Free Republic's (1/9) poll on Republican candidates' liberal positions that would be deal killers

Free Republic Poll ^ | 1/9/2008 | Jim Robinson

[Jim Robinson]

(1/9) If the eventual Republican presidential nominee has a record including one or more of the following non-conservative positions, would you vote for him anyway or which item specifically would most likely be a deal killer?

• Abortion/gay rights

• Open borders/amnesty

• Gun grabber

• Tax & Spender

• Nanny stater

• Untrustworthy/flip flopper

• Anti-free speech

• Two or more could kill deal

• Three or more definitely kill deal

• I'll vote "R" regardless

Click on source link above to respond to the poll.

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Three or more liberal positions on critical issues would definitely kill the deal in my book.

The way I see it:

X = Candidate holds or has record of non-conservative position. W = Weak or mixed positions.

Candidate	Abortion/ Gay Rights	Open Borders/ Amnesty	Gun Control	Tax and Spend	Nanny Stater	Untrustworthy Spinner Flip flopper	Campaign Finance Reform
Giuliani	X	X	X	-	-	X	X
Huckabee	-	X	-	X	X	X	W
Hunter	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
McCain	W	X	W	W	W	X	X
Romney	X	X	W	W	X	X	X
Thompson	-	-	-	-	-	-	X

Thompson and Hunter are most conservative, but I prefer Thompson because Hunter's going to have a tough time making himself known and jumping from the House to the Presidency.

Please correct me where I'm wrong.

[unspun]

I have lived in several different states (Pacific Northwest/Mid West/East) and areas in the country, and I currently reside in the South. Where I live in North Carolina every time items like increased funding for roads, parks etc come up in elections, they pass overwhelming (80%+) where they didn't in other parts of the country where I have lived, while the state votes overwhelming Republican in national elections. My guess is part of the reason my be a lower percentage of state GDP spent on these types of items in the South...etc. I image Arkansas isn't much different in this respect from North Carolina, and not supporting some increased spending on roads/parks etc would have been political suicide. Huckabee was also working with a Democrat legislature in a state with a balanced budget amendment. Ronald Reagan could be mischaracterized as a heavy spender as well with the Democrat congress he had to work with, but he clearly wasn't. Anyways, I think part of the mischaracterization is due to regional differences.

Thanks for the note, FP. From what you know of these states, have they been free of budget burgeoning, since say, 1998?

[Reagan Man]

Rooty is a tax and spend liberal.

From the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (Edmund J. McMahon):

"Even with the tax cuts of the last several years, New York remains by far the most heavily taxed big city in the country."

TAXES: From 1996-2001 Giuliani and the City Council agreed to reduce marginal city income taxes by some $2.0-billion, an effort that offset the $1.8-billion tax increase put in place by Mayor Dinkins a few years earlier. So in reality, individual city income taxes were actually cut by a modest $200-million. Giuliani made no effort to make permanent changes to the city income tax code. Giuliani even fought efforts to abolish a 12.5% tax surcharge. The primary reason Rudy and the City Council agreed to cut business taxes, was to make NYCity more appealing to companies thinking about locating/relocating to the Big Apple. A smart move, however, when Rudy left office he left NYCity straddled with some of the highest income, sales, property and general corporation taxes in the entire nation.

GOVERNMENT SPENDING: Spending under Rudy`s reign as Mayor went up 35.6%, compared to the inflation rate of 22.2%. Rudy left NYCity with a projected, pre-9/11 deficit of $2.0 billion and an increased debt total topping $42-billion. Second largest debt after the federal government. Giuliani also added 15,000 new teachers to the city employment rolls. Increasing the membership of two major liberal organizations, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

"The scope of government was not reduced at all. The mayor abandoned his most visible initiative in this sphere—the proposed sale of the city hospital system—after a struggle with the unions and defeats in the courts. He did cut costs in social services; even before the new federal welfare reforms took effect in 1997, the city had begun to significantly reduce caseloads. But money saved on social services has only helped to subsidize big increases in other categories. Today the array of social services sponsored and partially funded by the city—from day care to virtually guaranteed housing—is as wide as ever.

"In the final analysis, Mayor Giuliani sought to make the city deliver services more efficiently—not to make the city deliver fewer services. Gains in efficiency were offset, however, by a spike in the costs of outsourced contracts (see point 2 below). Thus, in two areas where inroads might have been made, the city instead failed to reduce spending."

"1. Personnel Increases. In 1995–96, the city entered into a series of collective bargaining agreements with its public-employee unions. In addition to granting pay increases that ended up roughly equaling inflation, the city promised not to lay off any workers for the life of the contracts. These agreements were expected to add $2.2 billion to the budget by fiscal 2001. But that estimate didn’t reckon with renewed growth in the number of city employees. After dipping in Giuliani’s first two years, the full-time headcount rose from 235,069, in June 1996 to over 253,000 by November 2000. Thanks largely to this growth in the workforce, the total increase in personnel service costs since 1995 has been $4 billion.

2. "Outsourced Services. The failure to shrink the scope of city government made it all the more imperative that Mayor Giuliani vastly increase its efficiency. In the attempt to increase productivity, the mayor farmed out some city services to private contractors. But as the number of outsourced contracts doubled under Giuliani, contractual expenses also nearly doubled—from $3 billion to $5.8 billion. While it may be argued that the city saved money by outsourcing these services, the net savings turned out to be marginal at best. In practice, outsourcing proved to be more of a bargaining chip in negotiations with unions than a serious means of pruning expenses."

[Jim Robinson]

Well, it should be easy enough to check Romney and Huckabee’s appointment records. I know when we did this with Rudy, it was suspicions confirmed. It was corrupt cronyism and wall to wall liberals and democrats.

[what's up]

I said why Fred supported it was about cleaning up corruption.

Limiting free speech is supposed to clean up corruption?

Sheesh.

[fieldmarshaldj]

C’mon, dude. You know it was over big $$.

[Reagan Man]

Romney was a liberal Governor of a very liberal state. Massachusetts has elected two of the biggest liberals in America to the US Senate for decades --- Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.

Romney's recent conversions on several key issues isn’t convincing. More political expediency than political epiphany. His 35 years of support for Roe v Wade and a woman's right to have an abortion is enough right there to disqualify him. His support for gay rights, gun control and his call for nationalized health care based on his own plan called RomneyCare, marks him as a big government, liberal Republican.

Willard didn’t support Reagan`s conservative agenda of the 1980`s and even opposed the Contract With America. He even shifted from being an open borders/amnesty backer to a Tancredo clone.

Thats just off the top of my head. Romney’s got a horrible track record on most issues. Mitt’s has never been a conservative.

Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush.
I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.

~ Mitt Romney LINK

[Jim Robinson]

Romney on choice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c3xJdFbJGw

[Jim Robinson]

Watch the entire video. Romney’s trying to run to the left of Kennedy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c3xJdFbJGw

[WOSG]

You can read the Cato reports yourself. Just a google away. I’d link or post but its PDF.

“Mike Huckabee? As governor, he never saw a tax increase he didn’t love. He presided over a massive increase in state spending, including an expansion of Medicaid, and approved increases in the sales, income, and cigarette taxes. On its annual governor’s report card, Cato gave him an “F” for fiscal policy. Most Democratic governors received higher grades.

As a presidential candidate, Huckabee has been no better. Not only has he failed to call for spending cuts, he actually wants to increase spending on a variety of programs, from education to infrastructure. He even wants the federal government to fund art and music programs in the nation’s schools.”
- Michael Tanner

[Califreak]

United Conservative thread bump

[decal]

The three youngest Supreme Court Justices are all on our side; the other six (including Justice Scalia) will be at least 70 by the next administration. A two-term President beginning in 2009 could have more influence on how the Supremes decide cases since FDR.

We CANNOT have a Dem be that President - the last good one the Dems put on the bench was Byron White, in 1962. The last one before that, well...

The ones the GOP Presidents have nominated have been hit-and-miss, to be sure, and it hasn’t seemed to matter whether a conservative or moderate has done the deed - for every Scalia there’s been a Kennedy; for every Stevens there’s been a Rehnquist.

The Dems will probably control both houses of Congress; we’ll have gridlock with either a conservative or moderate GOP President.

Does this all mean I don’t care whether a conservative or moderate gets nominated? By no means; I’d much rather see Fred Thompson get the call than William Jennings Huckabee.

But it does mean that I’m not going to paint Muslim into a corner, saying “if (fill in the blank) gets the nomination I’m gonna vote: 3d party/Dem/write-in/not bother.”

mountainfolk said it best upthread: if conservatives were the majority in this country, this thread would never have been posted, as it would have been unnecessary.

Fact is, we’re NOT the majority in this country and we DO have to avoid alienating the moderates who ARE the majority.

Like that great pragmatic conservative Casey Stengel once said: “The secret of managing is to keep the ones that hate you away from the ones that haven’t decided yet.”

[WOSG]

Try these on for size...

Huckabee on sealing the Mexican border with armed forces:

“I also would have had a real problem with using a military force for a police function… Part of my problem with that would have been that we have, in essence, militarized a peaceful border, and I think that’s a terrible precedent.”

Huckabee on Amnesty:

“I tend to think that the rational approach is to find a way to give people a pathway to citizenship. You shouldn’t ignore the law or ignore those who break it. But by the same token, I think it’s a little disingenuous when I hear people say they should experience the full weight of the law in every respect with no pathway, because that’s not something we practice in any other area of criminal justice in this country.”

Huckabee on President Bush’s illegal immigration plan:

“To think that we’re going to go lock up 12 million people, or even round them up and drive them to the border and let them go, might make a great political speech, but it’s not going to happen. What should happen, however, is exactly what I think the president has proposed, and that is that we create a process where people make restitution for the fact they have broken the law.

It’s not an amnesty, and I know that there are some who think that anything less than essentially grabbing them by the nape of the neck and tossing them over a fence, real or imaginary, is amnesty. But I think that’s ridiculous. And whether it’s Patrick Kennedy, Rush Limbaugh, or an illegal immigrant, there ought to be some rationality in how we apply our law. We do that every day.

…

“Suddenly to say that these people that came over here to pluck a chicken, pick a tomato, or make a bed should suffer the full consequences of the law as if somehow they’ve totally violated our peace and prosperity, is absurd.”

Huckabee on the reaction to the immigration bill:

“You can’t get them off of it, and you can’t have a discussion beyond the classic, “what part of illegal do you not understand?” I understand it correctly. I know exactly what that means.”

[unspun]

Huh, WOSG.

I asked you about your example, but you threw more muck about Huck.

I want you to do some of the real work, here.

What was that exemplary governor’s name, again? What were the budgets at beginning and end? What years?

[Reagan Man]

You Can't Trust Mitt Part 1:Abortion

LINK

[what's up]

You know it was over big $$.

So what? It's the socialists who control US capitalists.

Don't you know that yet?

[roses of sharon]

You can be in the weeds all night with decades of records.

One just has to listen to the actual campaigns the candidates are running.

And Huck is running a liberal/populist campaign, with a little sainthood thrown in, lol.

No sale.

[WOSG]

Actually I linked to a FULL report on Huckabee’s tax and spend record, that includes the things he did right and the many things he did wrong. Huckabee started out okay but in office morphed into a tax-and-spend liberal. Most of his ‘good’ things were in the early years in cutting taxes, but later on his actions were no different from a tax-and-spend Democrat, hiking taxes and spending and ignoring pleas from Arkansas conservatives for fiscal discipline. getting into fights with the conservative Republicans.

According to Arkansas Eagle Forum President Betsy Hagan and former Republican state senator Peggy Jeffries, once he gained power in the Governor’s office with the support of the conservatives, he alienated his conservative based, and at one point referred to them as the Shiites in the Republican Party. Hagan was a key backer and number one fan of Huckabee’s early political career. But to her dismay, Huckabee did not practice what he preached. “He was pro-life and pro-gun, but otherwise a liberal,” she says. “Just like Bill Clinton, he will charm you, but don’t be surprised if he takes a completely different turn in office.”2

[Jim Robinson]

Hey, all I ask is that we support the conservatives in the race and quit slobbering all over the liberal RINOs. And quit caving-in with “I will vote for whichever Republican gets the nomination.” Might as well surrender before the battle begins. FR is a conservative site and we will fight for conservative candidates. Liberals and RINOs need not apply.

[fieldmarshaldj]

"FR is a conservative site and we will fight for conservative candidates. Liberals and RINOs need not apply."

That's the money shot, right there. ;-)

[fieldmarshaldj]

I dunno. I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.