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Banned
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"God", "Guns", and "race baiting", ain't Huckabee's style, and the "old guard" are concerned that their "evangelical faithful" are receptive to Huckabee's message.
"Horrors" if wealth inequity and the decline of the middle class earnings growth is actually discussed.
An amazingly revealing article touching on the scam that is the republican party manipulation of the mostly southern evangelical vote. Selfless christians, persuaded to vote against their own economic interests, election after election:
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/we...rkpatrick.html
December 30, 2007
The Nation
Shake, Rattle and Roil the Grand Ol’ Coalition
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
AS a Republican presidential primary candidate, Mike Huckabee is a puzzle.
A Southern Baptist pastor and thoroughgoing social conservative, Mr. Huckabee has struck a distinctly populist chord when it comes to economics. He has criticized executive pay, sympathized with labor unions, denounced “plutocracy,” and mocked the antitax group the Club for Growth as “the Club for Greed.” And when it comes to foreign affairs he sometimes sounds almost liberal; for example, comparing the United States’ place in the world to “a top high school student, if it is modest about its abilities and achievements, if it is generous in helping others, it is loved.”
Yet he has surged to the head of the pack in polls of Iowa Republicans in the week before their caucus and moved close to the front in national polls as well. Now his success is setting off a debate in his party over whether his success marks the fading of the old Reaganite conservative coalition — social conservatives, antitax activists and advocates of a muscular defense — or, rather, offers a chance for its rejuvenation.
“It’s gone,” said Ed Rollins, who once worked as President Reagan’s political director and recently became Mr. Huckabee’s national campaign chairman. “The breakup of what was the Reagan coalition — social conservatives, defense conservatives, antitax conservatives — it doesn’t mean a whole lot to people anymore.”
“It is a time for a whole new coalition — that is the key,” he said, adding that some part of the original triad might “go by the wayside.”
So far, the leadership of all three factions of the old coalition has shown little more than disdain for the idea of a President Huckabee. The Club for Growth has flooded Iowa with commercials mocking him as a compulsive spender when he was the governor of Arkansas who never met a tax he did not like. Some hawks complain that he is to the left of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on foreign policy.
Even among Christian conservatives — Mr. Huckabee’s natural constituency — most national leaders gave him the cold shoulder, complaining that he worked too hard to distance himself from them and their allies. “You can’t just say ‘respect life’ exclusively in the gestation period,” he often says, or, “I believe in the Bible but I am just not angry about it.”
In a sign of how intertwined the leadership of that old three-part Reaganite alliance has grown, some of the most prominent Christian conservative political leaders have even faulted Mr. Huckabee because his economic populism or slim defense credentials would irk their allies. “I think out of respect to the other members of the coalition, some evangelicals have held back because he is a challenge to some in the foreign policy ranks and even some fiscal conservative groups are opposed to him,” Tony Perkins, president of the Christian conservative Family Research Council recently told CNN.
Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative standard-bearer National Review, warned of “Huckacide” for the party if it gives him the nomination. Now Rush Limbaugh, the loudest voice of the conservative movement, has joined the chorus, accusing Huckabee of practicing “identity politics” (as an evangelical) and conservative apostasy. He told his listeners that Mr. Huckabee’s record is “not even anywhere near conservative.”
Mr. Rollins, for his part, traced Mr. Huckabee’s political lineage back to George Wallace in 1968 (without the segregationism). Mr. Wallace and, later, Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot appealed to the same blocs of working-class voters and socially conservative white Southerners that the Republican Party began trying to court in Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign.
Reagan finally captured those voters for the Republican Party by rallying them against abortion and the Communist threat at a time when the Democrats had shifted to the left on cultural and defense issues. They became the so-called Reagan Democrats. But many never lost their ear for the old economic populist appeals, and over time many drifted into political independence — coming home for George W. Bush, but abandoning the party in droves in the 2006 midterms.
Mr. Huckabee, Mr. Rollins said, could win back those voters, but not with the same combination of issues. The rash of corruption scandals and pork-barrel projects that plagued the House of Representatives under Republican rule tarnished the old image of the party as the champion of limited government, while dismay at the Bush administration over the Iraq war was a blot on the party’s national security credentials.
“It is time to go get those independents back again,” Mr. Rollins argued. “Huckabee fits the bill.”
Some doubt Mr. Huckabee’s distinctive style will translate as well beyond Midwestern states like Iowa — the region where Christian populism was born in the person of William Jennings Bryan. “I see Huckabee as more of a Prairie populist than what I would consider a traditional conservative,” said former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a stalwart of the conservative movement once considered a 2008 presidential contender himself. “I don’t see how he takes that show across the East Coast or even the Midwest.”
Still, he acknowledged that in some ways Mr. Huckabee’s combination of social conservatism and sympathy for the working class also touched a fault line that ran further through the Republican Party, including in his home state of Pennsylvania.
“He would do very, very well in southwestern Pennsylvania, Reagan Democrat country,” where many socially conservative working-class voters “have a heart for the poor and, unfortunately, think of government as the answer,” Mr. Santorum said.
A few Christian conservative leaders applaud Mr. Huckabee for his independence of the other factions of the conservative movement. “We have been saying for years that you can’t build a winning coalition based on low taxes and limited government anymore, because you need to reach out to middle-class voters,” said Randy Brinson, founder of the evangelical youth voter-registration group Redeem the Vote and a friend of Mr. Huckabee’s. <h3>“The gulf between the haves and have-nots — that really is going on.”</h3>
Mr. Brinson argued that Mr. Huckabee had, in a sense, taught the established Christian conservative leadership a lesson about its own clout by talking directly to the people in the pews. “He showed you can have a much larger effect than by going to a self-appointed Christian conservative leader,” Mr. Brinson said. (Mr. Huckabee was the Redeem the Vote’s national advisory committee chairman before running for the nomination and his campaign has rented its e-mail lists of 414,000 voters in Iowa and 25 million around the country.)
Still, some veteran conservative organizers note that beneath the rhetoric Mr. Huckabee is still positioning himself in many ways as a Reaganite, including pledging not to raise taxes.
Many discount the possibility that he will win the nomination because he has too little money and there are tougher battles ahead after the heavily evangelical Iowa caucuses. But they contend that he can energize previously demoralized Christian conservatives and, at 52, is a relatively young politician with a future in the party who will probably do his best to turn them out for the nominee.
“My fantasy out of this race is that Huckabee will create another Christian Coalition,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, recalling the group that grew out of Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign and became a political force for much of the next decade. “If you could have the equivalent of the Christian Coalition, it would be a bulwark for the Goldwater-Reagan wing of the party.”
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The last thing Grover Norquist wants is a mass of disenchanted middle class voters putting economic issues ahead of religious ones.....
Last edited by host; 12-30-2007 at 11:20 PM..
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