Huckabee lost me as soon as he started pulling out the class warfare arsenal and calling the Club for Growth the “Club for Greed.” Which, in addition to being a serious mischaracterization of C4G, is really just a terrible insult. If you really want to tackle the Club for Growth, you’d better be a little more creative than that.
Here we Dick Morris ardently defending Huckabee’s record as a fiscal conservative (to which I say: then why is he so willing to pound the “rich-people-and-corporations-are-evil” drum). But what really caught my eye was the way he tried to paint the race as a three-way contest between Giuliani, Romney and Huckabee.
When voters who have decided not to back Rudy Giuliani because of his social positions consider the contest between Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, they will have no difficulty choosing between a real social conservative and an ersatz one.
Romney, who began as a pro-lifer and switched in order to win in Massachusetts, and then flipped back again, cannot compete with a lifelong pro-lifer, Huckabee.
The choice is not between Romney and Huckabee, it’s between Romney and Huckabee and my man Fred Thompson. Not only does Thompson have a perfect pro-life voting record, he’s also a fiscal conservative in the model of (dare I say it?) Ronald Reagan. Unlike Huckabee, Romney or Giuliani, Thompson has actually released a fiscal policy plan that includes a variety of tax cuts and tax reforms that would benefit every American.
So it’s really no wonder that Morris would prefer to act as though Fred Thompson doesn’t exist. He’s the only good choice in a field of half-hearted Republicans who enjoy quoting Reagan without understanding that there are unifying principles behind those talking points.
Finally, this paragraph really rubbed me the wrong way:
But Huckabee’s strength is not just his orthodoxy on gay marriage, abortion, gun control and the usual litany. It is his opening of the religious right to a host of new issues. He speaks firmly for the right to life, but then notes that our responsibility for children does not end with childbirth. His answer to the rise of medical costs is novel and exciting. “Eighty percent of all medical spending,” he says, “is for chronic diseases.” So he urges an all-out attack on teen smoking and overeating and a push for exercise not as the policies of a big-government liberal but as the requisites of a fiscal conservative anxious to save tax money.
Written like a man who doesn’t really believe in conservatism to start with. Mike Huckabee is one of those surely good-hearted people with an unfortunate tendency to conjure rights from thin air. Or, more often, to mistake privileges for rights. For example, illegal immigrants have a right to federal college money too.
Also, the idea that we’re going to start cracking down on smoking, overeating and lethargy is frightening in its implications (and not just because overeating and lethargy are my vices of choice). When we reach a point where government (and through taxation, your fellow citizens) is responsible for health care, why should they not take action to discourage unhealthy lifestyles? But part of living in a free society is that people can choose to be either healthy or unhealthy. They can choose to have bad habits and vices, because their fellow citizens aren’t forced to shoulder the burden of their choices. But when my tax money starts paying for your health care, you can be damn sure I’ll do whatever it takes to get you on that treadmill.
