to be the Soviet Union.

MATTHEWS: Being an older member of this group I must tell you, I remember growing up and worrying about nuclear holocaust. I worried about a mistake made, a weird Armageddon moment in Cuba or Berlin. I didn‘t like it. This is better. I‘m sorry. I don‘t care what Rudy Giuliani or anybody says. Terrorism is better than the Soviet Union.

Anyway, dinner with “The Sopranos.” What is it all about, Tony? You‘re first. What is it all about? Everybody in America was watching this thing last night. They end up having dinner together as a family, with Meadow and the kid, Junior, and it was just a dinner. What was it about?

TODD: You know, the ending has grown on me. I didn‘t like it. I like it now. I get it. I‘m with it. I‘m OK with it. And it‘s—

MATTHEWS: Are we in a dream—

TODD: He has all of us talking about it. I hope he doesn‘t sell out to a movie. That‘s my biggest fear. Yes, my biggest fear is that he is somehow going to want to do a movie. No, let it end, because Tony was ambiguous. He was kind of good. He was kind of bad. So let it end ambiguous.

DOUGLASS: The foundation of the whole—

MATTHEWS: Did you like Tony?

DOUGLASS: Like? Tony was hard to like? I‘m thinking of all the people that he graphically murdered in that TV series. But I was shocked at the ending. I was completely shocked and disappointed. Then I woke up this morning and it felt like somebody you‘ve known for years and years, and they‘ve just moved away. And you sort of lost track of what happened to them.

And I think that is the feeling that Chase was kind of going for, not a hard separation, but just kind of the way people drift away from each other.

MATTHEWS: I like those world wary eyes of Tony Soprano. It‘s almost like a European old movie. You know, I‘ve seen it all. I‘m good. I‘m bad. I‘m everything. That look he gives; you know that dead look? It‘s such a great look.

TODD: And he knows that he always has to live that way.

MATTHEWS: I love the loyalty of the wife. I‘m sorry. I love it. I love it. That family having dinner at that restaurant, eating onion rings together, the kid who is a pain in the butt, the daughter who can‘t parallel park. It was so American. It was us.

(CROSS TALK)

TODD: He went into the mob so his kids didn‘t have to.

MATTHEWS: -- at the north end in Boston the other day, the Italian neighborhoods. It‘s so much a part of this country. Anyway, thank you Linda Douglass, thank you Chuck Todd. Join us again tomorrow tonight at 5:00 and 7:00 eastern for more HARDBALL. Our guests include Don Van Natta, the co-author of the new book about, who else, Hillary, “Her Way” it‘s called. Now it‘s time for “TUCKER.”