Thread: Not Everyone Loves Huckabee

Not Everyone Loves Huckabee
By Donald Lambro
Monday, December 3, 2007

WASHINGTON -- It is very rare, if not unheard of, to catch a presidential candidate, especially a Republican, in the act of saying he or she would be willing to sign any tax increase that lawmakers wished for.

But that's what happened to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has rocketed to a statistical tie in Iowa with Mitt Romney, largely as a result of the former Baptist minister's support from evangelical voters in the nation's first caucus state.

The Club for Growth, an effective tax-cut advocacy group, has been on Huckabee's back almost from the beginning of his candidacy, sending out e-mail blasts to party conservatives that paint an abominable picture of his record on taxes.

Huckabee has been campaigning as a tax cutter, and indeed he did slash some state taxes during his two terms as governor, but he raised far more than he cut. The Cato Institute, which monitors the fiscal records of the nation's governors, gave him a poor-to-failing grade on spending and taxes.

The Club for Growth has also examined his tax and spend record and found it wanting. Its verdict: Huckabee could not be trusted to hold the line on taxes, let alone push it back.

Huckabee of course rejects the charges and said they do not take into account the many taxes he also cut. He insists he is a committed tax-cutter who could be trusted to shrink the size of government.

But seeing is believing, and the visual record backs the Club for Growth up; the Arkansas Journal blog has uncovered a video of Huckabee addressing the state legislature, virtually begging them to raise any taxes they wanted, and saying that he would sign the increases into law.

Here's what then-Gov. Huckabee told Arkansas lawmakers: "Again, let me state what I've said privately as well as publicly, but I want to get it on the record again. There's a lot of support for a tax at the wholesale level for tobacco, and that's fine with me; I will very happily sign that because it's a revenue stream that will meet the needs if enacted at a level that will help us to meet that $90 to $100 million target, and that's what I would begin to focus your attention on -- is the target.

"Some have suggested the retail level of tobacco; if that ends up being your preference, I will accept that. Others have suggested a surcharge on the income tax; that's acceptable; I'm fine with that. Others have suggested, perhaps, a sales tax; that's fine.

"Yet others have suggested a hybrid that will collect some monies from any one or a combination of those various ideas, and if that's the plan that the House and Senate agree upon, then you will have nothing but my profound thanks."

This does not sound like someone who is willing to hold the line on taxes, nor find places in his budget-as many governors have done-where he could cut spending instead of having taxpayers foot the bills for bigger and bigger government.

Huckabee says he would like to eliminate the Internal Revenue Service and replace the income tax with the so-called Fair Tax, which would impose a national sales tax on virtually everything we buy. But such a tax would be a disaster for this country, especially for low- and middle-income Americans who spend a disproportionate portion of their earnings -- in many cases all of it -- on the necessities of life.

It would wreak untold havoc on the business community, driving down retail sales and creating an underground economy that would undermine America's productive marketplace -- especially small businesses that produce most of the jobs in our country.

The Club for Growth was formed with one purpose in mind: to promote economic growth by lowering the tax rates, simplifying the tax code and providing tax incentives to expand business formation, savings, investment and economic opportunity. It has praised the tax-cut proposals of Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and other contenders for the Republican nomination.

But last week Huckabee labeled the respected tax-cutting group "The Club for Greed," a charge that sounded more like the invective spewed forth from Al Gore, Howard Dean or socialist Bernie Sanders.

The Arkansas Republican is fond of bashing corporate CEOs and their salaries, thinks a higher minimum wage won't hurt entry-level job creation, and apparently doesn't mind slapping higher sales taxes on the most vulnerable people in our economy.

The next president will face huge fiscal issues in 2009: such as rising entitlements that threaten to engulf the federal budget and what to do about President Bush's tax cuts which are due to expire in 2010, a demise that would raise taxes by trillions of dollars.

That's when we're going to need strong, principled leadership to keep a likely Democratic Congress from sending income taxes through the roof. It's something Iowa voters need to think deeply about in the days to come.
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/Dona ... s_huckabee

Are you folks in Iowa nuts? Why are you fine folks believing this sham artist illegal alien lover? Huckabee is a RINO and is no friend of the American people.
Come on Iowans, don't drink the SUCKABEE Kool-aid.

HORRIBLE HUCK
By GEORGE F. WILL

December 3, 2007 -- ARTHUR Balfour, the British statesman, once said that a ri val's clarity was a liability because he had nothing to say. As the presidential nomination contests approach a crescendo, some candidates are making themselves perilously clear, one of them with the help of her helpmate.
Last Tuesday, Bill Clinton, trying to whet Iowans' appetites for another Clinton presidency, announced/discovered/remembered that he opposed the Iraq War "from the beginning," thereby revealing disharmony with his spouse, who voted for it. Backward reels the mind, to 1992, when Gov. Clinton explained his opinion of Congress' 1991 authorization of the Gulf War: "I guess I would have voted with the majority if it was a close vote. But I agree with the arguments the minority made."

Such muddiness clarifies: Do voters who are weary of the scary clarity of the current president's certitudes really want to replace them with a recurrence of the hairsplitting evasions that created the adjective "Clintonian"?

About one thing, Hillary Clinton is both clear and opaque: Jefferson is anachronistic. "We can talk all we want about freedom and opportunity, about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but what does all that mean to a mother or father who can't take a sick child to the doctor?" Well, OK, what does "all that" mean to someone stuck in congested traffic? Or annoyed by the price of cable television? What does Mrs. Clinton mean?

John Edwards' health care agenda involves un-Jeffersonian bossiness. "It requires," he says, "that everybody get preventive care. If you are going to be in the system, you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years." In an ad running in Iowa, Edwards brandishes his mailed fist at Congress, to which he vows to say: "If you don't pass universal health care by July of 2009, in six months, I'm going to use my power as president to take your health care away from you."

What power would that be? What power enables presidents to "take" health care from people who have it by statute? This is the Democrats' riposte to the grandiosity of the current president's notion of executive prerogatives?

Edwards might, however, reconsider - he is, after all, a serial apologizer. Of his actions during his six years in the Senate, he says: My vote for the Iraq War? Sorry about that. For the Patriot Act? I don't know what I was thinking. For No Child Left Behind? Oops! For liberalized trade with China? Forgive me. For storing waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain? I was for it before I was against it.

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee's candidacy rests on serial non sequiturs: I am a Christian, therefore I am a conservative, therefore whatever I have done or propose to do with "compassionate," meaning enlarged, government is conservatism. And by the way, anything I denote as a "moral" issue is beyond debate other than by the uncaring forces of greed.

His is a moralist's version of the intellectual vanity once ascribed to Oxford's Benjamin Jowett:

My name is Jowett

Of Balliol College;

If I don't know it,

It is not knowledge.

Many Iowans think it would be wise to nominate a candidate who, when the Republicans were asked during a debate to raise their hands if they do not believe in evolution, raised his. But, then, Huckabee believes America can be energy independent in 10 years, so he has peculiar views about more than paleontology.

Huckabee combines pure moralism with incoherent populism: He wants Washington to impose a nationwide ban on smoking in public, show more solicitude for Americans of modest means and impose more protectionism, thereby raising the cost of living for Americans of modest means.

Although Huckabee is considered affable, two subliminal but clear enough premises of his Iowa attack on Mitt Romney are unpleasant: The almost 6 million American Mormons who consider themselves Christians are mistaken about that. And - 55 million non-Christian Americans should take note - America must have a Christian president.

Another pious populist who was annoyed by Darwin - William Jennings Bryan - argued that William Howard Taft, his opponent in the 1908 presidential election, was unfit to be president because he was a Unitarian, a persuasion sometimes defined as the belief that there is at most one God. The electorate chose to run the risk of entrusting the presidency to someone skeptical about the doctrine of the Trinity.

If Huckabee succeeds in derailing Romney's campaign by raising a religious test for presidential eligibility, that will be clarifying: In one particular, America was more enlightened a century ago.

georgewill@ washpost.com
http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/pri ... 672050.htm