An interesting formulation from Mike Huckabee’s potential adviser as the Republican nominee, Dick Morris:
"He puts all of the Bible into play. It’s not just ‘thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not,’ but it’s the positive aspects of his religion, too — which is ‘love thy neighbor,’ and ‘when I was naked you clothed me,’ and a sense of helping poor people."
Or a spend-like-Jesus Republican. My take on Huckabee in the Sunday Times here.
James Poulos looks at various blog-responses to this week’s GOP debate and sees nothing but wild incoherence and continuing conflict:
Fascinating, that is, because on the basis of these observations some possible facts emerge:
(1) McCain isn’t fading anytime soon, though he’ll only win if the others kill each other off;
(2) Huckabee is for real because he has a real constituency — Fred Thompson’s plus Gersonites;
(3) The Ron Paul wing(s) of the Republican Party are now irreversibly present in GOP politics;
(4) Mitt and Rudy maintain their death grips on one another at their peril.
…it’s the Huck-Paul exchange on honor that really captures the major fissure in this race, in the GOP, and probably in the country — and it runs right through both parties…
The big question to me now seems to be who’s the anti-Huckabee, other than Ron Paul?
I think it’s clear that the Republicans will run on staying in Iraq indefinitely. And that could well be their undoing.
If you want to know why many of us have come to feel that the current Republican party is not our cup of tea, consider this anecdote from Joe Klein, sitting in on a focus group of Republicans during last Wednesday night’s debate:
In the next segment–the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee’s college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants–I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, "After all, these are children of God," the dials plummeted. And that happened time and again through the evening: Any time any candidate proposed doing anything nice for anyone poor, the dials plummeted (30s). These Republicans were hard.
But there was worse to come: When John McCain started talking about torture–specifically, about waterboarding–the dials plummeted again. Lower even than for the illegal Children of God. Down to the low 20s, which, given the natural averaging of a focus group, is about as low as you can go. Afterwards, Luntz asked the group why they seemed to be in favor of torture. "I don’t have any problem pouring water on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11," said John Shevlin, a retired federal law enforcement officer. The group applauded, appallingly.
As Kevin says, "Ladies and gentlemen, your Republican base." They loved Romney, apparently. He can give them their torture without any sense that he might be soft on the gays.
That’s what Mike Gerson thinks of fiscal conservatives.
It’s funny, isn’t it, how much abuse I receive for writing a book and a blog that essentially argue that the base of the GOP is a sectarian and religious movement rather than a political one – and that this is a problem. In that sense – in the sense that it believes that political power should be assigned primarily on the basis of religious purity – it is a theocratic force. And now who comes along and agrees with me, with respect to the new front-runner in Iowa? Freddy The Beetle Barnes:
Maybe my memory betrays me, but I don’t recall a major presidential candidate who made such an unabashed, unambiguous appeal for support on the basis of religious faith… The Huckabee ad, entitled "Believe," begins with Huckabee’s emphasis on the importance of his faith. "Faith doesn’t just influence me," he says. "It really defines me." A few seconds later, the words "Christian Leader" are emblazoned on the screen… I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that, at least in this ad, Huckabee has made his political views secondary to his religious beliefs. Perhaps this is what Christian conservatives in Iowa want to hear.
You think? You can buy the book here. Denial is a powerful thing, isn’t it?
All the more devastating for being mildly supportive of the general project. Loved this line about Bush’s alleged transformation of conservatism:
Gerson has the air of a horse trader talking as fast as possible in the hopes the audience won’t notice that the animal he’s selling has already expired.
It’s just pining for left-liberalism’s fjords.
"In recognition of the significant contributions to our country by our proud and independent Spanish-speaking citizens, we have developed a comprehensive program to help achieve equal opportunity… To provide the same learning opportunities enjoyed by other American children, we have increased bilingual education programs almost six-fold since 1969. We initiated a 16-point employment program to help Spanish-speaking workers, created the National Economic Development Association to promote Spanish-speaking business development and expanded economic development opportunities in Spanish-speaking communities.
We will work for the use of bilingual staffs in localities where this language capability is desirable for effective health care," – the Republican Party platform in 1972.
Mona at Unqualified Offerings has a cow over this Paul Mirengoff quote:
When I first heard George W. Bush talking about "compassionate conservatism" in 1999, I figured (and certainly hoped) that it was at least 80 percent ad campaign and no more than 20 percent policy guide. Eight years later, it seems to me that, in practice, the Bush administration probably hasn’t strayed too far to the wrong side of that proportion.
I tend to agree with Paul on the former point, but I wish he were more right on the latter. The splurging of tax-payers’ money to make rich brats like Bush feel better about themselves is a defining characteristic of a certain kind of liberalism, not conservatism. And no, it’s not "heroic" to spend other people’s money on your pet bleeding heart projects.
You can see some of the many competing and contradictory themes within contemporary conservatism in Patrick Ruffini’s blogpost on Hewitt’s blog today. His heart is with libertarianism; but his head is with the Bush security state and current Republican coalition. When the two conflict, his brain hurts:
Libertarianism in the GOP took a big hit on 9/11, and it’s slowly coming back, with Ron Paul as the catalyst. Its underlying ideals still have appeal well beyond the cramped confines of the LP. If it’s possible to be known as a pro-life, pro-war, pro-wiretapping libertarian, then sign me up. Markos too brands himself a “libertarian Democrat,” though he’s never read Hayek and supports big government social programs.
Let’s unpack this a little. After any serious attack on a country, civil liberties are bound to suffer. I don’t know many grown-up libertarians so pure that they would deny this completely. But the goal is always to return to maximal liberty within the bounds of security, especially when the initial threat appears diminished. Of course this is hard to measure because the threat itself is hard to measure. But a libertarian will constantly be seeking to protect liberty where possible. You don’t really see that instinct in today’s authoritarian GOP. A libertarian also understands that there is no deeper threat to liberty than war and that a state of permanent war is close to the end of libertarianism. Hence the discomfort with amorphous wars against "drugs" or "terror," wars in which no enemy can ever surrender or ever be defeated. Patrick needs to grapple with that, it seems to me. Being a pro-war libertarian is possible if you see the war as an unavoidable measure for basic security. But Iraq, to take an obvious example, long ago ceased to be that. What being pro-war in the GOP today tends to mean is an unskeptical Hannity-Giuliani enthusiasm for war, and judgment that more of it, not less, is what we need. When you combine that with contempt for civil liberties, pride in waterboarding, disdain for even minimal judicial oversight of wiretapping, and a reflexive bent to accuse all domestic critics of treason … then you are far, far away from libertarianism, or my kind of conservatism. That’s why, in my judgment, Ron Paul is right to insist on the radical degeneracy of today’s GOP establishment. And why, for all his eccentricities, I’m immensely grateful he’s doing so well.
And some quibbles. No, you can’t be a pro-wire-tapping libertarian.
You can be for wire-tapping with judicial safeguards, but that’s not Bush’s mojo. And it’s simply absurd to say that Paul "blames[s] America for 9/11." That’s hogwash. It’s Giuliani’s ally, Pat Robertson, who blamed Americans for 9/11. Paul merely sought to establish that part of al Qaeda’s murderous ideology was fueled in small part by American troops in Saudi Arabia and the US’s long-time support for autocratic regimes in the Middle East. This is simply indisputable. And Patrick’s laudable attempt to square the circle is misguided:
Absolute freedom within our borders, for our own citizens; eternal vigilance and (when necessary) ruthlessness abroad.
The trouble is: this war knows no geographic boundaries and so the warpowers we have rashly given to the president against anyone he calls an "enemy combatant" inevitably affect US citizens and residents. The clear divide Patrick wants is impossible, alas. It seems to me that the most rational divide is to treat all non-citizen enemy combatants as prisoners of war (with traditional baseline protections against mistreatment) and US citizens as criminals, accused of the most heinous crimes and facing the direst consequences.
But at a deeper level, conservatives have to decide what their deepest value is: security or freedom. And how many have the balls, like Paul, to choose the latter if it really comes to that?
Rip van Novak rouses himself from a deep slumber:
The rise of evangelical Christians as the force that blasted the GOP out of minority status during the past generation always contained an inherent danger: What if these new Republican acolytes supported not merely a conventional conservative but one of their own?
Memo to Novak: have you heard of George W. Bush? Barely a government program he hasn’t expanded; barely a soul he doesn’t want to heal. Nation-building where there is no nation; borrowing when there is no more money. And all wrapped up in a theological bundle of conservative "compassion". The main difference between Bush and Huckabee is that Huckabee once actually raised the money he wanted to spend, instead of borrowing it from the Chinese. And Huckabee’s resort to left-liberal criticism of conservatism – that’s it’s heartless and greedy – has been deployed by Bush as well. Heroic Christianism – with its certainty about everything and moral imperative to intervene wherever "evil" strikes – is not compatible with any sense of limited government. It’s pretty amazing to me that it has taken Huckabee to wake some up to this somewhat obvious fact.
The Dish 