Huckabee is charming, likeable, eloquent, witty. He excelled in all five debates I watched and delivered outstanding speeches both at the Value Voters Summit and at the National Rifle Association. I think he is the only GOP candidate (apart from Ron Paul) who made it clear that the Second Amendment is about allowing individuals to protect themselves against out-of-control government if necessary. He is also in favour of a Pro Life Amendment specifying once and for all that life begins at conception thereby overturning Roe versus Wade and protecting the unborn. And he wants to abolish the IRS, income tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax, and replace it with a 23% sales tax, the Fair Tax. Mike Huckabee (apart from Ron Paul, of course) may be the only GOP candidate behind whom both religious right and libertarian right could unite. He would sweep the religious South (which Giuliani might have trouble winning against the former First Lady of Arkansas), and keep the libertarian West. His compassionate conservative credentials may even appeal to the blue collar Mid West, and he might even make inroads in New England!
And you just signed up today to post all of that BS.
And now he’s for the Fair Tax, though he never thought about such in Arkansas.
I don’t think so. The comments attached to the article should give you a taste of what small government types think of Huckabee. If you poll the small government/small-l conservative contingent here, you’ll find in most cases that Huckabee is unacceptable. He has a record of hiking taxes, hiking spending, and proposing big-government “solutions” such as national smoking bans, just as a start. In my view as a small government conservative, he is anathema to this wing of the party.
I’ve posted many times that Giuliani cannot turn out the three major constituencies of the Reagan coalition — social conservatives, small-government conservatives and security hawks. Huckabee has the same problem. Giuliani is a slap in the face to social conservatives and in many cases to small government conservatives. Huckabee is a slap in the face to small government conservatives and in many cases to national security hawks.
If we can’t organize behind a candidate who is acceptable to all three groups, we have only two choices: lose the election, or trash the Reagan coalition and form a different one with a different set of groups.
By the way, welcome to Free Republic.
Life doesn’t begin at conception. That is biologically impossible. Life is, in fact, an unbroken chain extending all the way back through time to Creation.