My column this week is about Gov. Huckabee’s recent speech to the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, where he elaborated on his decision not to run for president.
Huckabee said his decision was based on spiritual reasons, and I don’t question that, but practical considerations were involved, including President Obama’s huge advantages as an incumbent as well as the toxicity of the current political environment.
No need to go into great detail; if you want more, scroll down on this site a few inches to see the former Arkansas governor and current Floridian quoted at length.
Freed from the constraints of a possible presidential run, Gov. Mike Huckabee made a number of candid statements – about the national debt, about the nature of politics, and about the Republican Party – during a speech at the Clinton School of Public Service Wednesday in Little Rock.
Asked how to explain to voters the seriousness of the country’s current fiscal situation, he said this:
“I’m not sure that the political election process is the environment in which it can be told because our election environment is becoming incredibly toxic to the point that I’m not sure that the country is presently governable. I know that’s a very bold statement, but I’m telling you now, that it is becoming where it is impossible to actually govern. Not just because the other side is going to take you on because of everything that you say and parse every word and bring nuances to everything that’s said, but because your own party will do that. One of the processes that I was going through in deciding whether or not to run for president this election cycle was whether or not the environment in the Republican Party was really about moving toward where we had pragmatic solutions to governing the country or whether it was all about, ‘Can we poke out the eyes of the other guy before they poke out our eyes?’ And I’ll be honest with you, I’m right now convinced that it’s all about poking out each other’s eyes. It’s not about solving real problems. And until we change that, and when I say, ‘we change,’ we as a culture, as a country, have to utterly reject the idea tht one party is always right and the other party is always wrong. That’s nonsense.”
Huckabee talked about the importance of strong families and decried the national debt, which he blamed on both Democrats and Republicans. He compared the Greatest Generation’s sacrifices so their children could live better lives to today’s electorate, which seems on the way to doing the opposite. He said that Ronald Reagan might not get nominated, much less elected, today because he worked within the political system, made deals and even raised taxes. He called for an end to corporate taxes in order to better compete with China – taxing consumption instead of productivity.
He said he wouldn’t completely rule out running for president in 2016 or even in 2012, saying, “I honestly thought I was going to run this time.” He said he didn’t run for several reasons, including spiritual ones, and the fact that, since 1868, only once – in 1980 after Jimmy Carter’s first term – has a party been turned out after only one term. Next year, he said, President Obama will have a billion dollars in the bank. By contrast, he said, “It’s not going to be an easy path for whoever the Republican is. Whoever it is is going to come out of a bloody primary, broke and battered, because I anticipate the Republicans will do what they typically do and they’ll have a demolition derby, a circular firing squad and load up with bullets and start shooting and then by the time somebody comes out of this thing in let’s say April or May, they have very little little time to recover, they’ll never be able to come up with the amount of cash that the incumbent is going to have, and plus he’s an incumbent president which means the advantages of flying in on Air Force One and being presidential is very different than being the challenger.”
He also said that “Q and A” stands for “Questions and Avoidance” and then joked that his goal was to “avoid a career-ending response.” Which led him to say this:
“Although I will say that I have a little bit of a liberation in that the decision that I’m not going to be seeking the Republican nomination gives me a freedom that maybe I wouldn’t have had otherwise.
“And in part, I would say that’s the shame of our political system today. We say we want candor, but we don’t. We say we want people who run for office to be blunt, but if they are, then we crucify them for their candor. We say that we want people to give straightforward answers. But straightforward answers are usually what gets a person from being able to hold office, not what propels him into it. And so in many ways, I feel like there is a great need in our culture for us to come to the place where we actually want an honest, intellectually upright discussion of issues that we are challenged by in this country.”
My Arkansas News Bureau column is about hate crimes legislation. Is it a slippery slope?
Last week, two men, Frankie Maybee and Sean Popejoy from Green Forest, became the first in Arkansas to be convicted of hate crimes under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009. The two men used their pickup truck to run five Hispanic men off the road, injuring all of them and putting one into a coma, after taunting and threatening them because of their ethnicity.
Of course Maybee and Popejoy should go to jail, but not for “hating.” They should go to jail for aggravated assault and battery. How they feel about a particular group is irrelevant.
Hate crimes legislation punishes not only actions but thought. I think it’s a dangerous path – one on which European countries and Canada already have traveled farther. America shouldn’t follow.
“I am not a member of any organized political party,” American humorist Will Rogers once said. “I am a Democrat.”
That’s one of Rogers’ most famous quotations, and it is as true now as it was when he said it. It’s one of the reasons Democrats have had such trouble creating a coherent message to counteract the “less government” message Republicans have been preaching so successfully since the Reagan years.
Republicans have a different problem – they are too organized, as Rogers pointed out. He also once said, “Democrats never agree on anything. That’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.”
Now more than ever in my lifetime, Republicans demand almost lockstep conformity on just about every issue – as Newt Gingrich is finding out.
Gingrich, the party’s leader during the mid-90s, is trying to revive his political career with a presidential bid that is going nowhere. On Sunday, he criticized Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan as “radical” and “right-wing social engineering.”
I don’t know about “right-wing social engineering,” but Ryan’s plan is pretty radical. He wants to replace Medicare as it now exists with a voucher program that gives senior citizens $15,000 a year to buy their own health insurance. It certainly deserves a healthy debate – both within the Republican Party and outside it. In fact, a healthy debate would actually help its cause. A new poll shows most voters oppose any cuts at all to Medicare, which shows how little they understand the budget realities the country faces. A healthy debate might educate them on those realities.
But Republicans are cutting Gingrich off at the knees, and, regrettably, he has already backtracked.
Republicans have always talked about being a “big tent party.” If Newt Gingrich isn’t welcome inside, that’s a pretty small tent.
