The Gospel According to Mike Huckabee

Can you ever imagine working with Giuliani? Being a running mate …
Let's rephrase it: could I ever imagine Giuliani working with me?

You know his campaign said good things about you. You were mentioned in their strategy memo that got sent all over town, and I think an obvious question that people were asking was: are they being nice to you because they might consider you for vice president? Would you share a ticket with him even though you disagree …
Oh, you know I'm running for president, not vice president, and it's a natural question and you've got to ask it, [but] you don't expect me to [answer], and I'm not going to do that. It's not that I'm being coy, but I'm really not going to let myself start thinking about the what-ifs.

Let me ask you specifically about money, because some people say that money reflects an ability to manage well and to lead well. If you can't raise money, it's indicative of an inability to manage well and to lead well ...
Au contraire! See what I would tell you is this: if I'm able to get as far as I have with the resources I have, I think it shows a great level of management skill, because I would say, wouldn't you hate to have a president who had his hands on the federal treasury and spent the money of the taxpayers like he's spending on his campaign? That to me would be more dangerous.

But why can't you raise more money?
McCain-Feingold is really a very corrupted system. It's a disastrous system. If you're a federal officeholder, a senator, you just transfer some money over to your presidential campaign from your Senate campaign and you've jump-started the whole process so you can hire fund-raisers, you can send letters, you can do all this stuff that … it takes money to raise money. So you have to have money to start with, or if you're very wealthy, you write a personal check, you pop it into your account, because you can give unlimited amounts to your own campaign. It's not because the law restricts me, but my checkbook restricts me. So we have a system that is really tilted toward already entrenched Washington politicians and very wealthy people. We need to be screaming about how the process is really corrupt. But I'm not one of these going around whining about it.

On education, how would you close the achievement gap?
The good thing about No Child Left Behind is it finally recognizes that every child is an individual. The downside was that there wasn't a way to factor in that the school might have a disproportionate number of kids either [with learning disabilities or who speak limited English]. Two [other] negatives that I can think of: one is that, despite that we have put music and art as a part of the core curriculum, the bad thing is we're only really testing for math and reading, and schools are like most entities: what you're not held accountable for, you don't worry about. And as a result … schools have cut their music and art programs because they only want to put a focus on the things they're going to get tested on. The biggest single mistake we've made in the last generation is that we've created a left-brain education system. And when you do that, it's like having a computer that has a wonderful database and no operating system. We have 6,000 kids that drop out of school every day in this country—6,000. There are millions more kids that lay their heads on the desk and take the most expensive nap in the country—at the expense of the taxpayers—and its not because these kids are dumb. These kids are bored.

Is there a way for the Feds to take on the teachers' unions? Would you get into that?
I certainly did in Arkansas where I thought they were wrong, but I also found that there were times when it wasn't [a matter of] "taking them on." It was doing things that were good for the students. And I always told them, "I'm not a school person, I'm a kid person. And my focus is not going to be about what is good for the school. This isn't about perpetuating the institution." But we raised teacher pay, we improved benefits, we created some incentives; forms of merit pay that would give incentives to people that did well. I think those are important factors. The [unions] don't like all of them, but they don't hate everything, either. I think it's a matter of finding the common ground and being honest when you disagree with them, and I certainly did ... they worked against me in every election I had in Arkansas.