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"?

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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.

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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.

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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

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