“My policies have never changed,” Huckabee said when asked whether he had changed his position on taxes. “I balanced the budget. You do what you have to do to balance the budget. I came in with a deficit of about $400 million; I left with a surplus of almost a billion dollars.”

An independent analysis by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette in 2007 found that Huckabee’s governorship resulted in “a net tax increase of $505 million, a figure adjusted for inflation and economic growth, according to the state Department of Finance and Administration.”

The newspaper’s analysis also concluded that the average Arkansan’s annual tax burden was $2,902 the year Huckabee left office — nearly $1,000 more than his first year as governor.

Huckabee Tax Flip-Flop on Production Taxes

During Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate, the former Baptist pastor said that he supported a Fair Tax plan that would eliminate all taxes on production in favor of more taxes on consumption.

“I think we ought to get rid of all the taxes on people who produce,” he said during this week’s GOP debate held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. “Why should we penalize productivity? And it’s why I’m an unabashed supporter of the “fair tax,” which would be a tax on our consumption, rather than a tax on our productivity.”

Yet, that view contradicts Huckabee’s past statements critical of Republican support for regressive taxes.

“One of my complaints with Republicans in my own party is that, true or not, we’re perceived as the people whose tax policies do tilt toward the people at the top end of the economic scale, with disregard to the people who are barely making it,” Huckabee said in 2006, according to the Washington Examiner. “And I think it’s in many ways a legitimate criticism.”

Most economists believe that consumption taxes, such as a sales tax, disproportionately affect the poor and working classes. The left-leaning blog Think Progress has pointed out that “Huckabee signed a 1996 sales tax hike, opposed efforts to reduce grocery taxes, and allowed a sales tax increase to become law in 2004.”

Huckabee renews feud with Club for Growth

When asked about his record of raising taxes, Huckabee also took the opportunity to levy a fresh round of attacks on the Club for Growth, who he dubbed “the people who hate my guts.” In 2007, the national network of limited government and free market advocates published a detailed white paper on Huckabee’s tax record.

“Club for Growth, there’s an organization that loves me,” Huckabee said sarcastically. “If you hear everything they have to say, you’ll have the most absolutely nuanced and inaccurate depiction of my record that you’ll ever be able to find.”

A spokesman for the Club for Growth disputed Huckabee’s characterization that the feud is “personal.”

“He often tries to portray his conflict with the Club for Growth as personal, when in fact, it’s only ever been about his terrible record on taxes and spending,” Club for Growth spokesman Doug Sachtleben told CalWatchdog.com. “While Tax Hike Mike was governor of Arkansas, the overall tax burden in the state rose by 47 percent and the net tax hike was $505 million.”

Huckabee: I Cut Taxes 94 Times

Huckabee’s record as governor of Arkansas has been heavily criticized by fiscal conservatives.

“During his two-term tenure, spending increased by more than 65 percent — at three times the rate of inflation,” Michael D. Tanner, the director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, wrote in December 2007. “The number of government workers increased by 20 percent, and the state’s debt services increased by nearly $1 billion. Huckabee financed his spending binge with higher taxes.”

Although he refused to acknowledge his support for tax increases, Huckabee quickly pointed to taxes he’s cut.

“Ninety-four times we cut taxes,” Huckabee said at the CA GOP convention in Anaheim. “We rebuilt our roads. We did many things like cutting the marriage penalty, reducing capital gains taxes. I did that in the headwinds of the most Democratic legislature in America – more Democratic than even California, more Democratic than Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Oregon, New Jersey.”

The Club for Growth points out that those tax cuts don’t offset his tax increases.

“Huckabee’s substantial tax hikes far surpassed his modest tax cuts, and he has consistently and vigorously defended that record,” Sachtleben said.

At this month’s state GOP convention in Sacramento, the California Republican Party approved the charter of the Log Cabin Republicans of California by an 861-293 vote, making it an officially recognized party organization. Much of the attention following the vote has focused on the political consequences: How the chartered club can help with the party’s re-branding and outreach to the state’s gay and lesbian community.

“This is about working together to win elections in California,” John Musella, the club’s incoming chairman, said in a recent press release. “Being officially recognized sends a strong signal that the Republicans’ ‘Big Tent’ has room for everyone. Our chartering in California should serve as an example of how every Republican organization can stand proud and work together.”

The political impact is significant, but that’s hardly the most important part of the story. In an era when pundits describe politics as hopelessly divided, a group of outcasts succeeded in changing the hearts and minds of their adversaries. The Log Cabin Republicans didn’t just win a charter — they won a major argument in the culture wars in California.

“Seventy-five percent of the body — 75 percent — overwhelmingly affirmed our place in the party,” said Charles Moran, past president of the Log Cabin Republicans of California. “The Republican Party has moved away from fighting those ideological battles and is now focused on winning elections.”

Gays once “the ultimate enemy”

The party has come a long way since those past “ideological battles.” The state party once was led by such Log Cabin opponents as Rep. Bill Dannemeyer, Rep. Bob Dornan and the Rev. Lou Sheldon. Only two decades ago, any association with the gay club was considered toxic in a GOP primary. It’s been 15 years since moderate Republicans joined conservatives in campaigning for Proposition 22, the state’s 2000 defense of marriage initiative that was passed by 61 percent of voters.

And it’s only been seven years since Proposition 8, which also banned same-sex marriage, was passed by 52 percent of state voters.

“In the 1980s, I was afraid to walk around the state convention alone,” Frank Ricchiazzi, a longtime Log Cabin Republican leader, told the L.A. Times in 2012. “I could see the hatred in the eyes of some of those people.”

Back in the late 1970s, when gay Republicans began to organize, they faced off against GOP Assemblyman John Briggs, who had proposed a 1978 initiative to ban gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools. Proposition 8 lost, getting 42 percent of the vote.

“I assume most of them are seducing young boys in toilets,” the conservative Orange County lawmaker said in defense of his Briggs Amendment, according to Gustavo Arellano’s book, “Orange County: A Personal History.” San Francisco, according to Briggs, was nothing more than “the moral garbage dump of homosexuality in this country.”

Although the measure failed, thanks in part to opposition from Ronald Reagan, it still didn’t lessen the rhetoric from some California Republicans.

In the 1980s, Congressman Bill Dannemeyer led the charge with his work, “Shadow in the Land: Homosexuality in America.” He thought “AIDS was God’s way of punishing gays” and described gays and lesbians as “the ultimate enemy.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Dannemeyer believed gays would “plunge our people, and indeed the entire West, into a dark night of the soul that could last hundreds of years.”

1998 Senate race

In the 1990s, the Rev. Lou Sheldon, leader of the Traditional Values Coalition, was at the height of his power. He helped elect Republicans by distributing 4 million voter guides to California churches.  Sheldon routinely cited the threat of “homosexuals” in his literature and held conferences to mobilize like-minded conservatives. A 1991 symposium at the Disneyland Hotel drew spirited opposition from gay and lesbian activists, five of whom were arrested for disrupting the event.

Throughout the 1990s, Sheldon was a central player in GOP politics, while any association with the Log Cabin Republicans could be used as a hit piece against Republicans. In the 1998 U.S. Senate race, GOP Senate candidate Matt Fong was criticized in the primary for receiving support from the Log Cabin Republicans. Fong, considered a moderate, received the club’s backing despite his support for the Defense of Marriage Act. Ironically, the Log Cabin Republicans raised $8,000 for Fong who, in turn, donated $50,000 to Sheldon’s anti-gay group.

“Rev. Lou is a friend,” Fong said of the donation, when it was unearthed for the general election against incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer. “We were working on the Defense of Marriage Act initiative that he was contemplating. It is an act that was supported in principle by President Clinton. I support the defense of a traditional marriage.”

Fong lost the 1998 election to Boxer, 53 percent to 43 percent. The son of longtime Democratic California Secretary of State Marge Fong Eu, he died in 2011 at age 57.

Two years after Fong’s defeat, in 2000 Republican State Sen. Pete Knight authored Proposition 22, a 14-word initiative to ban gay marriage.

The campaign was managed by GOP political consultant Rob Stutzman. He told columnist Debra Saunders polygamy might be next because “there’s a logical extension to it … if you accept the premise that marriage should be whatever relationships people want to enter into.”

Prop. 22 was endorsed by U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who came in second that year for his party’s presidential nomination to future President George W. Bush. In 2008, McCain garnered his party’s presidential nod, but lost to Democrat Barack Obama. Both McCain and Obama opposed same-sex marriage; in 2012, Obama changed his position and backed it.

Barney Frank

Hostility from the right was matched by hostility from the left. Some in the gay and lesbian community viewed the Log Cabin Republicans as “self-loathing” at best or traitors at worst.

“I now understand why they call themselves the Log Cabin Republicans: Their role model is Uncle Tom,” openly gay Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., wrote in 2012; he left office in 2013. “Twenty years now I’ve been hearing why the Log Cabins are gonna make the Republicans better and they’ve been getting worse.”

Frank was referring to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the 1852 novel that helped spark the Civil War; the title character, a slave, is excessively subservient to his white masters.

Yet this month, instead of prominent party leaders using their convention speeches to attack the “homosexual lifestyle,” they embraced the state’s gay Republicans.

“They have been solid soldiers in their fight against leftist tyranny in California,” said California’s Republican National Committeeman Shawn Steel. “I would welcome them in our organization. … I am proud to have them in the California Republican Party.”

H/T to OC Weekly & LA Times for archives. 

“We’re pushing the party outside of its comfort zone,” California Republican Party Chairman Jim Brulte said in advance of the convention. “And we’re already seeing the benefits.”

So did the party’s convention mantra prove to be more than just a slogan?

GOP groups, activists and delegates, who’ve traditionally felt excluded from the state party, describe last weekend’s convention as a “blockbuster” step forward in terms of inclusiveness and creating a broader, more accepting party.

Log Cabin Republicans “Blockbuster” CA GOP Convention

“This convention was blockbuster for Log Cabin,” Charles Moran, chairman of the California Log Cabin Republicans, said of the 2014 spring convention. “The last few years, things have been increasingly getting better for us as we’ve grown and the Party leadership has been more willing to engage with us. But, this convention took that to a whole new level.”

Once at the margins, California’s chapter of the the nation’s largest organization of gay and lesbian Republicans says that it is on the path toward an official charter from the GOP, a thought unheard of just a decade ago. The group’s annual luau-themed convention hospitality suite was packed the entire night, despite being right across the hall from the suite of Assemblyman Tim Donnelly of Hesperia, the conservative running for governor.

Then again, the two aren’t mutually exclusive: many Log Cabin Republicans, and their supporters, are conservative backers of the Tea Party star.

“The mix of people in our suite really does show the diversity of Log Cabin — roughly half the folks in our suite were wearing Donnelly stickers, and the other half Kashkari stickers,” said Moran, who added that gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari, a moderate, was the first candidate at the Log Cabin’s doorstep. “I really can’t think of another place in the convention where there was this much intermingling of the two camps.”

Small accommodations for overlooked groups

It wasn’t just gay and lesbian Republicans that felt more welcomed by the nearly 1,000 delegates and activists at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport. Other groups, who have felt that the GOP wasn’t communicating with them, noticed a change in the party’s desire to communicate. Literally.

At convention after convention, unlike their Democratic counterparts, Republicans have failed to provide an American Sign Language interpreter to accompany convention speakers. That’s now changed.

This year’s spring convention, for the first time in recent history, included an ASL interpreter for deaf and hard-of-hearing delegates.

Consider it a small change that shows the party is serious about its promise to “Rebuild, Renew, Reclaim.”

“We had a request from a delegate, and we want the party to be accessible to all,” party spokesman Mark Standriff said of the change.

Allen Wilson, a state party delegate who is hard of hearing, said he’s been asking the party for years to provide an ASL interpreter. Eventually, he stopped asking.

“I truly thank Chairman Brulte and Vice Chairman Dhillon for making this accommodation,” said Wilson, who is active in Republican politics. “The Deaf and Hard of Hearing struggle everyday on challenges for jobs, education and equal access. We don’t want a handout but acknowledgment of our challenges should come with empathy not sympathy.”

The Hearing Loss Association of America estimates that roughly 20 percent of Americans, 48 million people, report some degree of hearing loss. That number includes a third of Americans over the age of 65 who report some hearing loss.

CA GOP Vice-Chair Harmeet Dhillon: More people heard our message

California Republican Party Vice Chair Harmeet Dhillon, who received complaints from friends that felt excluded from full participation in political events, said she’s proud to see the party make the change.

“I’m proud that our party is really trying to reach every interested voter and activist by making them welcome at our keynote lunch through the inclusion of sign language interpreters at our convention,” Dhillon said. “Today more people were able to receive [former Secretary of State Condolleezza] Rice’s inspirational message about liberty, global responsibility and educational opportunity for all Americans, rich and poor.”

All of the party’s changes are getting noticed by national leaders and the media. Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus told the Bay Area’s KTVU that it’s providing financial support to help the party rebuild. “The RNC national party is spending real money here to help the GOP rebuild itself and we’re starting on the ground,” he said.

“These events have felt like those post-soccer game parties where the team that lost 10-1 tries to convince itself that the next contest will be better,” wrote Steven Greenhut, California columnist for the UT San Diego. “The buzz among convention-goers was that there actually was a buzz.”

If, as many party bosses privately hope, Kashkari wins a place in the Top Two primary election in June, expect the buzz to continue. Top Two produces two winners, the likely other one being Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, who then face off in the November election.

“The first candidate at our doorstep was Neal Kashkari, who gave an impassioned plea for the party to modernize, grow the tent and get with the times,” said Moran of the Log Cabin Republicans.

By Katy Grimes

SACRAMENTO — The 11th Commandment, according to the gospel of former President Ronald Reagan, is an unwritten rule in the Republican Party discouraging public attacks on other Republicans, particularly GOP candidates. “Thou shalt not speak ill of any Republican,” is not intended to discourage debate over ideology, philosophy or policy, but to prevent GOP candidates from launching into personal attacks on each other.

For the most part, the California Republican Party convention held last weekend in Sacramento may have started with an attack on one party candidate, but continued and ended on an upbeat, positive note.

A rousing convention — for CA Republicans

By the last day of the three-day convention, most of the women attendees — except the under-30 crowd — were worn out and had kicked off the killer high heels and slipped into sensible flat shoes. Jeans and Sperry’s replaced the men’s dark blue suits. But even on Sunday, after all-day working sessions and late-night parties and receptions, the 1,300 attendees were still enthusiastic and working hard.

The election of new party Chairman Jim Brulte ushered in a new, distinctive feeling of cohesiveness missing in the party for several years, along with a sense of a new era of leadership.

Brulte’s overwhelming election on Sunday, to loud cheers and visible relief, is a message to the state. Brulte isn’t just any CRP Chairman — he’s a former Assembly and Senate leader, and a well known down-to-business butt-kicker.

The state Republican Party has not only suffered devastating losses in recent years. There has been a glaring lack of cohesiveness, spotty communication, dismal voter registration and lackluster outreach and inclusiveness.

Who is Brulte?

A former assemblyman and state senator, Jim Brulte served 14 years in the California Legislature. He was in the Assembly from 1990-1996, and the Senate 1996-2004, term-limited out both times.

After the Republican Party election Sunday, Brulte promised to step up communications, make sincere connections with California voters and make the party more competitive in upcoming elections.

Brulte has a daunting job ahead.

“The Democrats are borrowing 46 cents of every dollar,” Brulte said. “This has to stop. We Republicans have to get outside of our comfort zone and deliver our message of individual liberty and responsibility.”

Nasty infighting

While there was plenty of support for Brulte and a new and much-needed cohesiveness, there were also problems in paradise.

The good news was San Francisco County Republican Party Chairwoman Harmeet Dhillon was elected as the CRP Vice-Chairwoman — the first woman in the history of the California Republican Party to be elected to the office. But the bad news was her ascension was not without nasty party infighting.

Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney, was widely supported by many California Republican leaders for the vice-chairman’s seat. However, she was recently viciously slurred, and called a “Taj Mahal princess” and Muslim terrorist sympathizer — by a Republican.

“Vera Eyzendooren, the president of the San Bernardino County Federation of Republican Women— an official party group — slammed Dhillon in a recent Facebook post, which included a photo of an Islamic terrorist who beheaded two people,” Carla Marinucci of the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“I was told by one of Harmeet’s friends that because of her religion, her loyalty is to the Muslim religion,” Eyzendooren wrote on Facebook. “So she will defend a Muslim beheading two men without any hesitation……she is not a Republican.”

Dhillon, a devout Sikh, immigrated from India when she was a child.

Fortunately, Eyzendooren’s outrageous and ignorant comments were vehemently denounced earlier in the week and again during the convention by Republican leaders. “Blatant racism has no place in the party of Lincoln,” said a joint statement from outgoing California GOP Chair Tom Del Beccaro, Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff and Assembly Minority leader Connie Conway. “We strongly denounce this hateful speech in this and any other venue.”

Brulte denounced the slur as well.

This is a teaching moment and an important opportunity for Brulte to put an end to the flame-throwing, ignorant, power-seeking faction of the state’s Republican Party. Far too often, this faction seeks opportunities for power, although most of them tend to be moderate crony capitalists. The infighting and vicious attacks have been a problem for many years, but have escalated in recent years through vociferous bloggers and local Republican groups. Perhaps under Brulte’s leadership this divisive faction will be exposed and marginalized.

Looking ahead

“We have to stop talking to each other,” Brulte said. “If we are going to be successful at winning elections, we have to get out of our comfort zone and stop only talking to the choir and going and talking to the people who don’t necessarily share our views, because if we share not only our head, but we share our heart, we will make converts.”

“Twenty-nine percent of California is Republican,” Brulte told delegates after his election. “But 100 percent of 29 percent does not get us to 51 percent.”

Brulte promised to help Republicans regain seats in the state Legislature, saying Democratic control of both houses and the governor’s office “is a recipe for disaster.” Brulte asked delegates to close their eyes and imagine the California they want to see 10, 15, 20 years from now, “And imagine the America you want to see. Is there anyone in this room that actually believes Harry Reid, Barack Obama, Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom can make that happen?”

“There is a fundamental difference between their vision and ours,” said Brulte. “Because the state run by Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom is a recipe for disaster.”