Great: Huckabee Leads In Iowa

Rudy also tanks in South Carolina, but it's the Huckabee thing I'm worried about. There are four potential nominees I find acceptable -- including St. John of Arizona -- and Huckabee isn't one of them, for so many reasons, including those noted by Robert Novak:

Who would respond to criticism from the Club for Growth by calling the conservative, free-market campaign organization the "Club for Greed"?
...
Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist advocate of big government and a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans. Until now, they did not bother to expose the former governor of Arkansas as a false conservative because he seemed an underfunded, unknown nuisance candidate. Now that he has pulled even with Mitt Romney for the Iowa caucuses and might make more progress, the beleaguered Republican Party has a frightening problem.
...
There is no doubt about Huckabee's record during a decade in Little Rock. He was regarded by fellow Republican governors as a compulsive tax-and-spender. He increased the Arkansas tax burden 47 percent, boosting the levies on gasoline and cigarettes. When he lost 100 pounds and decided to press his new lifestyle on the American people, he was hardly being a Goldwater-Reagan libertarian.
... Huckabee simply does not fit within normal boundaries of economic conservatism, such as when he criticized President Bush's veto of a Democratic expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Calling global warming a "moral issue" mandating "a biblical duty" to prevent climate change, he has endorsed a cap-and-trade system that is anathema to the free market.
...
Nevertheless, he is getting remarkably warm reviews in the news media.... Any Republican who does not sound much like a Republican is bound to get friendly press, as Sen. John McCain did in 2000 (but not today, with his return to acting more like a conventional Republican).
An uncompromising foe of abortion can never enjoy full media backing. But Mike Huckabee is getting enough favorable buzz that, when combined with his evangelical base, it makes real conservatives shudder.

Nevermind his pro-amnesty stance.

I didn't like all the vows of some in the party to not vote at all, or vote third-party, if a candidate they didn't like was nominated. I would make that same threat now in response to Huckabee's emergence, except I don't have to: Huckabee will be positively demolished by any Democratic candidate. It will be a blow out. He manages to take the less popular parts of conservatism and fuse it with the less popular parts of liberalism.

That's not a winning formula. It's a recipe for disaster.

Posted by: Ace at 02:09 PM

Comments

1 Looks like the media has found its new John McCain.

Posted by: Warden at November 28, 2007 02:11 PM (rZ5uY)

I won't vote for him because the damn movie of his sucks!

Marky Mark and Existentialism just do not go well together.

Posted by: Lost My Cookies at November 28, 2007 02:15 PM (XFXr4)

Huckabee delende est!

He's like Bush without the tax cuts and the occasional fiscal conservatism.

Posted by: OU_Gryphon at November 28, 2007 02:19 PM (HUjun)

4 This news hits Romney the hardest. None of the other top four were really competing in Iowa, but Romney's whole strategy from the beginning was to dominate the early states and turn that dominance into momentum for the later states. If he's beat out by Huckabee, he has nothing.

Posted by: Sobek at November 28, 2007 02:20 PM (6GK9U)

5 If Romney's and Giuliani's campaign staff are even moderately competent, they are loading up their candidates with answers that attack Huckabee's policies for tonight's debate and not just each other.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at November 28, 2007 02:28 PM (WzpEB)

I like Huckabee- but I see a Huckabee candidacy as having the same dynamic effect on the electorate as the Robert Dole campaign

Hes like a GOP Paul Tsongas, or Dukakis

Posted by: TMF at November 28, 2007 02:32 PM (KTgUG)

Put him up, by all means

Enjoy the pressers with Pres. Clinton fielding softballs from Helen Thomas

Posted by: TMF at November 28, 2007 02:33 PM (KTgUG)

8 This is why Iowa should not be picking our nominee. They excel at growing corn and having good high school wrestling teams. I don't trust 'em.

Posted by: Judd at November 28, 2007 02:36 PM (JB0d8)

If republicans are too stupid to nominate electable candidate then just fuck'em.

You wanna show Rudy's who's boss? Welcome to Hilly World.

Posted by: Eleven at November 28, 2007 02:45 PM (7DB+a)

10 Like someone was saying somewhere (great attribution, I know!) Huckabee winning would be a good outcome, because it would discredit frickin' Iowa because only the idiotic Iowa caucus system will generate votes for the guy. He'll finish behind Ron Paul in NH and SC, and thankfully that'll be the last anyone will have to think of him.

Posted by: suedenim at November 28, 2007 02:56 PM (oYEcP)

I'm not that worried by this. I think Huckabee's the new Conservative savior, a charismatic one at that, and once people find out about his policies he'll sink. Too much baggage to hide.

If he does win, however, he's probably the worst of the bunch. Compassionate Conservativism on steroids is exactly right.

Posted by: MlR at November 28, 2007 02:58 PM (9f5Pa)

Better now than later. There's that dangerous point where the momentum can suddenly switch to a candidate who few people know well but is dangerously fashionable after the presumed frontrunner falls apart. (See Howard Dean and John Kerry)

Posted by: MlR at November 28, 2007 03:01 PM (9f5Pa)

13 If Huck is the nominee anyone want to chip in with me and see if we can buy the home of a celebrity who moved to France to escape the Bush Reich? Cause I bet they'll be back here once Hillary! is guaranteed to be elected.

Sure they have the YOUEE problem but they also have Sarkozy.

Who's in?

Posted by: Drew at November 28, 2007 03:10 PM (hlYel)

14 Call me an optimist, but I believe Huckabee's temporary ascendancy opens the door for the Fred. An earlier commenter was right, once Huck's record and policy preferences are more closely scrutinzed, he'll sink.

The clean-up guy will be Thompson. Let Mitt, Rudy and Huck do battle for a while and Fred will emerge the statesman-like candidate.

Posted by: Alamo at November 28, 2007 03:32 PM (Mqupr)

I left a comment over at Joe Carter's blog asking how he could say with a straight face that Huckabee is a genuine conservative. Sure, you can give him props (or not) for some of his social positions, notably his pro-life stance. But he's a big nanny state do-gooder of the first order. If he represents conservatism, then I'm no longer a conservative. I kind of think I am though, which means that Huckabee is a sweet smiling, smooth talking fraud. He could win a state or two, but there's no way in hell he wins the nomination. At least, I hope not.

Oh, and if St. John of Arizona wins the nomination, I prophesy that his margin of defeat will make the Nixon-McGovern tally look close by comparison. He's absolutely unacceptable to a large number of conservatives and small-l libertarians, myself included.

Posted by: physics geek at November 28, 2007 03:38 PM (MT22W)

My worst nightmare is coming true....God help us.

A vote for Huckabee is a vote for HELLary. Period.

Posted by: Lisa at November 28, 2007 03:47 PM (6M4qw)

The clean-up guy will be Thompson. Let Mitt, Rudy and Huck do battle for a while and Fred will emerge the statesman-like candidate.

I also agree with this. I think people are counting out Thompson way too fast. So far as I can tell, all of his weaknesses are already out there and relatively shallowly. When the more seriously flawed candidates run into trouble he's going to look like a steady alternative.

Posted by: MlR at November 28, 2007 04:07 PM (9f5Pa)

The MSM loves Huckabee. Right on about the "new McCain", but he's even better because if they can get him nominated, they can climb all over how he's a born-again winger. Of course, until then, he's just wonderful, right boys?

NPR this morning had what was nearly a puff-piece on Huckabee. But I could not help noticing how they invert cause and effect - seems that the reason Huck is suddenly credible is that he has been recognized extensively in the MSM! The major part of the 5 minute segment was spent recounting, not his positions, but the list of the MSM outlets that had run features on him recently!

I just love how these folks cannot seem to get themselves out of the mindset that they are the legitimizers of candidates. Even when they are trying to portray a candidate as increasingly attractive, they assume that attractiveness is due to their influence. In this case, where they are touting someone whose actual value to them is as an eventual stalking horse for Hillary, they are for once exactly correct.

Posted by: sherlock at November 28, 2007 04:52 PM (ojW85)

19 Okay, is some candidate going to answer the bell and start attacking the bias of the media, or are we just going to let them pick our candidates for us?

Posted by: sherlock at November 28, 2007 04:55 PM (ojW85)

20 Fred did and he got called a whiner.

Posted by: MlR at November 28, 2007 04:58 PM (9f5Pa)

He complained about Fox's treatment of him right?

Not what I had in mind - more like the entire MSM being in the pockets of the Dems, and the Dems being in the pockets of nuts and terrorists, or anyone else who can cause America to fail for their electoral benefit. That's what I'm talking about.

Posted by: sherlock at November 28, 2007 05:04 PM (ojW85)

There are four potential nominees I find acceptable -- including St. John of Arizona

[sound of credibility circling toliet bowl]

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