By David Nather, CQ Staff

Just before Mike Huckabee left office as governor of Arkansas in January, his chief of staff ordered the destruction of 83 computer hard drives in his office — wiping out whatever records were stored on them.

HIGH HOPES: Huckabee, who has taken the GOP lead in Iowa, tours a corporate office in Des Moines on Dec. 3. (GETTY IMAGES / YANA PASKOVA)

It was an unusual move, to say the least. “I never heard of such a thing,” said Jim Argue, a Democrat who was the president pro tempore of the state Senate when Huckabee was governor. “It would be like burning all the paper records.” But Huckabee and his aides were never penalized. The state’s ethics commission dismissed a complaint about the destruction, and the attorney general determined that the crushing of the hard drives did not break any laws.

What records were on those drives remains a mystery. Huckabee has said the destruction was intended only to protect sensitive information such as Social Security numbers. Media groups, however, say it is now impossible to determine whether the records contained anything else that would shed light on important events of his administration. “We’ll just never know,” said Tom Larimer, executive director of the Arkansas Press Association.

By itself, the incident doesn’t alarm government watchdogs who have followed the rise of executive power under President Bush. “Is it a fatal defect? Not necessarily, but it leads you to ask whether it’s part of a pattern,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy.

According to Arkansas political analysts and journalists who are familiar with Huckabee’s record, however, the incident does reflect such a pattern. Despite the affable, quick-witted image that has fueled his sudden rise in popularity among Republican voters, Huckabee had a reputation during his 10A? years as governor for being thin-skinned, easily annoyed by criticism and not interested in sharing information about his activities — all tendencies that can indicate whether a candidate would welcome oversight as president.

During a 1998 controversy over his use of a governor’s mansion financial account, for example, Huckabee declined to respond to media requests for account records, arguing that they were exempt from disclosure. He called aggressive reporters “junkyard journalists.” And when legislators in Little Rock criticized him in 2003 for laying out his agenda without asking for any of their input, he said it would have done no good to ask for their advice because when he had sought their suggestions on a 1997 tax rebate plan, “next thing I knew, they had thoroughly nitpicked it.”

“I don’t think the governor has ever felt warmly toward ethics and transparency issues,” said Art English, a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Larimer said the crushing of the computer hard drives “really didn’t surprise anyone who had dealt with him,” because “his track record was not one of openness in government.”

By most accounts, Huckabee had a rough start in dealing with the legislature but got better over time. He struck some lawmakers as a man who, as a Baptist minister, wasn’t used to scrutiny. But by the time he left office, they say, he had learned more about the give-and-take of legislative politics and had become fairly good at it.

“My view is that his attitude was probably shaped by his experience as a Baptist church pastor,” said Argue. “In a local church, a pastor is on a pedestal, and isn’t really questioned. So that made it a difficult relationship at first.”

By his final years in office, however, Huckabee was able to score some successes, working closely with Argue and others on a 2004 school district consolidation plan that — to Huckabee’s chagrin — was accompanied by the largest tax increase in the state’s history.

In Huckabee’s first two legislative sessions, “I kind of feel like he just threw his agenda out there like a basketball coach throwing the ball to the players to see what they can do with it,” said Bill Stovall, who was the state House Speaker during the 2005 session. In his final years, though, “I think he became fairly polished in dealing with the legislature,” Stovall said.

Argue said that by the end of his term, Huckabee had “learned the same quality you and I already have when we get an e-mail that really ticks us off: We wait a day to respond to it. He finally learned that quality late in his tenure.”

Huckabee clashed with the legislature at times when he felt it was encroaching on his executive authority. In 2004, when lawmakers refused to fund five new staff positions for the governor’s office in Washington, he told them to stop interfering in his business. “We would hope that the legislative branch would recognize that administering the executive branch, specifically the governor’s office, should be left to the governor,” Huckabee said.

If he becomes president, Huckabee has indicated, he will take a fairly broad view of the most important exercise of executive authority: war powers. In the October debate over whether a president would need Congress’ approval to strike against Iran, Huckabee said, “If you have the time and the luxury of going to Congress, that’s always better.” But if Congress refused and Iran presented a nuclear threat, he said, “you do what’s best for the American people and you suffer the consequences.”

“If we think Iran is building nuclear capacity that could be used against us in any way, including selling some of the nuclear capacity to some other terrorist group, then, yes, we have a right” to take military action, Huckabee said. “And I would do it in a heartbeat.”