The Kamikaze Candidacy
By Martin A. Knight Posted in Archived | Mike Huckabee | primaries — Comments (41) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Just after the thumpin' last year I got into an extended fight with the regulars/denizens of GOPProgress - which billed itself as a home for "moderate" i.e. Republican Main Street Partnership types, and "Libertarian" Republicans - the proprietress of which considered it a worthwhile endeavor to come over to Redstate and post a diary boosting Lincoln [*spit*] Chafee(!) as a "Republican" worth donating to in the final stretch of the 2006 campaign.
In the aftermath of the loss of 2006, Liz Mair and her friends (including the RMSP) created this narrative that social conservatives (and social conservatives specifically), like Todd Tiarht, Marilyn Musgrave, Patrick McHenry, Rick Santorum, etc. were behind the GOP's six year failure to live up to its fiscal conservative principles and were thus singularly responsible for our loss in 2006.
I went out of my way to point out that this was nonsense on stilts. As a group, "moderate"/RMSP Republicans regularly compiled far (often, much) worse fiscal/economic records than social conservatives - in fact, the main thing our argument ended up proving was that the more socially conservative a Republican was, the more likely it is that he/she is a fiscal conservative. The reality is that (even now), since Reagan and Gingrich, for most Republicans, social and fiscal conservatism comes together as a package.
I am putting all this out there to establish my bona fides on being a social conservative and having gone on the record defending social conservatism long before most of the Huckabots here signed up. I'm pro-life, anti-gay marriage, pro-Second Amendment ... and I am also very very very opposed to Mike Huckabee winning the Republican Presidential nomination.
Anteater's response to my question asking "Why Should I Vote For Huckabee?" in light of the fact that not a single one of Huck's supposedly high priority agenda items have much of any hope of getting to the floor of any of the Houses of Congress is refreshingly clear and a great deal more revealing about Huckabee's campaign for the nomination than I'd bet even Anteater realizes. Anteater makes no bones about it; Republicans should vote Huckabee because "Huck is the only consistent social conservative." That's it. Every other aspect of conservatism and their adherents in the GOP base be damned.
Why this is revealing is that this is clearly also Huckabee's attitude from observing his campaign. He obviously couldn't care less about the other parts of the GOP base that is just as or even more concerned with fiscal/economic, civic and national security issues; he's just carelessly muddling it through.
How else can one explain the refusal to come up with a coherent fiscal/economic policy that would have helped fiscal conservatives come to terms with the weakness of his fiscal record? There are literally scores of conservative think tanks and big name fiscal conservatives, that would have been more than happy to help him out for the sake of the party having a set of viable Presidential candidates all espousing a fiscally conservative philosophy. But he did not. He instead labels the Club for Growth the Club for Greed. And the result is that we now have ourselves a candidate with a fiscal policy that combines both the Fair Tax and tax credits.
What makes this worse is the fact Huckabee's record of unnecessary taxing and spending is actually is not a new complaint within Republican circles. In Arkansas, and even on Redstate. It would probably shock most of the Huckabots here but the subject of Huckabee's (as well as others like Taft, Riley, Pataki, etc.) woeful fiscal (and immigration) record came up more than a few times last year. Oh? Yes, that is indeed a thread from November 2006.
Then, to further compound the issue, Huckabee now decides to write up an article detailing foreign policy views chock-full of Lefty talking points, pabulum and KnownFacts™ including shoring up the falsehood about Eric Shinseki being fired. For all intents and purposes, he just needlessly made a enemies of the huge majority of conservatives who favor President Bush's (conservative and so far very successful) strong and proactive position on national security.
Again, it would have been the simplest of things for him to have looked for and found solid conservative foreign policy experts, up to and including at least pedigreed Republican "realists" like Brent Scowcroft to reach out to national security/foreign policy conservatives. But he did not.
This is a Kamikaze style of campaigning - deliberately pitting a part of the base against the other(s) because they're apparently the largest in the coalition and they can carry you to victory in the battle for the nomination. The after-effect, of course, is a divided, demoralized party and a lost general election. I won't even get into the awkward situation most of our down-ticket candidates for Congress, Governor's offices and the state legislatures are going to be put into trying to run fiscally conservative campaigns with the Presidential ticket headed by a "populist."
At least Rudy is respectful enough of social conservatives that he regularly attempts to address their concerns - his judicial team is nothing if not top-notch even if it provides no guarantees.
Huckabee - well, as his boosters continue to remind fiscal conservatives, is pro-life and anti-gay marriage. Okay, I guess ...
Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("An argument is a sequence of statements aimed at demonstrating the truth of an assertion.); }
with the nomination though (RCP has him in the lead (most recent polls) in all but NH and NEV of the pre-Feb 5 states). So, unless Romney surges back, I see this as a race between Huck getting enough momentum from early wins to take out Rudy on Feb 5 (where Romney polls bad). The one thing we know from past elections is that the SoCons are much more likely to vote than the FisCons.
I'd bet he's going to suffer the same fate as Howard Dean.
SoCons are not a very fickle group. Sometimes when there guy is attacked they grew stronger and more determined, especially in Iowa. The others had better be careful with the negative stuff. It could backfire big time.
I also believe Huckabee will implode in very short order, Martin. It appears just like Dean, though, he wouldn't mind taking substantial parts of his party's coalition out with him.
and for the record I am definitely not a Huck supporter.
Dean had a lead for a while and actually got beat by a surging Kerry/Edwards in Iowa 2004, where in 2007/8 it is Huck that is surging. Also, in 2004, the Caucus was on January 19th, giving people time to reflect more after the holidays, with the Caucus on the 3rd this coming year, I am not sure there is enough time left for someone else to surge (especially with the Register endorsing McCain).
...a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right...
---Thomas Paine---
The reflection probably will have to come from voters in other states.
Actually purist SoCons out number purist Fis Cons by a large degree. There are many that are a combination of both, but the hot button issues are with the SoCons. They vote with passion. Huck has them and is unlikely to lose them.
The unfortunate thing is that Huck and his supporters don't even care enough to bring them along. And in fact, Huck seems to be going out of his way to tick off DefCons with his latest foray into foreign policy.
I really find it hard to imagine that there is anybody actually thinking that there are enough Reagan Democrats who would appreciate Huck's "populism" to make up for the loss of FisCons who will sit it out like they sat out the 1992 election for George H. W. Bush.
Of course, this ignores the fact that Reagan carried SoCons, DefCons, FisCons as well as Reagan Democrats (a lot of whom were primarily DefCons in the molds of Scoop Jackson and Harry Truman) to his two victories.
Anyway, at least I can console myself as I watch the map turn blue on Election Day next year that Huckabee is pro-life and against gay marriage. That is something, isn't it?
They that are with us are more than they that are against us.
The Huckster stands a slim chance of winning the nomination. If he does, he stands virtually no chance of winning the White House. If God intervenes on his behalf and he somehow does win, he will have so many enemies at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that he'll be fortunate to see as much as a non-binding resolution urging members to acquiesce on an appropriation for new stationery.
Jeremiah 17:9.
Pastor Dan,
I guess you are one because of your handle, so it is odd to see your comment.
I don't support Huck, think he'll be bad for the party, America and SoCons (in general if he doesn't win the general AND if he does win and proceeds to cause the damage so many fear, then this will be bad for SoCons).
With all that said, If God intervenes... then it wont matter how many enemies he has at the other end of Pennsylvania Ave.
To toss out an old classic: "God + 1 makes a majority"
*****
The greatest single cause of Atheism today is Christians who profess Jesus with their lips & then go out and deny him by their lifestyle. That's what an unbelieving world simply finds...unbelievable -DC Talk
I mean, Rudy may be anathema to some in the party, but at least Rudy wants and is trying to get the approval and support of as many social conservative voters and leaders as he can. I get the sense from some of the Huck supporters that the fact that Huck is so unpalatable to voters concerned with national security, taxes, spending and regulation is a feature rather than a bug.
At least, as a socially conservative pro-lifer myself, I'm not supporting Rudy because he bothers others in the base.
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill
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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.
This really isn't complicated.
The only reason that Huckabee is seen as a "frontrunner" is because 75-80% of Republicans are splitting their support between McCain, Romney, Thompson, Giuliani, and Hunter/Paul/Tancredo. Whoever emerges from that group should consolidate the vast majority of Republicans that will reject Huckabee's candidacy.
I just hope they don't all hang in there long enough to create a Huckabee vacuum.
...will only dig their heels in harder too. However, the real voters are starting to pay attention and are watching all his silliness. I expect the poll numbers to drop and shock --shock I say-- the MSM.
Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("An argument is a sequence of statements aimed at demonstrating the truth of an assertion.); }
Don't you realize that Huckabee is George W. Bush, Part II? We all voted for W. and he was no fiscal conservative. We voted form him knowing he could not call himself a conservative. He amended it to a "compassionate conservative". So why should Huckabee expect us to do anything different in 2008?
It appears to me to be working.
Shame on us for supporting a big government candidate in 2000. Look what we have reaped!
... our choices pretty-much boiled down to GWB the big-government Republican and John "Straight Talk from Every Democrat's Favorite Republican" McPain.
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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.
... if I'd known we were going to get McCain/Feingold anyway (my major reason for favoring GWB over McCain was opposition to 'campaign finance reform'), I'd've voted for McCain.
Just an observation-
This is all just another example of how our 2 party system is inadequate. There's a significant percentage of people in this country- my guess is between 15 - 30%- who are economically moderate or even populist, but who are socially conservative.
They don't really fit very comfortably in either party (for example, the "Reagan Democrats"), but they're a large enough percentage of voters to cause problems in both.
In a different type of electoral system (like the German system, for instance), they would be separated out into their own party. It'd probably be necessary to deal with them to form a governing coalition, but they'd be separated out into a clearly identifiable block. They couldn't hide under the party label and steal votes from party voters whose views they don't represent. Tere wouldn't be this type of Kamikazee attack in this system, because the parties would be ideologically more narrowly based. You wouldn't have the Huckabee anomaly of a populist frontrunning in an ostensibly free market party (nor would you have the Guiliani situation, in which a socially moderate-trending-left candidate seriously contends for the presidential nomination of an ostensibly socially conservative party), because candidates would have to be more forthright in their positions. Doing the standard, base pleasing "primary chameleon" act would be counter-productive, because there would only be one base per party (as opposed to our current situation in which both parties have three or four often conflicting sub-bases)
The "big tent" idea is pretty much the only viable set-up in our current first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all electoral system, but it is philisophically unsatisfying. Proportional representation may have drawbacks, but it would be nice to have party labels that actually mean something. After all, what does it mean to be a Republican if Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Hagel, Lindsey Graham, Arlen Specter, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Rudy Guiliani, Rick Santorum*, and Tom Tancredo are all elected members of the party?
(*I know that Santorum is no longer an "elected member," but I included him in the illustration because he lost his seat only recently and he still remains popular amongst certain segments of the party.)
The parliamentary system is a mess. In a coalition system often small fringe parties wield disproportional influence. I have never seen it work well. I don't know why everyone keeps copying it.
...everyone copies it because it works better than you portray it to work.
I know that you'll disagree with me on principle because of the political make-up of European parties, but most parliamentary systems in Europe work pretty well. The Italian system is arguably a mess, but would you call the German, Austrian, Baltic, or Scandanavian systems messes? You may disagree with their policies, but that doesn't mean that their system is in a mess. The key is to have a minimum threshold for representation (5% or so) to avoid splintering and overfragmentation. There are far fewer wasted votes under that system, which is the major reason why the typical European election has far higher voter participation than U.S. presidential elections (let alone the non-presidential election years).
Small parties may wield more influence there than they do here, but that's because what would be small parties in the U.S. have largely been subsumed under the umbrella of the two "big tent" parties. That doesn't mean that "fringe groups" don't cause trouble here in the U.S. They still cause trouble here(if that's what you want to call people who make their viewpoints known in a free society), but they hide behind party labels when they do it. At least the smaller "fringe" parties in proportional parliamentary governments are forced to make their trouble and put the positions out in the open.
(By the way, the term "fringe party" needs to be clarified. In Germany, the Greens, Communists, and Liberals (Liberal in the European sense, which is more like U.S. Libertarians- small govt.,pro-capitalism and market forces, socially libertarian) tend to get 8-10% of the vote each and are each represented in Parliament, while the Ultra-Nationalists get around 2% and fail to meet the representation threshold. Do you consider all of those parties to be "fringe", or only the Ultra-Nationalists and other groups who fail to muster the threshold level of votes.)
... but parlaimentary systems are much less vulnerable to creeping dictatorship, and if you keep first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting then you largely stay out of the coallition trap.
...to be mentioned by name again! I'll have to get busy writing those diaries now to answer these criticisms.
[Joos, PNAC, chickenhawkers, neocons, you know the drill by now. Blam. -LHW]
someone looked away just for a second and he slipped out of his straitjacket.
I'm just waiting for you to start with the JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSSSSS
Go restock your tinfoil supply.
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Two thirds of the world is covered by water,
the other third is covered by Champ Bailey.
Maybe I should go and enlist or something...
This entire comment thread will self-destruct in 5 minutes. You can stop responding to it now.
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The Red Sox Republican: Burkeanism, Baseball, and Sundries.
His screen name was accurate, not misleading at all. Moe likes that.
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The Red Sox Republican: Burkeanism, Baseball, and Sundries.
I hope I availed myself well while trying to keep him in check. I tried not to commit a foul, but it was hard.
I guess guys like this still catch me off guard. I cannot fathom how a person thinks like that. I guess that is a good sign for me - I hope.
Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("An argument is a sequence of statements aimed at demonstrating the truth of an assertion.); }
This is why so few people respect Ron Paul- his supporters act like ignorant maniancs. It's not just here, and it's not even limited to political forums. I've run across random Paul outbursts on football sites, video game sites, history sites, etc.
...it sure is a good chunk of it.
The rest is the fact that the candidate himself is a little bit nuts.
In all fairness, I'm not sure that this guy was a Ron Paul supporter. He sounded more like a Daily Kos troll to me.
it's like journalist and democrat partisan hack, they are not mutually exclusive.
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Two thirds of the world is covered by water,
the other third is covered by Champ Bailey.
You'll find people with whom you don't want to be associated in any group. It doesn't mean the cause is bad. It just so happens that elements of it are.
useful in building majorities.
When a party gains a majority the core should determine priorities not the fringe.
Look how relatively conservative Democrats were used to regain Congress in 2006.
Many primary posts have examined the individual candidates, either promoting or tearing down their credentials, often with comparison with other candidates.
You've looked at the party and its viability, since the goal is not just to win the primary but also the general, and to do that, the party needs to find a candidate with skills in diplomacy - that is, a candidate who not only articulates a conservative positions but who can also reach out and reassure those in the party who don't support them that they are being heard and considered to, even if some of their views don't prevail this time around.
Along that line, you've rightly pointed out the diplomacy difference between Rudy and Huck's campaigns: although Rudy's efforts may not prove enough or be viewed as sincere, at least he's make visible efforts to reach out; whereas Huck doesn't seem to be visibly reaching out. Fred and Mitt don't seem to be quite as polarizing at this point and seem to have some basis to appeal to all factions. McCain - he manages to offend everybody at some time, but yet still clearly stands as a conservative.
And it might be good for supporters of the candidates to also keep in mind the need for reaching out.
And Rightly So!