Huckabee: There Oughtta Be A Law!

On the one hand, Mike Huckabee really is in a bind.

Common Sense Issues is calling millions of voters and telling them that John McCain wants to allow experiments on unborn babies and that Fred Thompson supports partial-birth abortion. He can’t do anything to stop it. And in a deft bit of spin, he says the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law is at fault — so it’s John McCain’s fault that Huckabee can’t stop the group from smearing McCain.

He’s criticized the calls, said he “wished they would stop,” and now has gone so far as to tell NPR, “I personally wish all of this were outlawed.” (He didn’t mention that the calls actually are illegal under state law in South Carolina.)

On the other hand, from what the group has disclosed, it’s apparent that most, if not all, of its major donors also support Huckabee.

That’s certainly no surprise, since virtually all of the group’s efforts over the past couple months have been on Huckabee’s behalf. After all, they run a website called TrustHuckabee.com.

Though lax disclosure laws mean that the group can keep most or all of their contributions secret, they have disclosed $123,500 in contributions from six unique donors. Of those, four are known to have contributed to Huckabee. One, Arch Bonnenna, told Newsweek that he’d been invited to a Common Sense Issues fundraiser in Dallas just a couple weeks after attending a Dallas Huckabee fundraiser (he wouldn’t say who’d invited him, but said he hadn’t seen that person at the Huckabee fundraiser).

The two remaining donors, Joe C. Thompson, Jr. and Dottie Thompson, who’ve given a total of $45,000, appear to have attended that same Common Sense fundraiser, but it’s unclear whether they’ve also contributed to Huckabee. We won’t know for sure until the end of this month, when the campaigns update their disclosures. When I called Thompson’s office, I was told he was out of town and left a voicemail.

The only other connection drawn between Common Sense and Huckabee’s campaign is that his campaign manager Chip Saltsman is an old colleague of Patrick Davis, the executive head of the group. The two worked together at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, where Davis was the political director for the 2003-2004 cycle. Both say there’s no collusion.