Category Archives: Mike Huckabee

What’s a ‘mainstream Republican?’

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Remember this David Brooks piece I called to your attention yesterday? I continue to be fascinated by the way "conservatives" are pulling their party apart, to the point that pundits not of their persuasion have trouble describing the viscera thus exposed.

Mr. Brooks wrote of how a nouveau kind of guy like Mike Huckabee can take on the various aspects of the GOP coalition embodied by "Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush" and prevail. In today’s paper we have David Broder and George Will trying to describe the same GOP elephant from different angles.

David Broder, a man whom I greatly respect even though he has an unshaken faith in the importance of the political parties that I believe are the ruination of America, is clinging to the definitions and alliances with which he is familiar. For instance, he uses the term, "mainstream Republicans," as though it is a term that is still easily understood, and therefor meaningful to the reader. He uses it here:

    …But McCain and Huckabee have yet to build broad constituencies among
mainstream Republicans. Huckabee’s following is centered among
evangelical Christians, who dominated the low-turnout Iowa caucuses.
McCain’s greatest appeal is to Republican-leaning independents who
powered his 2000 victory and who remain loyal to him….

And again here:

    …That opens at least something of an opportunity for Rudy Giuliani and
Fred Thompson to demonstrate their ability in Florida, South Carolina
and other states that were part of George W. Bush’s political base. The
mainstream Republicans in those states are still looking for a
candidate…

What do you suppose he means, in the Year of Our Lord 2008? Is a "mainstream American," in his usage, a mainstream American who happens to be a Republican, or a Republican partisan who happens to be at some ideological midpoint in his own party — which is not the same thing at all? I suppose he means the latter. In any case, he seems to be speaking of some theoretical type who remains loyal to "Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush," and is untroubled by any of the associations — if such still exists.

Or maybe he’s thinking of the folks, to be found commenting on this post, who see Fred Thompson as the last Paladin of a "conservatism" which I have asked them to define, because the word by itself means little nowadays.

Or maybe he’s talking about George Will, as being among the Old Guard of pundits. Here’s part of what he wrote for Sunday:

    Like Job after losing his camels and acquiring boils, the conservative
movement is in distress. Mike Huckabee shreds the compact that has held
the movement’s two tendencies in sometimes uneasy equipoise.

    Social
conservatives, many of whom share Huckabee’s desire to “take back this
nation for Christ,” have collaborated with limited-government,
market-oriented, capitalism-defending conservatives who want to take
back the nation for James Madison. Under the doctrine that
conservatives call “fusion,” each faction has respected the other’s
agenda. Huckabee aggressively repudiates the Madisonians.

    He and
John Edwards, flaunting their histrionic humility in order to promote
their curdled populism, hawked strikingly similar messages in Iowa,
encouraging self-pity and economic hypochondria. Edwards and Huckabee
lament a shrinking middle class. Well…

Mr. Will (whenever I type "Mr. Will," I hear Sally Field addressing John Malkovich in "Places in the Heart") misunderstands the difference between Huckabee’s and Edwards’ brands of populism, between hope and anger. He just knows he doesn’t like populism. Neither do I, generally speaking, but I can tell that there’s a chasm the happy kind espoused by Mr. Huckabee and angry kind pushed by Mr. Edwards.

In any case, conservatism, like liberalism, ain’t what it used to be. And considering the way those ideologies have been defined for the last three decades or so, that’s a good thing.

Staying in touch with his bass

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Huckabee_2008_wartfender

We know Mike Huckabee is a versatile kind of guy — governor, preacher, ex-broadcaster, man from Hope, self-described conservative, populist — but does he play not one, but two separate musical instruments?

Until recently, I sort of ignored scribes
who wrote that he "plays guitar," assuming they don’t know a guitar from their elbows. Clearly, he plays bass — that’s what you see in all the pictures, as the one above, in which he is playing a Fender.

Les_paul_2But one picture moved on AP recently over this caption:

** FILE ** Republican presidential hopeful, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee rests after playing his guitar while campaigning in Boscawen, N.H.,in this Dec. 14, 2007, file photo. As part of a series of questions the Associated Press asked presidential candidates about their personal tastes, traits and background, candidates were asked to name their favorite gadgets. Huckabee answered: "Probably my laptop. Or my bass guitar and amplifier." (AP Photo/Cheryl Senter, file)

In the photo, at right, he is shown standing next to (but not, mind you, playing) a Les Paul.

So does he actually play both? Does anyone out there know? I need to get this key fact straight in my mind before we consider endorsements next week.

By way of full disclosure: I am a Gibson man myself — although my particular instrument is a reproduction vintage Flying V.

Flying_v_002

Passing of the GOP Old Guard

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Check out the David Brooks column we ran in today’s paper, particularly these paragraphs:

    Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize. First, evangelicals have changed. Huckabee is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. He’s funny, campy (see his Chuck Norris fixation) and he’s not at war with modern culture.
    Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their leaders’ ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and K Street. Most importantly, he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.

I believe he’s on to something. The folks who attended the Iowa GOP caucuses Thursday night certainly thought he was on to something.

If you want to win as a Republican these days, you have to approach things a lot differently from the way George W. Bush and Mark Sanford (as pure an example of a "Club for Growth" guy as you’re likely to find) have. And, unfortunately for Mitt Romney, being a "Suit" doesn’t cut it any more. (Thinking a person would be good at politics because he’s good at business is about like assuming that a good swimmer would automatically be a good tennis player — it MIGHT happen, but one does not really lead to the other.)

This New Wave going to be very interesting to watch, and it might be very good for the country.

In New Hampshire, we’ll get our next indicator as to the direction in which that wave is rolling. Will Huckabee’s crushing Iowa victory over Romney boost him to an unexpected victory — or will it push John McCain over the top?

Separated at birth?

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Huckabee_014

Mike Huckabee, with that friendly Everyman face of his, seems to remind everybody of somebody. In a column coming up Sunday, George Will compares him to Richard Nixon — which I can sort of see, although I’ll warn you that Mr. Will doesn’t mean it in a nice way (but you sort of knew that, right?).

I’ll tell you who he reminds me of — so much so that, when I was flipping channels the other day on the off chance that there’d be something worth watching before popping in the DVD (there wasn’t), I saw this guy and stopped, thinking for a second that it was Gov. Huckabee.

But then I realized it wasn’t. It was another guy, pretending that he already was the president. I did a little research to get specifics.

It was Gregory Itzin, who portrays "President Charles Logan" on "24." Check out his picture, and imagine Mr. Huckabee frowning, rather than wearing his seemingly perpetual smile. See the resemblance? Maybe it’s just me, but I thought it was a little spooky.

By the way, here’s a fun fact to know and tell: At this moment, there are about 210 pictures of Huck on Grin1
the Associated Press wire. And in almost every single one of them, he’s captured with a friendly grin. I just thought I’d tell you that, in case you doubted that Gov. Huckabee is this year’s Jimmy Carter. Remember in 1976, when, if you went by what was printed, you’d think the man was always grinning?

And no, it’s not a conspiracy. The thing is, that’s just the way everybody thinks of this guy who has just fully burst onto the national consciousness. So far, his imageGrin2_2
is one-dimensional. Photographers think, "This is the guy who grins," so they go through their exposures looking for the grinning shots, so they will look like him, and that’s what their editors put on the wire, and that’s what newspaper editors use, because those are the ones that "look like" Huckabee.

Grin3
It’s something you don’t even notice unless you do what I just did, which is deliberately look for a frowning shot. Here’s one of the few exceptions without the winning smile (below), and it still doesn’t quite meet my needs for the comparison to Mr. Itzin. But watch — if the Huckabee candidacy lasts a few weeks longer, we’ll start to see the image take on a fuller set of moods.

Huckabee_2008_iowa_wart

Iowa: The Politics of Joy Redux

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Obamajoy

OK, since everybody ignored my plea and paid attention to Iowa anyway (as I knew they would), here’s an observation that is hardly original, but I thought I’d provide a place for y’all to talk about it.

What happened last night was a remarkable case of caucusers going for new, fresh, upbeat, hopeful change over ticked-off, bitter, resentful, angry same-old. It’s almost HHH’s "Politics of Joy," only more convincing.

Caucusers (as distinguished from voters, which is what you will encounter in New Hampshire and South Carolina), went for the squeaky-new, self-described "conservative that’s not mad at anybody over it" and Barack Obama’s optimistic, youth-and-future-oriented Call to Service. Rather than Humphrey, I’d cast Huckabee as Jimmy Carter (think, "Scandal-weary nation turns to evangelical Southern newcomer") and Obama as JFK in this context. Anyway, to the extent that this phenomenon is borne out in broader venues, it bodes well for America.

And it bodes very badly for Mitt Romney, whose constant attack mode, amplified with all that money, had to be a huge turnoff to folks in a looking-for-joy sort of mood. It bodes even worse for John Edwards, who picked the wrong year to switch from Happy Populist (a role gratefully seized by Obama and Huckabee) to Angry Populist. And (here I’m really reading way more into Iowa than anyone should) it could spell the beginning of the end for Hillary Clinton, whose candidacy depends completely on the voters being willing to endure four more years of the wretched partisan bickering of the Clinton-Bush years.

Last night’s result caused me to amend my opinion of Iowa in one respect — obviously, with these results, the caucuses this year were a measure of more than just "organizational skill" (fourth paragraph of today’s column). These results show that even the unabashed partisans who show up at caucuses are susceptible to a new mood rising and sweeping through the Zeitgeist. And that bodes even worse for the aforementioned campaigns, because if their money and organization don’t serve them well in THIS controlled environment, what fresh humiliations will they suffer out here in the broader electorate?

But enough about that. I’m more eager than ever now to see what happens in New Hampshire on Tuesday.

Huckabeejoy

Must we fight about evolution AGAIN?

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This morning I was in the men’s library (to use an old Knight Ridder Washington Bureau euphemism) perusing The New York Times. Turns out it was the NYT of Dec. 19, but under such circumstances beggars can’t be choosers.

Anyway, I ran across a piece about Mike Huckabee’s famous "floating white cross" TV commercial. We’ll set the cross controversy aside for the moment. What struck me was the Times‘ assessment of the potential downside of the ad:

While that may work in Iowa, the religiosity of the message may turn
off more-secular voters elsewhere, and remind them that Mr. Huckabee
has been dismissive of homosexuality and indicated that he does not
believe in evolution.

We’ll also, if you don’t mind, set aside the homosexuality thing. What got me going was the bit about how "he does not
believe in evolution."

What does that mean — "believe in evolution?" As an overriding credo — as opposed to, say, believing in God? If so, then put me in the disbeliever’s corner with Mr. Huckabee.

Or does it mean believing in evolution as a mechanism through by which organisms have developed into their present shapes? If so, yeah — I believe in evolution. But I can certainly understand why Mr. Huckabee has been dodgy on the issue, saying such things as "I believe God created the heavens and the Earth. I wasn’t there when he did it, so how he did it, I don’t know."

Or at least, I can understand why I would be dodgy about the issue, were I in his shoes. I would resist every effort to pin me down on one side or the other of what I see as a false choice: That between religion and science.

To me, this dichotomy is as bogus, as pointless and as unnecessary as the chasm that the MSM tell us exists between "liberal" and "conservative," "Democrat" and "Republican," or what have you. I’ll tell you a little secret about this universe: Very few things that are true fit into an either-or, yes-or-no, black-or-white model. At least as often as not, it’s "both-and" or "neither."

Trying to make a Southern Baptist preacher either offend secularists by asserting that the world was created in six days or dismay his co-religionists by saying that’s a metaphor is a lot like those wise guys asking Jesus to offend either his followers or Caesar with the trick question about taxes. I’ve gotten nothing against asking a guy to be clear; I do have a problem with a question that seems designed to make the questioned a bad guy either way.

In fact, in the interest of clarity, here’s what I believe:

  • Evolution seems to me exactly the sort of majestic, awe-inspiring way that God would have created us.  He’s no magician doing parlor tricks, as in Poof, here’s a man! or Zing! There’s a mountain; he’s the actual Master of Space and Time (and more; I just can’t explain it, being trapped as I am in space and time). He’s the only Guy I know who can complete a project that  takes billions of years. Therefore evolution has his handwriting all over it. It’s his M.O.
  • I believe in "natural selection," if by that you mean mutations that adapt an organism to his environment and enable him to
    survive to reproduce are the ones that prevail. The guy who can
    outrun the saber-toothed tiger is the one who gets all the grandkids.
  • I do not believe in "natural selection" if by that you mean "random chance." I don’t believe those  aforementioned mutations just happen. That offends me intellectually. So many adaptations seem so clever, so cool, so inspired, that there’s just gotta be somebody out there to congratulate for having come up with the idea. Yeah, 4.54 billion years gives random chance a lot of room to work with, but not enough to satisfy me. If you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with a typewriter you do not get Shakespeare; you get an infinite amount of monkey poop smeared on a perfectly good sheet of paper.
  • I believe that, judging by this photograph, Charles Darwin may indeed be descended from an ape. Check out the brow on that guy!
  • I believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, in that it describes better than any other book the development of a continuing relationship, a blossoming revelation, between Man and  God over a period of thousands of years.
  • I do not believe that Adam and Eve were actual individuals, living at the same time, whom you could photograph if you had a time machine, the way you could photograph Benazir Bhutto if you dialed that same machine back a couple of weeks (and had a plane ticket to Karachi). I read a lot, you see, and I’ve developed a knack for telling poetry from prose, hyperbole from understatement and the like. And reading Genesis, it’s pretty clear that this is an allegory that describes truths about our relationship to God, not a court stenographer’s version of what happened in a leafy garden in Mesopotamia one week long ago. Have you never noticed that novels often tell us more true things about how life is lived in the world than, say, nonfiction textbooks about geology or algebra do? There is great moral truth in Genesis, and that’s what we’re supposed to take away from it.
  • I do believe that some wise guy asked Jesus (who was probably known as "Yeshua" among friends) the aforementioned trick question about taxes. That has the ring of a very real situation, one that takes its meaning from the particular political situation in which a first-century rabbi would have found himself. It was clever, but not nearly as smart as his answer, and it’s just the sort of thing his friends would have remembered and told about him later. It also contains great moral truth, as does the story of the Garden of Eden.

Well, I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that I get offended when someone is questioned in a format that seems designed to make him choose sides between the "godless Darwinists" or the "Bible-thumping rubes."

Finally — and this is really where I was going with all this; the Huckabee stuff was just my way of warming up — do we really have to have another stupid, pointless argument over evolution in the classroom? This story I read over the holidays seems to indicate that we do. May God deliver us.

Belated, inadequate thoughts on Bhutto

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Pakistan_bhutto_kille_wart

I was actively avoiding posting last week, trying to have a real vacation for once and saving my strength for the home stretch heading up to the S.C. primaries. Not to mention the Legislature coming back next week.

So I didn’t say anything about Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. But I will now share what I was thinking at the time. It was basically two simple thoughts:

  1. This should provide a good gut check for all those people running for president — do they really want this job? Do they really think they know how to react in a situation such as this? Are people like Mike Huckabee, who has so many fine domestic sensibilities but NO foreign policy experience, thinking "Hey, wait a minute…"?
  2. Does an event like this reverse the process that David Brook wrote of last month. I thought his explanation of why Iowa voters were turning to Mr. Huckabee and Barack Obama was on-point: The success of the surge had made foreign affairs sink to the background in the public’s mind, and made them feel free to look around for a "postwar" president.

But make no mistake. Dealing with ungodly messes such as this is the main, chief, most essential part of the job description. The rest is mostly window-dressing by comparison. We need a wartime consigliere. Maybe it should be Obama or Huckabee. But if people are turning to them because they think "Happy Christmas/War is Over," they should think again.

I resisted writing the above during my vacation because … well, because I hate the way so many commentators change the subject from an important, knotty policy problem to electoral politics. They do it because they know electoral politics, or think they do, so that makes things easier.

But the truth is, it’s what I was thinking. And the further truth is, the biggest effect that you and I can have on the course of events in Pakistan and the next, yet-unidentified powder keg is to choose a president who’s a lot better qualified to choose a course of action than I am. Personally, looking at the chaos that Mrs. Bhutto’s death created, I would have no idea what to do or say next — if I were the one who had to do the saying and doing. I was truly at a loss.

Which Democrat would the UnParty embrace?

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Joe Lieberman’s endorsement of John McCain dramatizes the Arizonans status as the one Republican most in tune with the UnParty. To quote from Sen. Lieberman’s statement:

    "I know that it is unusual for someone who is not a Republican to endorse a Republican candidate for President. And if this were an ordinary time and an ordinary election, I probably would not be here today. But this is no ordinary time — and this is no ordinary election — and John McCain is no ordinary candidate.
    "In this critical election, no one should let party lines be a barrier to choosing the person we believe is best qualified to lead our nation forward. The problems that confront us are too great, the threats we face too real, and the opportunities we have too exciting for us to play partisan politics with the Presidency.
    "We desperately need our next President to break through the reflexive partisanship that is poisoning our politics and stopping us from getting things done. We need a President who can reunite our country, restore faith in our government, and rebuild confidence in America’s future.
    "My friend John McCain is that candidate, and that is why I am so proud to be standing by his side today…"

Does anyone else on the Republican side have UnPartisan potential? Sure, to differing degrees. Rudy Giuliani has certain appeal across party lines, and one of our commenters had it right when he compared Mike Huckabee to Jimmy Carter (Lee didn’t mean it as a compliment, but that doesn’t make the comment less true).

But Lieberman definitely gave McCain a big leg up in this regard.

That said, who on the Democratic side is most likely to appeal to UnPartisans? This is a tricky question. David Brooks (who, as you will recall, wrote of the McCain-Lieberman Party last year) framed part of the dilemma well in a column that will run on our op-ed page tomorrow. One the one hand, Hillary Clinton has been a significant bipartisan force as a senator:

    Hillary Clinton has been a much better senator than Barack Obama. She has been a serious, substantive lawmaker who has worked effectively across party lines. Obama has some accomplishments under his belt, but many of his colleagues believe that he has not bothered to master the intricacies of legislation or the maze of Senate rules. He talks about independence, but he has never quite bucked liberal orthodoxy or party discipline.

All very true. On the other hand, Barack Obama is the guy who wants to be president of all of us, while Mrs. Clinton tends to attract those who want to "take back" the White House for their partisan faction:

     Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side.
    But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.

Then, of course, there’s Joe Biden, who has more experience working effectively across the lines toward pragmatic policies than either of them. Unfortunately, David Brooks isn’t writing about Sen. Biden, and too few are thinking about him. But he certainly deserves the UnParty’s careful consideration.

I’m sure that’s a great comfort to him, don’t you think?

Talkin’ trash about Adam and Eve

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Back on this post, Gordon sought to discredit Mike Huckabee (at least, I think that’s what he was trying to do; correct me if I’m wrong, Gordon) by noting that he has been quoted as saying that Adam and Eve were real people.

OK, I know that we’re building up to a huge food fight between Creationists and Darwinists, with poor ol’ Huck in the middle. But on this point, I’m confused: I thought scientists said Adam and Eve were real people, just that they never actually met…

… which, when you think about it, seems like really going out of your way to gossip about our ancestors. If I hear them right, these science chaps are saying that our honored great-to-the-nth-power grandad Adam wasn’t the daddy of all Eve’s children; that some of us came from somebody we never heard of. Such talk strikes me, as a member of the family, as unseemly after all these years.

Your Huckabee video headquarters

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Back when we interviewed Mike Huckabee on Sept. 20, not all that many folks were interested in him. Now, it seems he’s the hottest thing going.

It occurs to me that some of y’all might be interested in seeing some of the video clips I posted from our interview way back when he was "HuckaWho?" If so, here you go.

We start with "Introducing Mike Huckabee," linked above, which sort of serves as the "Meet the Beatles" of this genre — get-acquainted stuff that speaks to his down-home appeal. He talks about his background, from his ability to get along with Democrats to the fact that he’s "a conservative that’s not mad at anybody over it."

Then there is the clip that pairs with my column, "Mike Huckabee on the obligation to govern." It was so refreshing to talk to a governor who still holds to the old-fashioned notion that government serves a useful purpose, and that it is the responsibility of the governor to play a constructive role in it. Here’s that one:

A few days after we met Mr. Huckabee was the 50th anniversary of the integration of Little Rock schools, so I edited this clip about that, about which he had some pertinent things to say:

Finally, a couple of weeks later, Cindi asked me to see if I had any footage with Mr. Huckabee sharing his views on health care, which I did. She remembered he’s said some stuff she thought sounded good, but her notes were incomplete. Cindi did a column that drew on the clip. Here’s the clip:

You’ll note that there’s no footage on what he thinks about evolution. or about homosexuals in the military. That’s because it would never occur to me to ask a presidential candidate about those things.

If I get time over the coming days, I’ll go through the rest of my footage to see if I can find anything else that might be of interest.

Hal makes up his mind: It’s Huckabee

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Back in this column, and in a followup post, I’ve been following Hal Stevenson’s very careful, prayerful process of discernment as he has tried to decide whom he would support in the primaries. That’s been a matter of concern to more folks than just Hal himself, given his leadership position with the Palmetto Family Council.

Anyway, Hal’s made up his mind, and for him it’s a logical choice:

Brad-

I promised to let you know when I decided to back a candidate for president.
I have indeed settled on mike huckabee.  The campaign wants to prepare a news release but I told them I wanted to let you know first. I was very humbled by the respect you showed for my opinion and am grateful for the kind words. I am not asking you to write anymore about it, but wanted to make sure you knew. Without going into all my thinking on the subject, I guess the one big challenge for me with him was is he really viable- a conversation I had with a business associate in nyc (a self-described non religious person) who expressed interest in him and huckabee’s recent surge have convinced me that he can attract more than just evangelicals. Let me know if you would like to discuss further.

hal

So you read it here first, and for that I’m grateful to Hal.

As for the "is he really viable" part. Well, he certainly is now. It’s interesting to ponder on why, at this time. I mean, I’ve always like the guy, although I’ve had some reservations. I don’t think his tax plan is sufficiently well-considered, and I’m very concerned about the holes in his understanding of (or at least, expressed understanding of) foreign affairs.

David Brooks has an interesting column, which will appear on our op-ed page tomorrow, as to why, all of a sudden, that doesn’t matter. He posits that recent events — the success of the "surge," the NIE on Iran, the setback Hugo Chavez suffered in the Venezuelan referendum, and even the Annapolis peace meeting, have moved foreign affairs off the front burner. He goes so far as to suggest this is now a "postwar election."

I have two reactions to that: One, he’s probably right in that at this moment in time — not last month, and not next month — candidates such as Huckabee and Obama have been given a chance they would not normally have in a wartime election. Two, I think that if people really do think the world has gone away and we don’t have to worry about it any more, they are profoundly wrong. Even given those examples:

  • Iraq can collapse at any time, but even if things keep going well, we will be heavily involved there for years.
  • The NIE only did one thing — made it harder to keep up diplomatic pressure on Iran. It did not change the fact that the mullahs are busily enriching uranium as fast as they can, and can have the bomb as early as 2010.
  • Chavez is still in power, and the need to radically change our energy policies to reduce the power of him, the Iranians, Putin and many others is as urgent as ever.
  • Annapolis has very, very far to go before we have a right to be optimistic about even getting on the road to Mideast peace.

But yeah, I get how polls could be affected at the moment. And none of that should negate Hal’s perfectly reasonable endorsement of Huckabee.

I’ll add one thought, though: Hal says it sort of came down to either Huckabee or McCain. McCain, of course, benefits if you still think the world is a dangerous place — or at least a place that requires our committed attention. But if you think the war is over, McCain has put too many eggs in that basket to remain among the four — excuse me; it’s now five — contenders for the GOP nod.

By the way, Hal didn’t cite that as his reason for endorsing Huckabee. He said that when he talked to Huckabee, the candidate said of other campaigns, "They may want you, but I need you." And Hal is, to his credit, a guy who wants to make a difference.

And note what he says about his friend in New York: Part of Huckabee’s appeal to him is that he is someone who folks who would be turned off by a Pat Robertson endorsement could go for. That speaks to the reason I talked with Hal about this subject to start with — I wanted to know the thinking of a "values voter" who wasn’t going to sellout for an illusory sense of "winnability" the sort of thing that apparently led Robertson to Giuliani (and, apparently, Bob Jones III to Romney).

What ABOUT a McCain-Huckabee ticket?

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Mccain07

This piece by David Broder, which we ran on our op-ed page, intrigued me. Broder is of course the dean of national political writers, so when he says here’s a political combo that would work, I tend to take notice. I had meant to call attention to it on the day that it ran, but got busy and forgot.

So, for the sake of y’all’s discussion, here it is now:

Principles Amid the GOP Pack
By David S. Broder
Sunday, December 2, 2007
If the Republican Party really wanted to hold on to the White House in 2009, it’s pretty clear what it would do. It would grit its teeth, swallow its doubts and nominate a ticket of John McCain for president and Mike Huckabee for vice president — and president-in-waiting.
    Those two are far from front-runners. They trail Mitt Romney in Iowa and New Hampshire and lag behind Rudy Giuliani in national surveys of Republican voters. But, in a series of debates, including last week’s CNN-YouTube extravaganza, McCain and Huckabee have been notable for their clarity, character and, yes, simple humanity.
    From everything I have heard on the campaign trail, it’s obvious that they are the pair who have earned the widest respect among the eight Republican candidates themselves. McCain is the eldest and the most honored, not only for what he endured as a Vietnam prisoner of war but as a principled battler for what he considers essential on Iraq and other national security issues.
    Huckabee, who previously was known only to those of us who cover state government and governors, has been the surprise discovery of the campaign season. His combination of religious principle, good humor, tolerance and clear passion on education and health care complements McCain’s muscular foreign policy and aversion to wasteful domestic spending.
    The two of them seem often to be operating on a different — and higher — plane than the quarrelsome Giuliani and Romney, whose mutual contempt is as palpable as it is persuasive.
    Fred Thompson appears perpetually grumpy — a presence hard to imagine inhabiting the Oval Office. The three House members — Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter — are exercising their lungs but running for exercise, happy to be part of the proceedings but with no hope of being nominated.
    What sets McCain and Huckabee apart is most evident in the way they treat the contentious issue of illegal immigration. Both of them have been burned by it — Huckabee in a losing battle with his legislature over tuition breaks for children of illegal immigrants; McCain for his sponsorship of President Bush’s comprehensive immigration reform. Both now acknowledge — as everyone must — that the failure of the federal government to secure the southern border has produced broad public outrage.
    But, unlike the others, who seem to take their rhetorical cues from the rabidly anti-immigrant Tancredo, Huckabee and McCain always remember that those who struggle to reach the United States across the deserts or rivers of the Southwest are human beings drawn here by the promise of better lives for their families.
    After outlining the failed Senate effort to pass a bill that included a temporary guest worker program and a pathway to earned citizenship for the illegal immigrants already living here, McCain said, "What we’ve learned is that the American people want the borders enforced. We must . . . secure the borders first. But then . . . we need to sit down as Americans and recognize these are God’s children as well, and they need some protections under the law and they need some of our love and compassion." That answer was interrupted by applause.
    Huckabee was asked to defend a bill he sponsored that the questioner said "gave illegal aliens a discount for college in Arkansas by allowing them to pay lower in-state tuition rates."
    The former governor corrected him. The bill, he said, "would have allowed those children who had been in our schools their entire school life the opportunity to have the same scholarship that their peers had, who had also gone to high school with them and sat in the same classrooms. . . . It wasn’t about out-of-state tuition."
    Romney was not appeased. He said Huckabee sounded like a Massachusetts liberal, giving the taxpayers’ money to people who are here illegally.
    To which Huckabee replied: "In all due respect, we’re a better country than to punish children for what their parents did. We’re a better country than that." He, too, was applauded.
    I think we are that better country. And I hope the Republicans agree.
    [email protected]

Huckbeas

Is Romney the Republican Hillary?

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Even as Hillary Clinton is being criticized for going negative on Obama (and Obama is apparently making the most of it), as I try to clean up e-mail from the past week, I see a similar pattern starting to emerge over on the GOP side.

It’s a testament to Mike Huckabee’s rising status in recent days that, even before the Des Moines Register poll came out, he was under attack by Mitt Romney:

And as we know, THEM’S FIGHTIN’ WORDS among the sort of folk Romney is trying to win over (and trying to express that he is one of, which is the amusing part).

Of course, Romney wasn’t entirely alone in going after Iowa’s new front-runner. Here’s a release from Fred Thompson. Poor ol’ Fred just wants to get noticed these days, I suppose.

Huckabee starting to appeal to his bass?

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Huckabass

OK, sorry about the pun (not really), but almost as exciting as the Obama surge (and I hope Obama supporters won’t mind my using that word), is the fact that Mike Huckabee — possibly on the strength of Christian conservatives finally noticing him — has overtaken Mitt Romney in Iowa.

I continue to find it difficult to believe that Republicans will nominate either Mr. Romney or Rudy Giuliani, no matter how many times I’m told that they will; apparently some folks in Iowa are starting to think the same thing.

Oh, one more thing about Mr. Huckabee — second only to John McCain (who’s done it in a tougher league), nobody on the Republican side has a stronger record of reaching across the aisle and working with people from The Other Party. That means the Huckabee surge can also be seen as good news for the same reason as the Obama news is…

I’m withholding judgment until I hear from Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler

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What’s with the preacher man lining up endorsements from all the tough guys? First Chuck Norris, and now it seems that Ric "The Nature Boy" Flair also ♥s Huckabee.

It just gets weirder all the time. A natural conservative Christian candidate like Huckabee watches as theLawler
religious right lines up behind Romney, Giuliani and Thompson, and the guys who make a living making the OTHER guy turn the other cheek are going with the ex-clergyman.

I’m not going to be swayed by any of it — especially not by any grappler out of Charlotte. When it comes to professional wrestling and martial arts, I go the same way that I go on barbecue — Memphis style, all the way. Get back to me when Jerry "The King" Lawler (at right) and Kang Rhee make their endorsements.

Video to go with Cindi’s health care column

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During the course of writing her column for today’s paper, Cindi asked me to comb back through my video from our editorial board meeting with Mike Huckabee, to help her reconstruct some quotes that she had not taken down completely in her notes.

Above you see what I put together for her. As it happens, I got almost every bit of what he said on health care, except for a view seconds when my camera automatically shut off recording (which it does after three minutes of video), and I had to restart it.

Look on it as a bit of show-and-tell to complement her column. The column itself is the third part of a three-part series. Here is part one, and here is part two.

Soul-searching in the secular realm of politics

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Hal1

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
A reader recently told me she enjoys my columns because she likes to follow my “soul-searching” as I try to work through an issue. I suggested she keep reading — who knows; someday I might actually find something.
    But I knew what she meant, and took it kindly. That’s the kind of commentary I value, too. That’s why I called Hal Stevenson on Friday to talk about the upcoming presidential primaries.
    Hal is a political activist of the Christian conservative variety. He’s a board member and former chairman of the Palmetto Family Council, which has its offices in a building he owns on Gervais Street. He’s also one of the most soberly thoughtful and fair-minded people I know, which to the national media probably constitutes an oxymoron: The thoughtful Christian conservative.
    When last I saw Hal, he had brought Sen. Sam Brownback in for an editorial board interview regarding his quest for the GOP presidential nomination.
    Since then, several things have happened:

    Of all those, the nod I would have valued the most was that of Sen. Brownback — like me, a convert to Catholicism. When he spoke of the impact of faith on his approach to leadership, it actually seemed to have something to do with Judeo-Christian beliefs: He spoke of acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly.
    By contrast, Pat Robertson’s explanation as to why he was endorsing the one Republican least in tune with religious conservatives seemed to have little to do with spiritual matters, and everything to do with secular ideology and partisan strategy: He spoke of defeating terrorism, fiscal discipline and the selection of federal judges. The first two concerns are secular; the third seemed the least likely of reasons for him to back Mr. Giuliani.
    The ways in which “values voters” interact with the sin-stained realities of power politics have long mystified me, and I wondered: Does a guy like Pat Robertson, with all his baggage (wanting to whack Hugo Chavez, suggesting 9/11 happened because America had it coming), actually deliver more votes than he chases away?
    So I called Hal to help me sort it out. As of lunchtime Friday, when we spoke, he was up in the air about the presidential contest himself, now that his man Brownback was out of it. But he’s sorting through it, and has had face-to-face talks with the candidates he considers most likely.
    “My heart says Huckabee,” he said. “He’s much more like me, I suppose, than the other guys.” But that’s not his final answer. He said when he asked Sen. Brownback why he didn’t get behind Gov. Huckabee, he said “it’d be like endorsing himself, so he might as well stay in himself.” He was looking for someone who offered what he couldn’t, and chose McCain.
    As for Hal, “I did meet with McCain,” who is “certainly a real patriot,” but he’s trying to decide whether the Arizonan’s position on stem cell research — he charts a middle course — “is going to be a deal-killer for me.” (Brownback has told him that McCain says he wouldn’t make such research a high priority as president.)
    He hasn’t decided yet about Mitt Romney. He’s talked with him, and sees him as “a very capable executive… he’s proven that.” But he cites “Sam’s words” about the former Massachusetts governor: “He’s a technocrat, running as an ideologue.”
    While noting that “we don’t look to Bob Jones III for a lot of stuff,” there are “some very credible Christian activists out there supporting Romney.” He mentions state lawmakers Nathan Ballentine and Kevin Bryant, and cites his respect for U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint.
    He says he’s not bothered by Mr. Romney’s flip-flopping on abortion, since he “takes the right position now.” But he worries it could hurt him in the general election, when Democrats could use old video clips to great effect.
    “I am going through a methodical process,” he said, “and I have been impressed with McCain, Huckabee, Romney….”
    He has not, however, met with Fred Thompson, “and I probably wouldn’t waste Giuliani’s time.”
“I respect him for being straightforward and not trying to B.S. us,” he said of the former mayor, but he does not relish having to choose between two pro-choice candidates next November.
    As for the host of “The 700 Club,” “I really don’t much care what Pat Robertson does.”
    “Robertson lost credibility with most thinking evangelicals a long time ago.” Hal said he was turned off back during Mr. Robertson’s own run for the presidency in 1988: “It was all about acquiring political power in the Republican Party,” and that “wasn’t what many of us thought the Christian Coalition was about.”
    While Hal himself is still seeking the answer, “I’ve got good evangelical friends who are working for every campaign.”
    Every Republican campaign, that is. Nothing against Democrats per se, Hal says; it’s just that “A pro-life Democrat doesn’t have a chance in the Democratic primary,” and that is a deal-killer.
    Hal still doesn’t know which of the candidates that leaves please him the most, but in the end, that’s not the point: “The only person ultimately I’m trying to please is the Lord.”

Hal2

So THAT’S why I ♥ Huckabee

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Mike Huckabee is close to the bottom of my "would never vote for" list, but it’s been hard for me to say why. The Wall Street Journal seems to have put its stodgy finger on the explanation this morning with an opinion column by John Fund (how’s that for a Wall Street byline?):

Another Man From Hope
By JOHN FUND
October 26, 2007; Page A16
    Republicans have won five of the last seven presidential elections by running candidates who broadly fit the Ronald Reagan model — fiscally conservative, and firmly but not harshly conservative on social issues. The wide-open race for the 2008 GOP nomination has generated two new approaches.
    Rudy Giuliani, for example, isn’t running away from his socially liberal views, although he has modified them. But he is campaigning as a staunch, even acerbic economic conservative. Should he win the nomination, conventional wisdom has it he may balance the ticket by picking former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as a running mate.
    Mr. Huckabee, on the other hand, is running hard right on social issues but liberal-populist on some economic issues. This may help explain why the affable, golden-tongued Baptist minister was the clear favorite at the pro-life Family Research Council’s national forum last Saturday. And why Mr. Huckabee’s praises have been sung by liberal columnists such as Gail Collins of the New York Times and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek…

I tend to have a warm place in my hear for anybody who confounds those who want to put everyone into a "left" or "right" box.

As it happens, one of the reasons I hate those labels is that I could never fit into one or the other if I tried. If you really strain, and chip away an inconvenient fact here and there, you might be able to cram me into a "conservative" box on social issues, and sometimes cram me into a "liberal" box on fiscal ones — just as Mr. Fund is doing with Mr. Huckabee.

But you’d have to really, really want to do it, because it would not be easy. One of the problems, of course, is that the popular definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" are so twisted and illogical.

For instance, Mr. Huckabee the fiscal "liberal" opposes free trade. Well, I don’t. And how is that "liberal?" A true liberal favors free trade and open markets.

And how on Earth did we ever get to the point that opposition to gun control is a "conservative" position? That makes zero sense. Obviously, gun ownership is a cherish libertarian — that is, liberal — value, while no true conservative (someone honoring tradition, security, stability, the established order) wants there to be so many guns around that you can’t walk the streets safely. The fact that the whole world, from avowed right-wingers to the most disgusted lefties, agree that it IS "conservative" would be enough to convince me I don’t want anything to do with the popular labels of today.

And "populist?" I can’t go with that, either. You don’t have to be a populist to give a damn about the poor and disadvantaged. I care without going for the dumbing-down that comes with populism. If Mr. Huckabee is indeed a populist, then I’ll leave that to him and John Edwards.

Which candidate do YOU hate the most?

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Ahillary             "NEVER? Whaddaya mean, ‘never?’"

Seems like I’ll stoop to anything to get you to click on a blog post, doesn’t it? Sorry about the headline. Tacky. I would never encourage you to hate anyone.

But my point was to share with you the results of this Zogby poll, which found that half the electorate says it would never vote for Hillary Clinton. She has the highest negatives, and Mike Huckabee and Bill Richardson have the lowest, going by that standard. (You may have already read about this, as it came out Saturday, but I’m just now getting around to checking the e-mail account the release came to). An excerpt from the report:

    While she is winning wide support in nationwide samples among Democrats in the race for their party’s presidential nomination, half of likely voters nationwide said they would never vote for New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, a new Zogby Interactive poll shows.
    The online survey of 9,718 likely voters nationwide showed that 50% said Clinton would never get their presidential vote. This is up from 46% who said they could never vote for Clinton in a Zogby International telephone survey conducted in early March. Older voters are most resistant to Clinton – 59% of those age 65 and older said they would never vote for the New York senator, but she is much more acceptable to younger voters: 42% of those age 18–29 said they would never vote for Clinton for President.
    At the other end of the scale, Republican Mike Huckabee and Democrats Bill Richardson and Barack Obama faired best, as they were least objectionable to likely voters. Richardson was forever objectionable as President to 34%, while 35% said they could never vote for Huckabee and 37% said they would never cast a presidential ballot for Obama, the survey showed….

Here’s the full list:

Whom would you NEVER vote for for President of the U.S.?

%

Clinton (D)

50%

Kucinich (D)

49%

Gravel (D)

47%

Paul (R)

47%

Brownback (R)

47%

Tancredo (R)

46%

McCain (R)

45%

Hunter (R)

44%

Giuliani (R)

43%

Romney (R)

42%

Edwards (D)

42%

Thompson (R)

41%

Dodd (D)

41%

Biden (D)

40%

Obama (D)

37%

Huckabee (R)

35%

Richardson (D)

34%

Not sure

4%

I got to thinking about it just now, and wondered for the first time which, of all the candidates, would I be least likely to choose at this point? Here’s how I would rank them personally:

Mind you, that’s just off the top of my head, based on what I know now, without any of my editorial board colleagues setting me straight on any of the calls. And I’ll admit I cheated on one — I can’t even picture "Hunter," much left summon up any relevant impressions, so I just sort of buried him in the pack toward the "less likely" end, hoping no one would notice.

How about you?

McCain’s lame health care plank

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Proving once again the truism that no candidate is right about everything, John McCain is talking about a health care "plan" that sounds an awful lot like the standard GOP laissez-faire approach, which is, "Let’s help them that has put away money to pay for their own health care, and forget (to use the euphemism) everybody else."

Here’s a story about him talking about it in the Upstate.

This is further evidence supporting Mike Huckabee‘s observation that most Republicans don’t have a clue how regular folks who don’t have a bunch of money live.

As he said in an op-ed piece:

I offer a genuinely conservative vision for health-care reform, which
preserves the most essential value of American lives — freedom.

That’s libertarianese for "The last thing in the world we would want government to do is help anybody. (After all, if it did that, you might stop hating it.) Remember, we stand up for your freedom to suffer and die from lack of affordable health care."