Mike Huckabee is surging towards the front of the pack in Iowa with a message of social conservatism and economic populism. Iowa sets up very well as a state for him, and it could slingshot him into contention in New Hampshire, although some Congressional candidates have more money in their war chests than he does, and it’s dubious whether or not he can effectively organize.
One thing is pretty clear; Huckabee’s sunny disposition masks some extreme views on social issues, which would be incredibly difficult to explain to a general election audience.
During a house party in New Hampshire over the weekend, Mike Huckabee was asked if his Christian values would prevent him from supporting funding for safe-sex programs. Huckabee then replied that it would be more important to ask people to simply not engage in reckless behavior.
“The best thing to do is to encourage people to make good choices,” Huckabee said. “For example, if we were really serious about stopping a problem, whether it’s drunk driving, we don’t say, ‘Okay, don’t drive as drunk,’ do we?”
Huckabee offered another example: “We don’t say that a little domestic violence is okay, just cut it down a little, just don’t hit quite as hard. We say it’s wrong.”
A real, under-the-radar goal of abortion opponents is to ban all forms of birth control in favor of abstinence programs that don’t work and actually endanger the sexually inexperienced. Huckabee fits squarely in the tradition we’ve seen just today, with the President appointing someone to head the family planning section of the Department of Health and Human Services who calls contraceptives part of the ‘culture of death.’ This is hardly a mainstream opinion, and behind that aw-shucks demeanor, this is Huckabee’s true belief.
2 Responses to “Just Another Country Moralist”
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Why are Dobson and co out talking up a third party spoiler rather than supporting Huckabee? I don’t mean that question rhetorically, it honestly puzzles me. My own theory is that the fiscal conservatives (like ClubforGrowth.net) hate him for raising taxes and talking about public funding for health care, and the two movements, fiscal and moral conservatism, are not really separate at the leadership level (Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed are not known for their mutual animosity). If that’s right, Huckabee’s million-dollar question is, are they separate, or separable, at the grass roots? This post provides a really excellent analysis of his combination of economic populism and moral conservativism, but I just wonder whether working-class Republicans are on balance susceptible to it. Some are, but enough to carry him to the nomination? Incidentally, I think Huckabee would be a tough nominee but not an invincible one, as some seem to believe. His problems with fundraising and outreach would continue to plague him in the general, and I have to say for all his charm I think he seems small somehow (not just after losing the weight) as the governor of a small state with no foreign policy experience. I know that’s what Republicans said about Clinton, but I do buy the conventional-wisdom view that the world has changed enough that people perceive qualifications at least subtly differently now.
Left by The Sleep Thief
October 17, 2007 at 11:19pm