On last Sunday’s Meet the Press, Mike Huckabee told Tim Russert that for voters wondering how his religion would shape his presidency, “the best way is to look at it is how I served as governor.” This week The Los Angeles Times followed his advice. Among other things, the paper found that Huckabee held up emergency disaster insurance legislation for three weeks because he objected to “act of God” language in characterizing natural disasters:

In a time of emergency, Huckabee would hold up the measure for more than three weeks to press his personal objection that the Almighty could not be blamed for the region’s loss. In the process, he drew damaging headlines and created new strains in his relations with the state’s legislature, the General Assembly….
Huckabee at times seemed too biblical even for fellow believer-politicians in the Bible Belt. In the “acts of God” dispute, there is no indication that anyone was harmed by the delay, but some felt that the governor’s religiosity, as politically expressed, came close to pettiness.
” ‘Petty’ is the best word to describe him,” said Dennis R. Young, a state representative at the time who sponsored the relief measure and had been an early Huckabee supporter. “In these kinds of things, he’d make mountains out of molehills.”

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