Republicans would be wise to tab McCain and Huckabee ("For the children...of illegals")

If the Republican Party really wanted to hold on to the White House in 2009, it's pretty clear what it would do. It would grit its teeth, swallow its doubts and nominate a ticket of John McCain for president and Mike Huckabee for vice president — and president-in-waiting.

Those two are far from front-runners. They trail Mitt Romney in Iowa and New Hampshire and lag behind Rudy Giuliani in national surveys of Republican voters. But, in a series of debates, including last week's CNN/YouTube extravaganza. McCain and Huckabee have been notable for their clarity, character and, yes, simple humanity.

From everything I have heard on the campaign trail, it's obvious that they are the pair who have earned the widest respect among the eight Republican candidates themselves. McCain is the eldest and the most honored, not only for what he endured as a Vietnam prisoner of war but as a principled battler for what he considers essential on Iraq and other national-security issues.

Huckabee, who previously was known only to those of us who cover state government and governors, has been the surprise discovery of the campaign season. His combination of religious principle, good humor, tolerance and his clear passion on education and health care complements McCain's muscular foreign policy and aversion to wasteful domestic spending.

The two of them seem often to be operating on a different — and higher — plane than the quarrelsome Giuliani and Romney, whose mutual contempt is as palpable as it is persuasive.

Fred Thompson appears perpetually grumpy — a presence hard to imagine inhabiting the Oval Office.(continued)

Of course, there was yet another line of argument which Romney could have invoked and which he did allude to: the state treasury is a finite resource and when you divert the money to illegal aliens, you deny it to legal citizens. Romney said that but he might also have broadened its application to observe that Huckabee's formula punishes Americans. It is not compassionate, therefore, but discriminatory.

Your entire post was excellent, but this snippet was especially insightful.

Huckabee and McCain are far too willing to extort money from the hard-working productive citizens of this great country to enable big government--in its heavy-handed, stupid, discriminatory, woefully inefficient way--to exercise "compassion." This may make these two men feel really good and holy about themselves, but in the end their misguided efforts inflict even more inefficiencies and waste on everyone else and create a deeper cesspool of misery than they started with. In this, they are no different than Lyndon Johnson whose "Great Society" nonsense destroyed entire generations of black Americans while flushing trillions of dollars down the "compassion" toilet.

What I really like about Romney is that he doesn't buy into such nonsense. He is far too good of a businessman to buy into it.

Did you read the quotation I posted by Broder: “History will record that both of them saw the threat to the West posed by terrorism and responded courageously” Do those sound like the words of a partisan leftist?

Or that the man heaped praise on Karl Rove?

I’m not sure about “consistent.” I’m not familiar enough with Broder to say that. But I do remember the guy was a rare journalist who could praise Bush and the War on Terror. Why should I trash a guy who I think has been fair on an occasion or two?

Now that you mentioned, I’ve searched through some of his articles, and I would say he has a few redeemable moments:

On Bill Clinton:

“”Ambrose is right on both scores,” says Howard Baker. “But the difference between Clinton and Nixon is that Nixon resigned because he couldn’t stand it. Clinton is not cut from the same cloth. He can compartmentalize. I drive by the White House at night and think, ‘What in the world are they doing right now? How do they function?’ I would be destroyed.”

For Baker, the most serious consequence of the scandal is “the diminished capability for the U.S. to lead by moral example . . . the impact on Kosovo and Iraq. I can just see Saddam Hussein licking his chops seeing that the U.S. is less willing to respond.”

Washington insiders are particularly appalled by the president’s recklessness, given the fact that he was already facing the Jones lawsuit. “What angers people here,” says political writer Elizabeth Drew, is that “he was on notice. There are two different kinds of judgments — one, how terrible and two, how stupid. Even if this doesn’t warrant throwing him out of office, there are too many people who are bothered by it morally and there are others who want to take the opportunity to exploit his vulnerability. The result is an awful lot of wreckage and damage.”

“Even those who have to deal with or publicly support the administration do so grudgingly. They say that regardless of whether his fortunes improve, Bill Clinton has essentially lost the Washington Establishment for good.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/quinn110298.htm

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