Evangelical conservative Mike Huckabee, the man on the move
in the Republican race, is finding his conservatism challenged.
** SOUTH CAROLINA POLL: CLINTON AND OBAMA TIED AMONG DEMOCRATS, ROMNEY AND THOMPSON TIED AMONG REPUBLICANS. Clemson University’s new Palmetto Poll of the early South Carolina presidential primary shows Hillary Clinton sliding back into a statistical dead heat with Barack Obama on the Democratic side and Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson in a similar dead heat on the Republican side, with Mike Huckabee surging into a close third place and Rudy Giuliani dropping.
On the Democratic side, it’s Clinton 19%, Obama 17%, and John Edwards 12%. No one else is in double digits.
On the Republican side, it’s Romney 17%, Thompson 15%, Mike Huckabee 13%, John McCain 11%, and Giuliani 9%.
Over half the Republican sample is 55 or older. 97% are white. The Democratic sample has a slight majority of blacks over whites, with 60% women. Both parties have huge undecided votes.
** LOS ANGELES DEBATE CANCELLED. Next month’s Democratic presidential debate in Los Angeles is being cancelled by the Democratic National Committee on account of uncertainty surrounding the Writers Guild strike and the debate’s broadcast status on CBS. There are no plans to reschedule it.
** AN IMPROVING SITUATION WITH IRAN? President Bush met yesterday with Iran’s leading ally in Iraqi politics, Shiite leader Abdel Aziz Al–Hakim. The pro-Iranian leader has not raised objections to Bush’s plan to maintain an ongoing US troop presence in Iraq when the bulk of American forces are withdrawn.
As previously reported, the US released nine Iranian agents captured in Iraq. And US officials have noted that the flow of arms from Iran into Iraq has decreased.
** BROWN SUES BUSH ADMINISTRATION ON TOXIC DISCLOSURE. Former Governor-turned-Attorney General Jerry Brown this morning sued the US Environmental Protection Agency for its decision to relax its Toxic Release Inventory. Brown, who was joined by 11 other states in the lawsuit, says the federal government is “subverting a key public safety measure.”
The Toxic Release Inventory requires annual reports of the release of toxic chemicals by refineries, chemical plants, and other manufacturing facilities.
Charging the federal government with “subverting a key public safety measure,” California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. today sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for allowing companies to hide information about toxic chemicals at thousands of facilities around the United States.
Under the new rules, says Brown, some 5,300 facilities around the country could be permitted to conceal information from the Environmental Protection Agency about toxic chemical levels and management of toxic waste. The new regulations, he says, increase by a factor of 10 the quantity of chemical waste that a facility can generate without providing detailed reports.
Joining Brown and California in the lawsuit are Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and Vermont.
** HUCKABEE’S SURGE IN IOWA MATCHED BY SURGE IN CRITICISM OF HIM. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is now tied with Mitt Romney in a new private poll of the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses. Romney had long held a big lead in the first-in-the-nation contest. Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson are way behind both of them.
But Huckabee’s new eminence in the field is matched by a new effort to show that he’s not really a conservative. Though he is in fact the clearest social conservative in the field. Conservative columnist Bob Novak, laying out the case for his allies, scores Huckabee for raising some taxes, spending money on social programs, criticizing free trade, and backing a cap & trade program on greenhouse gases.
Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist, big-government advocate of 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 with the possibility of more progress, the beleaguered Republican Party has a frightening problem on its hands.
The rise of evangelical Christians as the motive force that blasted the GOP out of minority status during the past generation always contained an inherent danger if these new Republican acolytes supported not merely a conventional conservative but one of their own. That has happened now with Huckabee, a former Baptist minister educated at Ouachita Baptist University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The danger is a serious contender for the nomination who passes the litmus test of social conservatives on abortion, gay marriage and gun control but is far removed from the conservative-libertarian model of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
There is no doubt about Huckabee’s record during a decade in Little Rock as governor. He was regarded by fellow Republican governors as a compulsive tax increaser and spender. He increased the Arkansas tax burden by 47 percent, boosting the levies on gasoline and cigarettes. When he decided to lose 100 pounds and pressed his new lifestyle on the American people, he was far from a Goldwater-Reagan libertarian.
As a presidential candidate, Huckabee has sought to counteract his reputation as a taxer by pressing for replacement of the income tax with a sales tax and has more recently signed the no-tax-increase pledge of Americans for Tax Reform. But Huckabee simply does not fit in normal boundaries of economic conservatism, as when he criticized President Bush’s veto of a Democratic expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Calling global warming a “moral issue” mandating “a biblical duty” to prevent climate change, he has endorsed the cap-and-trade system that is anathema to the free market.
Huckabee clearly departs from the mainstream of the conservative movement in his confusion of “growth” with “greed.” Such ad hominem attacks are part of his intuitive response to criticism from the Club for Growth and the libertarian Cato Institute for his record as governor. On Fox News Sunday Nov. 18, he called the “tactics” of the Club for Growth “some of the most despicable in politics today. It’s why I love to call them the Club for Greed because they won’t tell you who gave their money.” In fact, all contributors to the organization’s political action committee (which produces campaign ads) are publicly revealed, as are most donors financing issue ads.
Better not tell Chuck Norris he’s fronting a dangerous socialist.
** REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE TONIGHT. The Republican presidential field debates tonight at 5 PM Pacific time. It’s a two-hour debate in Florida, on CNN, featuring questions posed by citizens via You Tube. This is the debate scheduled for September that some Republicans decided not to do, with Mitt Romney saying he didn’t want to answer questions “from a snow man.” The candidates since changed their minds, since the field is so unsettled and there is a great deal of pressure for it to be sorted out.
** SCHWARZENEGGER IN PRIVATE DISCUSSIONS. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is in private meetings and conversations in LA today, perhaps in the state house south known as Oak Productions. (His movie production company.) He’s still trying to get a deal on universal health care, with a state Assembly session scheduled for next week.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel.
You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti.
While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND U.S. ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. Crude oil is trading in a range of $94 to $95 per barrel. This is the second day of declines in the oil market. Saudi Arabia has increased its production to the highest level this year.
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Of course this does remind one of those “Ads” in the “Candidate” attacking the Redford character. And it is just as the Peter Boyle character says when he sees them – the other side is running scared. Romney in particular is pretty much self-financing himself with a strategy that calls for quick wins in Iowa and NH and then a sweep to victory. But Huckabee is the fly in the ointment in the midwest and McCain is rising in the East. So its time to take off the gloves.
Meanwhile its Oprah vs Bill.
Say what you will but it looks like we’re in for some fun times!
Of course this does remind one of those “Ads” in the “Candidate” attacking the Redford character. And it is just as the Peter Boyle character says when he sees them – the other side is running scared. Romney in particular is pretty much self-financing himself with a strategy that calls for quick wins in Iowa and NH and then a sweep to victory. But Huckabee is the fly in the ointment in the midwest and McCain is rising in the East. So its time to take off the gloves.
Meanwhile its Oprah vs Bill.
Say what you will but it looks like we’re in for some fun times!
Huckabee sure sounds like a conservative.
Novak does a public service here by bringing to the mainstream media the very real fissure between fundamentalist and Wall Street Reeps.
This is the most interesting Republican primary of my lifetime. Talk about wide open: For the first time since 1972, neither a Bush nor a Dole will be on the ticket.
Novak does a public service here by bringing to the mainstream media the very real fissure between fundamentalist and Wall Street Reeps.
This is the most interesting Republican primary of my lifetime. Talk about wide open: For the first time since 1972, neither a Bush nor a Dole will be on the ticket.
It’s a two-hour debate in Florida, on CNN, featuring questions posed by citizens via You Tube — I think the candidates had better be preared for an ambush.
By CNN or the citizen vids?
It is interesting, isn’t it?
>Chris M :
Novak does a public service here by bringing to the mainstream media the very real fissure between fundamentalist and Wall Street Reeps.
He does.
>Jonas Blane :
Huckabee sure sounds like a conservative.
Nov 28, 2007 09:52 AM
Bob Novak actually figured in The Candidate. Remember the scene in which he and his then partner Rowland Evans issue an attack column claiming that Bill McKay’s father really backs the Republican senator he’s running against?
>richard locicero :
Of course this does remind one of those “Ads” in the “Candidate” attacking the Redford character. And it is just as the Peter Boyle character says when he sees them – the other side is running scared. Romney in particular is pretty much self-financing himself with a strategy that calls for quick wins in Iowa and NH and then a sweep to victory. But Huckabee is the fly in the ointment in the midwest and McCain is rising in the East. So its time to take off the gloves.
Bob Novak actually figured in The Candidate. Remember the scene in which he and his then partner Rowland Evans issue an attack column claiming that Bill McKay’s father really backs the Republican senator he’s running against?
>richard locicero :
Of course this does remind one of those “Ads” in the “Candidate” attacking the Redford character. And it is just as the Peter Boyle character says when he sees them – the other side is running scared. Romney in particular is pretty much self-financing himself with a strategy that calls for quick wins in Iowa and NH and then a sweep to victory. But Huckabee is the fly in the ointment in the midwest and McCain is rising in the East. So its time to take off the gloves.
Novak seems more and more a Drudge with every passing day…
If I may be so lame as to comment upon my own comment, I should note that the 1976 Reep primary was in some ways more interesting (if less wide open) than this one, in that we experienced the rare phenomenon of a challenger (and not just any challenger!) to a sitting Reep president.
In some ways, Huckabee is playing the Reagan role of 1976, that of an outsider-governor challenging other candidates who are more acceptable to the D.C. elite.
Kevin Drun has some interesting things to say about this today over at POLITICAL ANIMAL. And about the fissure between the “Money” right and the “Social” right. And Novak is with the former.
We might end up with a Dole on the ticket – Senator Elizabeth Dole could be chosen for VP.
That’s a good point.
That’s a good point.
I’m regularly getting invitations from Novak to big corporate type private briefings.
>richard locicero :
Kevin Drun has some interesting things to say about this today over at POLITICAL ANIMAL. And about the fissure between the “Money” right and the “Social” right. And Novak is with the former.
Nov 28, 2007 10:55 AM
I’m regularly getting invitations from Novak to big corporate type private briefings.
>richard locicero :
Kevin Drun has some interesting things to say about this today over at POLITICAL ANIMAL. And about the fissure between the “Money” right and the “Social” right. And Novak is with the former.
Nov 28, 2007 10:55 AM
That was a great race, Reagan vs. Ford.
And the only year in which Californians were major candidates for both party’s presidential nominations.
>Chris M :
If I may be so lame as to comment upon my own comment, I should note that the 1976 Reep primary was in some ways more interesting (if less wide open) than this one, in that we experienced the rare phenomenon of a challenger (and not just any challenger!) to a sitting Reep president.
Novak goes back to the ’60s.
>Wilbur :
Novak seems more and more a Drudge with every passing day…
Nov 28, 2007 10:35 AM
Huckabee is a lot more likable than Bob Novak.
I love it when Republicans fight.
Well, then you are going to love most of the next year.
Well, then you are going to love most of the next year.
Damning with faint praise?
>Jonas Blane :
Huckabee is a lot more likable than Bob Novak.
Nov 28, 2007 01:29 PM
Who isn’t more likeable than Bob Novak? lol
Does this mean there won’t be a debate before the California primary?
Am I the only watching the Republican Debate? The boys are feisty tonight and worth watching.
Am I the only watching the Republican Debate? The boys are feisty tonight and worth watching.
…only one watching…sorry
I’m listening to it carefully and thinking about what I’ll say after.
carole – i am watching, and it is much more interesting than I thought it would be, and the candidates are all standing up quite well. I am particularly surprised by Romney, who appears quite intelligent, affable, and readily willing to admit a mistake or change in policy from earlier days, which I always like. Thompson’s video spot was awful, but he is also doing okay in the debate. One of the weaker candidates thus far is actually Guliani in my opinion, and McCain..
I just want to know if long URLs work better now, for instance there is an interesting talk tonight at LA ALOUD: http://www.lfla.org/aloud/php/a.calendar.bioText.php?month=11&year=2007&day=28
I could also just use an HTML link with the A element.
Still, wewanttomakesurethatpeoplewhowriterunonsentencesanddonthaveaworkingspacekeyandsotheirsimplesentenceseachtakemanylinesasifinonesupercalifragilisticexpialidociouswordthatthesepeopledontcauseunfortunateformattingproblemswithourpages.
Hap,
You are 100% correct.
Hap,
You are 100% correct.
Guliani seems to have improved, and Thompson has I think stumbled on the folk humorist approach, even though he has been fairly articulate and direct in his answers. Duncan Hunter is pretty good, but won’t be around long, so what is the point. Ron Paul is a crackpot, and McCain is embittered and contrived, and I can’t believe he has sunk from what he once was in 2000. He is clearly to me at least a creature of Washington DC nowadays. I continue to be impressed by Romney, and I say so fully expecting a large ration of crap from that nasty Brasky.
The Reps are a respectable bunch but, I won’t vote for them.
I was pleasantly surprised that CNN didn’t pull any fast ones and ambush these folks. I was impressed overall by the frankness and ability of the candidates to engage in a sometimes critical but never derogatory back and forth. The democrats I don’t believe would have done as well with this format, seeming to demand a more structured and safe debate format in which they won’t have to get off their message. I think that the democratic candidate will have his or her work cut out against the republican nominee.
CADTS was right about Huckabee. He did very well.
CADTS was right about Huckabee. He did very well.
I really liked Huckabee …If you Dems crown Hillary I hope I have time to re-register as a Reep and to help Huckabee or Romney…
How is this going to work Mr.Bradley, pundits say if Hillary wins Iowa.. that’s it …is that true?!!!
I think the “winners” tonight were, Romney, Huckabee and Guliani, in that order. I think big losers were Thompson, as well as McCain, and of course Ron Paul. My democratic Iowa caucus voters continue to like Huckabee, although they will be going to caucus to vote for Obama (anybody but Hillary). Huckabee seems to be the folksy, straightforward guy that Thompson tries to be, but who lacks the requisite authenticity… In my DTS view, the top tier republicans seem much better than the top tier democrats.
Well in my DTS view Obama is a my dream candidate who I believe can take this country in a direction it needs to go in a post-global world…I could only vote for Romney or Huckabee in Reeps..NEVER Rudi or Fred… I am not in dynasty politics and I think a husband and wife is even more troublesome and unhealthy dynamic than father -son and that dynanmic has proved to be very unhealthy for the country….look at this speech of Bill’s with the 95 “I”s in it and his new take on where he was about the war…it’s like here they go again…
I am still firmly planted where I was 6 months ago.
Where’s CADTS? I want to hear what she thinks …are the Dems going to crown Hillary…. please say:… NO WAY!
Where’s CADTS? I want to hear what she thinks …are the Dems going to crown Hillary…. please say:… NO WAY!
I am too ,I am voting for Obama unless Hillary takes him out before California…if she takes him out after California and Romney or Huckabee are Reep candidates …I will vote for one of them
Those are very conservative candidates, you know.
The coronation is off.
>Barbara :
Where’s CADTS? I want to hear what she thinks …are the Dems going to crown Hillary…. please say:… NO WAY!
Nov 28, 2007 08:04 PM