This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: Mike Huckabee
Former Arkansas governor, and formerly relevant national political figure, Mike Huckabee is guilty of the latest right wing reductio ad Hitlerumfallacy. The Tea Party and right wing penchant for comparing President Obama to Hitler and Stalin is evidence not of any totalitarian tendencies on the part of Obama. Instead it is evidence that right wing contempt for science is now rivaled by contempt for learning anything about history.
With Mitch Daniels confirming that he will not run for president, and new polls showing that Mitt Romney is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2012, there is a real possibility that the 2012 primary will be over before it really starts. There is a small possibility that one of the candidates like Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich will galvanize the far right and make a race of it, and an even smaller possibility that a new candidate like Chris Christie will make a late entrance into the race and win the nomination, but with about eight months before the first vote is cast, Romney is increasingly likely to be the nominee.
Romney has done his work relatively quietly while the decisions by Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee not to run and the disastrous beginning to Newt Gingrich's quixotic bid for the White House have received considerably more coverage in recent weeks. Of these three stories, Huckabee's decision not to run is the most significant. Huckabee is a good politician with excellent communication skills and opinions that would have resonated well with the conservative Republican base. Huckabee also had a very difficult time building an organization and raising money in 2008 and evinced little enthusiasm for doing that again in 2012, seemingly preferring the comfort and compensation of his work for Fox News.
During the last few months a very strange political development has occurred. Most of the Republican candidates seeking to unseat President Obama in November have encounteredserious trouble raising money. By April of 2007, Hillary Clinton had raised $36 million; and Barack Obama had raised $24 million. No Republican candidate today has even approached these totals. Some Republican candidates, like Mitt Romney, can finance much of their campaigns themselves, but financing an entire presidential campaign is extremely expensive and should not be necessary for candidates, particularly Republican candidates, who enjoy significant political support.
While the good news for Democrats is that Obama may be in a relatively strong position to get reelected, the bad news for progressives is that Obama is now clearly just another Democrat with little real ability to inspire or bring about real change. The reasons to vote for Obama are clear: He will make better appointments to the Supreme Court than a Republican president would; he will stand up to the most extreme and dangerous proposals from a John Boehner-led House of Representatives and a U.S., Senate which could be taken over by the Republicans in 2012 or 2014; and he will pay more attention to issues regarding the environment, civil rights and organized labor, although will probably not really fight for any of this. There are, of course, other reasons as well, but the basic point remains that we need to vote for the guy who is disappointing and uninspiring because the other options are worse.
The absence of a clear front runner has encouraged numerous politicians, and at least one non-politician, to begin to explore a bid for the nomination. The breadth, and in some respects absurdity of this field, is striking. It includes Mitt Romney, a businessman turned liberal governor turned right wing ideologue, Newt Gingrich, a scandal plagued 1980s-1990s futurist, Haley Barbour, a former governor of Mississippi and chair of the RNC who would not have looked out of place railing against desegregation half a century ago, Mike Huckabee, a friendly sounding but often frightening preacher turned politician, Sarah Palin whose media savvy should not be underestimated, Michele Bachman who seems to take a sophomoric joy in saying every provocative and radical thought that pops into her head, Donald Trump a real estate developer, television personality and blowhard all rolled into one and many more and Tim Pawlenty who looks like the normal viable candidate on paper, but has failed to break through more broadly.
Before there was Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Scott Walker or any of the other current radical conservatives seeking the national spotlight and perhaps the Republican nomination for president, there was Newt Gingrich. The recent boomlet around a potential presidential bid by the aging right wing revolutionary feels like a strange hybrid of the unique quirkiness that has always been part of Gingrich with nostalgia for the 1990s. Next thing you know, we'll be talking about impeaching a Democratic president and shutting down the government. Maybe the 1990s really are back.
In recent weeks, as part of an uncanny attempt to behave as generals fighting the last war, many in the Republican leadership have been floating Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, as the next Republican hope, or even the Republican Obama. The thinking behind this, while not particularly sophisticated, is, at least on the surface, easy to understand. Jindal like Obama is well educated, young and has an attractive family.
To some extent the Republicans electoral woes can be attributed to an unpopular president winding down his second term while the country is mired in an unpopular war and the economy is struggling. More thoughtful Republicans, however, may begin to realize that something larger than this is going on. In recent decades, the Republican coalition has rested on three core groups: social conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and small government/anti-tax voters. Although this coalition was first forged by Richard Nixon in 1968, it could more accurately be described as the Reagan coalition because nobody held it together as well as Reagan. Through his hawkish views on the Soviet Union, anti-tax rhetoric and conservative social views, Reagan was able to get elected president relatively easily two times. Moreover, he seemed to effortlessly balance the needs of these three often conflicting constituencies. Wealthy voters who were not social conservatives seemed unconvinced that he was really a social conservative, while social conservatives did not seem to mind that he prioritized tax cuts and building up the military over their goals.