Gov. Mike Huckabee talks about his Arkansas' response to Hurricane Katrina, his personal battle with diabetes, and his presidential aspirations.
ED GORDON, host:
From NPR News, this is NEWS AND NOTES. I'm Ed Gordon.
In 2003, Arkansas Republican governor Mike Huckabee was diagnosed with diabetes. Doctors said he had to slim down and shape up. But Huckabee didn't just lose weight, he became a man on a mission. Arkansas now offers nutrition counseling to Medicaid patients and paid exercise breaks to state employees.
Later in the show, we'll hear about some simple and healthy ways to prevent and control diabetes from NEWS AND NOTES medical contributor, Dr. Hilda Hutchinson. But first, we hear from Governor Mike Huckabee. I recently sat down with him to talk about a number of state and national issues, including the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. He says the Federal Emergency Management Agency performed so poorly because its focus has shifted from disaster to the war on terror.
Governor MIKE HUCKABEE (Arkansas): Most people in America are going to more likely be affected by a storm, some natural disaster, than they are by a man-made. And I think it's time to rethink this whole concept of putting homeland security as an enveloping organization, because what we saw in the aftermath of Katrina, there was an extraordinary level of bureaucracy; there was an extraordinary level of miscommunication and total breakdown in the command structure.
GORDON: In fact, you have trailers sitting in Hope, Arkansas that have gone unused to this point; and there's a question as to whether or not they are even going to be allowed to be used for residents. How much strain have you seen on your state in accepting these evacuees? And give us an update on the situation in Hope.
Governor HUCKABEE: Ed, we had over 75,000 evacuees come to Arkansas, and that increased our population by three percent in a five-day period. So it really did stretch our resources. We managed it, but we did it not by dealing with FEMA rules; we did it by essentially saying, we can't wait for them to make decisions. We're going to have to go ahead and act according to what's best for people.
So what I did, I called our agency folks together and said put people first, paperwork second, take care of human needs, and if we've got forms to fill out, they could just wait. Those decisions are best made at a local level where people are looking into the faces of people who hurt, not made from people sitting in some bunker somewhere who have no clue the level of human suffering that's being encountered.
And I think one of the lessons learned is that you've got to empower people at the local level to make decisions and to carry out what's best for those human beings that are in harm's way.
GORDON: What do you see as relates to the question of race, poverty, economics, whichever one you want to pick there, as key factors to the response or lack thereof that we saw from Washington? How much credence do you give to that?
Governor HUCKABEE: None at all. This was not a matter of being unresponsive because people were African American or because they were poor. That really is to me a very cheap political argument. What happened here was a complete breakdown in command and control and communication, the two things you have to have in the aftermath of a disaster. I guarantee you, when those folks stepped off the airplane, we didn't look at their color, their gender, their background, or their checkbooks. We looked at people who were hurting. We took care of them as if they were our own family.
And what we really need to realize is that the breakdown was total and complete from the local, state and federal levels. A lot of it was because the disaster overwhelmed the capacity of the responding agencies. And in part, what Katrina did was to take this completely off of the models of what we normally do, because there was nothing normal about the disaster itself. And we needed people who were empowered to make decisions and to carry them out and execute those decisions immediately without having to crawl through 20 different bureaucrats, each of whom had to make sure that they had their authority imprinted on it before a decision could be made.
GORDON: When we talk about preparedness in this country, one of the issues that we've seen in relation to concern is the health crisis that this country typically finds itself in. And you, on a personal level, not only found that within yourself, where your doctors told you had you not changed your lifestyle, that you may not make it through the decade. But you also believed that this country is going to have to refocus its attention on health and healthcare.
Governor HUCKABEE: Ed, what we really need to do is to start putting an emphasis on health and not just healthcare. And Americans are dying by the hundreds of thousands every year unnecessarily because of chronic diseases brought on by essentially three risky behaviors, being overweight, being inactive, and smoking; and those are all issues that can be addressed by lifestyle changes. And the number one agenda of really this country from a health perspective needs to be not on spending more money to treat disease, but on helping people through incentives, to become healthier, making healthier lifestyle choices, so they don't have those diseases in the first place.
GORDON: And we should note that you were a poster child for much of that.
Governor HUCKABEE: Well, my own personal story is sort of a reflection of what perhaps needs to happen in America. I lost 110 pounds. I realized that my lifestyle was killing me, literally killing me. My doctor confronted me and said, if you don't make some changes, you're going to be dead within a decade, and told me what ended up becoming a title of a book I did called, Quick Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork. And it really shook me up.
And I think there are three stages. There's the shake up, the wake up, and the take up. We have to have the shake up moment where the doctor confronts us or maybe we're confronted by some medical emergency; we have the wake up where we start realizing there's some habits that have to change; and then we take up new habits. We really do make significant changes. We build an exercise regimen into our lifestyle. We start thinking about what we eat. Most of us take better care of our cars and lawnmowers than we even think about the fuel that we put into the tanks of our own bodies to create energy for us.
GORDON: You suffered with Type II diabetes, a disease that disproportionately affects African Americans. And when you talk about African Americans in this country, when you talk about diet and exercise, they're on the low end of the ladder, some of which, quite frankly, those lifestyle changes have been preached but not adhered to. I'm wondering why you think that is the case.
Governor HUCKABEE: I think in many cases it sort of is a reflection of the culture. My own culture is really very akin to that. And growing up poor, and growing up in the south where we fry all of our foods, we pour gravy on top of them, and we do that because that stretches the food dollar.
Many people who have grown up in the deep South or in impoverished backgrounds don't necessarily have the luxury of going out and picking fresh produce and vegetables each day, and making sure they're going to have a nice tossed salad and steamed vegetables. They're trying to get enough calories to meet the energy requirements of the day. As a result, the cultures of how we have learned to eat have really affected us.
In our own state, we have put a disproportionate share of our health focus dollars on the African American community for the simple reason that there's a disproportioned share of African Americans who have hypertension, who have diabetes, who have stroke, and that's costly not only in terms of lifestyle, but the economic impact of that is just dramatic. So it makes sense. And it's the right thing for us to do to try to target populations where there is the greatest need.
GORDON: We should note that you and former president Bill Clinton have teamed up to really get the word out. I know that he is concentrating a great deal on obesity among children. But just in general, you want people to understand to drop the weight and get out there and move around, if you will.
Governor HUCKABEE: That's really simply. And I've often said that America is somewhat reminiscent of an NFL football game. You have 22 people on the field who desperately need a rest, and 70,000 folks in the stands who desperately need some exercise. The result of which is record numbers of people being diagnosed with Type II diabetes; I'm seeing record numbers of people dying at early ages. And I think sometimes people don't understand that when Type II diabetes strikes early, the kid who is diagnosed with Type II diabetes by the time he is a teenager will have vision problems in his 20's; he'll start having heart attacks in his 30's; full renal failure with kidney dialysis by the time he's 40; he'll never see a 50th birthday.
A lot of parents are going to have to wake up realize that kids are not dry cleaning. You don't drop your kids off at school in the morning like a dirty shirt and expect, by the afternoon, to come pick them up after they've been well educated, well federal, well exercised and ready to go for the next day. It is a lifestyle. It has to be caught more than taught. Parents who don't model good behavior aren't going to see it in their kids. Our whole culture has to change in terms of how we put a focus on what kind of foods are pleasurable and right and how much of it we should eat, what kind of activity levels. We have to rethink the design of our communities. There's a whole host of things that come into play here, and it's not adequate to say, gee, if we just have P.E. classes and get rid of vending machines at school, we're going to have a bunch of healthy kids. That's nonsense.
ED GORDON: All right, governor. Before we let you go, I have to ask you the obligatory question. We have had, over the course of the last couple of weeks, a number of people who've been highly touted as possibilities for 08 and the White House. Your name, of course, is on that list. We've see recently the governor seat be a great pipeline to the White House. Are you interested?
Governor HUCKABEE: Well, I'm not ruling it out, and I'm not ready to make the announcement and stand up on the steps of the Capitol and say, this is the day, but I do think, you know, I'm certainly flattered that I'm even on the list, and it's something that I can't ignore and I'm not going to ignore, and over the next year, I'm going to give serious consideration to it, and one of the reasons is because I do think America needs to have a new focus on personal responsibility of taking care of ourselves and moving to a different kind of culture of service and sacrifice, but also believe this, that governors tend to end up getting on that list because everyday, unlike members of Congress who can just make speeches, we've got to make decisions. We have solve problems. We have to balance a budget, make schools work, fix roads and do things that people live and die by everyday.
GORDON: And what do you tell African-Americans who may read that you are, perhaps, most likely to inherit George Bush's quote, "conservative, evangelical base," and they may feel that you may not be on the same track as they are in terms of many of the social issues that they're looking at?
Governor HUCKABEE: Well, you know, Ed, there's a reason that I got 49 percent of the African-American vote as a Republican in my home state here in Arkansas back in 1998 and over 40 percent of that same African-American vote even in the 2002 election because people look behind party labels when your record reflects that what you've done is you've really targeted resources toward people who needed the most. I didn't grow up in some Ivy League, silver spoon environment. In fact, it was much more of a struggling environment. I tell people, I've got a lot more in common with folks working in the kitchen than I do the ones sitting at the head table, and I think that has been reflected in the record I have in public service, so I'm quite comfortable with the scrutiny of that record and how it's impacted, not just African-Americans but all minorities and the number of women and others that have had an opportunity to serve in my administration at levels that are unprecedented in my state.
GORDON: Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, we thank you for joining us today.
Governor HUCKABEE: Ed, it's a pleasure to be with you.
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