For the second time in a row, Mike Huckabee has turned in an inexplicably sub-par performance in a debate. On Fox last night, Huckabee’s weakest moment came in an exchange with Mitt Romney on the question of whether Huckabee raised taxes in Arkansas. When Romney pressed Huckabee, saying, “Net-net, did you raise taxes in your state by half a billion dollars?” Huckabee said, “We raised jobs, we built our roads.” It was obvious that he didn’t want to answer the question. Only later did Huckabee concede, “By a court order that said we had to improve education.”

I don’t know why Huckabee didn’t just tell the story of what happened with education and taxes in Arkansas. I talked with him about the issue last summer, and this is from a cover story last August:

The biggest tax increase during Huckabee’s tenure was the sales-tax increase, which went to education, and it began not with Huckabee but with the Arkansas supreme court. In 2002, the court ruled that the state’s system of funding its schools was unconstitutional and ordered the state government to come up with ways to spend more money on education and distribute it more equitably among the state’s school districts.
Huckabee had to do something. And with a heavily Democratic legislature, it was a sure bet that more money was going to be raised and spent on schools. So along with a tax increase, Huckabee attempted to fix Arkansas’ amazingly chaotic school-district system. The state has 75 counties, and at the time it had 310 school districts, each a separate fiefdom with its own budget and bosses. Some school districts had as few as 100 students in K-12. Huckabee wanted to consolidate districts so that each would have a minimum of 1,500 students. He lost that fight, with the legislature choosing to make the minimum size 350 students. Still, that meant the consolidation of the smallest districts, with significant savings for the state. Even so, when the bill got to Huckabee’s desk, he declined to sign it, knowing that it would become law anyway. “I thought that we were not pushing for the level of efficiency that we should have,” he says.

So what would be wrong with just telling that story? With Huckabee’s skills, it could be told quickly and effectively, and I think most voters would understand, and perhaps even appreciate what Huckabee did. Instead, he looked like he was hiding something – a very bad impression.