Breaking News: Thompson Quits Race

No one is surprised, I think, but Fred Thompson just officially announced his withdrawal from the race for the Republican nomination.

I believe this will help boost Huckabee's campaign. If it weren't for Thompson, Huckabee probably would have won South Carolina. They were competing for the same conservative voters and people who saw a need for a down-to-earth Southerner as the GOP nominee.

I do not feel compelled to say anything positive about Thompson, particularly after his bitter and libelous attacks on Huckabee in the past several weeks. Good bye and good riddance!

I Have a Dream

If you've been reading my blog, you know that I support Mike Huckabee for President because he combines whole-pro-life convictions with an economic policy perspective that understands the power of free markets but subordinates them to the good of families, particularly those who are middle class or poor.

You may wonder why I care, particularly about the economic policy. After all, the present system treats me well. As a lawyer, I can easily afford a nice home and all the trappings of upper-middle class American life (even if I try to avoid living like it). I can also easily afford to save money and invest it. I make my money off of the status quo in Washington--interpreting inscrutably complex regulations and lobbying for incremental changes (or no changes) to law and regulations on behalf of big businesses. By demographic profile, I ought to be a Romney supporter. Why do I want to change a system that treats me so well?

Two reasons: First, my moral values command me to work to make sure that all human beings have the opportunity to live in dignity, including in an economic sense. When I was a child, my father did most of his work for Christian relief and mission organizations, so I learned from an early age about the economic deprivations that many others face, both in the third world and in certain places in America too. I learned that from those to whom much has been given, much will be expected. And as I've grown older I have had those values reinforced by reading the beautiful encyclicals of the Catholic Church about our obligations as individuals -- and through the power of the State -- to ensure material dignity for all persons.

Here is the second reason: Yep, that's a picture of the K Street Mole's daughter, taken just today. And in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and the annual March for Life tomorrow...

I have a dream that my daughter will grow up or at least come of age in a society where every child is seen as the miraculous fruit of his or her parents' love (including the love of parents who sacrificially give their children life by choosing adoption), not an inconvenience to be eliminated for the poor or a luxury good to be produced in a test tube at a convenient time for the rich.

I have a dream that my daughter will not grow up in fear of a cataclysmic terrorist attack on our metropolitan area, the capital of our nation. (Not that any of the Republican candidates would not be strong on this point, but if the nominee is not a strong opponent against the Democratic nominee, the security of our city is a big concern.)

I have a dream that if my daughter wants to be a teacher like her daddy that she can pursue that dream and still be able to own a modest home and achieve economic self-sufficiency.

I have a dream that if my daughter marries, that she will have the option to stay home with her own children, even if her husband isn't a lawyer.

I have a dream that economic concerns will not consume my daughter and her peers as they enter adulthood; that they will feel free to pursue careers based on their talents and interests, not feeling compelled to strive for a mere handful of careers that are the only ones that will provide economic security.

I have a dream that society will not preach consumerism to my daughter; that her everyday influences inside and outside our home will show her that love of family and friends and God is far more valuable than accumulating treasures of earth that will rust and rot.

I have a dream that my daughter will have a better life than mine, not in terms of material goods, but a life rich with love, laughter, learning, and true meaning.

FRC Finally Acting Helpful

First, the disclaimer: Under federal tax laws, the Family Research Council is forbidden from endorsing any candidate for political office or otherwise "intervening" in an election. But the reality is that nonprofits have become very sophisticated in influencing their particular audiences in political matters without stepping over the tax code's lines. The leftys even have an organization, Alliance for Justice, devoted to giving workshops and offering individualized legal advice to nonprofits to help them "get away" with as much political activity as possible while not jeopardizing their tax status. (I infiltrated their 2-day workshop a while back: extremely informative -- and maddening.)

So the Family Research Council / FRC Action really botched an opportunity back in October to help unite social conservatives behind one GOP candidate. After Mike Huckabee received more standing ovations than all of the other GOP candidates combined (and they all got ~20 minutes to speak to about 2,000 FRC members) at their Washington Briefing conference, FRC announced Mitt Romney the winner of their straw poll (by a hair over Huckabee), to stunned silence by the people who had actually attended the event. Quickly the true story leaked out: the Romney supporters had "stuffed" the online voting (which required "joining" FRC Action for $1), but Mike Huckabee had totally dominated the onsite voting, winning 51% of the vote, and Romney came in a very distant 2nd place with 10% of the onsite vote. Had FRC been forthcoming from the beginning about the results of much more reliable onsite voting, instead of issuing misleading press releases calling Romney the winner, this would have boosted Huckabee's status as the leader for social conservatives much more than the muddled reporting that actually occurred.

Well, FRC is now facing the prospect of the social conservatives getting left in the cold because of the 3-way split among the first three primaries. Now Tony Perkins' message on their blog is, we have to unite! He can't say which candidate to unite behind overtly, and he offers some complimentary points about each of Huckabee, McCain, Romney and Thompson, but today's blog entry does offer some subtle clues to readers about where the center of gravity ought to be:

• It criticizes Dick Armey and the Club for Growth for touring South Carolina, not to unite the party, but to attack Mike Huckabee. Also note that FRC has cast Dick Armey as the villian in multiple recent daily emails for trying to jettison the social conservatives and shove Rudy Giuliani down their throats. The implication is that Club for Growth is guilty by association and Mike Huckabee is the protagonist to slay the Armey dragon.
  
• Huckabee gets listed first among the candidates. Simple yet suggestive.
  
• The Blogroll on the right of the screen highlights 3 blogs, and then lists maybe a hundred more alphabetically. The top two featured blogs happen to be... prominent pro-Huckabee blogs! Evangelical Outpost, which has explicitly endorsed Huckabee, and Reasoned Audacity, belonging to Charmaine Yoest, who recently joined the Huckabee campaign as Senior Policy Adviser.

In other news, today's Rassmussen poll shows Huckabee overcoming last week's slippage in South Carolina and gaining 9 percentage points in one week to pull dead even with John McCain. I was getting a little worried and pessimistic the last few days about a McCain takeover, but things are looking promising as we head into the first in the South primary!

Economic Stimulus II

Jon Kyl demonstrates again why he's my favorite Senator with his wise words about the foolishness of band-aid, short-term measures to address the impending recession. Only two short-term responses make any sense: measures to help prevent foreclosure for families on the brink, and temporary measures by the Federal Reserve to improve liquidity in the credit markets (though the latter needs to be treated with great caution, because too-low interest rates is what got us into this pickle in the first place*).

"Immediate" rebate checks and government spending will not address the real problem, which is that wages for most workers are not keeping up with soaring costs of living necessities such as housing, fuel, and health care. We delayed the effects of this problem for a few years by borrowing against rapidly-rising housing equity, but that well has run dry and set off a domino effect on the economy making things even worse. Rebate checks and government spending ("Keynesian prescriptions" as Sen. Kyl says) are just disproven snake oils for recession. We have to focus on raising wages and lower costs of necessities.

How do we do that? The best way to raise wages is to export more goods and services. Americans are already over-consuming and not saving, so there isn't any room (in a sustainable sense) to raise consumption domestically to improve demand and wages. But there's a rapidly growing middle class in Asia interested in buying things America has to offer. We need to facilitate that by lowering built-in costs in American exports, such as embedded high taxes, health care, and legal liability costs. To the extent the government helps expand demand at home, we should be building up our defenses and infrastructure, and do it in a long-term way that will provide a steady stream of work, not a short-term spike in retail sales.

Lowering health care costs is a two-fer, because it is also one of the big factors causing the economic squeeze at home. Another two-fer is investing in alternative energy sources and expanded domestic energy production to keep energy costs under control, which will also entail new, high-paying technology jobs. On the flip side, we have to be careful about propping up the deflating housing market by lowering interest rates again, because that only makes housing less affordable to anyone who doesn't already own.* Our economy needs to get away from dependency on housing prices to achieve real growth.

Guess what? All these prescriptions are in Mike Huckabee's economic stimulus plan! Check it out, and vote for a rare politician who doesn't fall for the counterproductive urge to "do something now" that will only make things worse in the end.

(I think we've been looking at the wrong Senator from Arizona: Huckabee-Kyl 2008, anyone?)

* If you're not aware of how the Fed's interest rate cuts from 2002-2005 are the chief cause of the housing crisis, I'll post an explanation of that later.

Smokescreen - Lifted

Back in August, after Ames when Mike Huckabee was just starting to get any attention at all, he stated at a cancer forum that he would support a ban on smoking in the workplace nationwide, just as he had fought for it in Arkansas. The National Review Online crowd went wild, declaring him a "nanny stater" and thus began NRO's war on Mike Huckabee.

Here's the irony: just as Huckabee has revised his position, saying that these types of smoking bans are best handled at the state and local level, not federal, the founder of National Review, William F. Buckley, has published his mea culpa in the matter of defending this deadly practice in the name of personal freedom:

My own story is that I am the founder of a doughty magazine which, if space was solicited tomorrow by a tobacco company, would agree to sell the space. We would come up with serious arguments featuring personal independence and pain/pleasure correlations to justify selling the space, but I would need to weep just a little bit on the inside over the simple existence of tobacco.

Again, the personal story. My wife began smoking (furtively) when 15, which is about when I also began. When we were both 27, on the morning after a high-pitched night on the town for New Year’s Eve, we resolved on mortification of the flesh to make up for our excesses: We both gave up smoking. The next morning, we decided to divorce — nothing less than that would distract us from the pain we were suffering. We came to, and flipped a coin — the winner could resume smoking. I lost, and for deluded years thought myself the real loser, deprived of cigarettes. Half a year ago my wife died, technically from an infection, but manifestly, at least in
part, from a body weakened by 60 years of nonstop smoking. I stayed off the cigarettes but went to the idiocy of cigars inhaled, and suffer now from emphysema, which seems determined to outpace heart disease as a human killer.

Stick me in a confessional and ask the question: Sir, if you had the authority, would you forbid smoking in America? You’d get a solemn and contrite, Yes. Solemn because I would be violating my secular commitment to the free marketplace. Contrite, because my relative indifference to tobacco poison for so many years puts me in something of the position of the Zyklon B defendants after World War II. These folk manufactured the special gas used in the death camps to genocidal ends. They pleaded, of course, that as far as they were concerned, they were simply technicians, putting together chemicals needed in wartime for fumigation. Some got away with that defense; others, not.

Those who fail to protest the free passage of tobacco smoke in the air come close to the Zyklon defendants in pleading ignorance.

In some ways I am surprised NR allowed this to be published at all, but I suppose they can't deny the wishes of their founder to do public penance on this matter. Though I certainly do not support criminalizing tobacco on the grounds of saving people from themselves, smoking in public certainly meets the legal definition of a "nuisance": a personal activity that imposes unacceptible risks and costs on others in the vacinity. The law has forbidden or punished nuisances even from the days when the state was truly only a "night watchman." Knowing what we know in 2008, there is no excuse on the grounds of "personal liberty" for allowing persons to impose this deadly nuisance on the lungs of others. Whether this is best handled state-by-state or nationally is a matter of pragmatic political judgment, but the policy considerations are the same.

Huckabee's Economic Stimulus Plan

First, a note on Michigan. I'm sad that Huckabee didn't win, as the polls indicated he might a few weeks ago, but I'm glad that Romney broke McCain's "momentum." This should deflate the McCain bubble and give Huckabee a better chance at winning South Carolina on Saturday. It's do-or-die time!

Romney seems to have won Michigan because of his conversion in the past week to the idea that the economy is hurting and maybe the government can do something helpful. In Romney's case, that "something helpful" is promising to shovel billions of dollars to Michigan in corporate welfare while mandating health insurance coverage for every American, thereby saddling the whole nation with similar health care costs as the auto industry. I guess Romney has decided that buying elections with his own money wasn't working too well, and buying an election with the taxpayers' money is cheaper for him and apparently more effective too.

Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee, who has been characterized by certain quarters as an "economic liberal" for having acknowledged the looming economic problems months ago, has put out an economic stimulus plan that addresses the struggles of the entire nation. Called the "Fair Deal," Huckabee's plan is both forward thinking and remarkably, well, conservative in its economic tone.

First off, Huckabee explains that "I know that Main Street, as well as Wall Street, is threatened by a weakening economy. But we are all in this together." Doesn't sound like John Edwards to me...

Principle 1: Strengthen the economic health of middle class families. Eliminate the marriage penalty. Cut taxes on savings. Make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Stem the tide of housing foreclosures. Cut bureaucratic red tape that hampers small businesses. Open new foreign markets for exporting U.S. products and services. (Weird! I don't see anything about capping executive pay or raising taxes on the rich.)

Principle 2: Work with the Federal Reserve to take a balanced approach to stave off recession while not encouraging inflation. (This is the key short-term element of the plan.)

Principle 3: Create jobs by building up the strength of our military, borders, and critical infrastructure. We desperately need to do these things anyway for the safety of our nation. It so happens that getting them done creates new jobs too.

Principle 4: Invest in energy independence. Not just for cars to buy Michigan's votes, but for all forms of energy, to get us off dependence on foreign oil entirely.

Principle 5: Make the tax system more competitive. Of course Huckabee advocates the Fair Tax, but recognizes it will take a long time to get there. In the meantime, reduce counterproductively high personal and corporate income tax rates and eliminate the death tax. (Super weird--he even wants to reduce taxes on the rich!)

The great thing about this plan is that it is balanced and addresses the long-range problems that are causing economic security and the move toward a recession. Some on Capitol Hill are proposing band-aid stimulus ideas, like retroactive tax cuts for 2007 to put rebate checks in people's hands this spring. A rebate check is nice and all (just got one from Sears tonight) but it doesn't address the core insecurity. For families that are really struggling it pays their fuel bills for a couple of months, and then what? For people who aren't as strapped, maybe they'll go out and buy golf clubs like someone I know did with his 2002 tax rebate check, but a tiny, temporary spike in consumer spending isn't going to cause employers to hire more people or give raises or stem the tide of home foreclosures.

Huckabee's plan is designed to address, over the long haul, the core problems of stagnating wages, rising energy costs, and an anti-family tax system. Bravo, Governor! If only our country could get past partisan hatred and pigeonholing to actually enact such sensible solutions!

CEO Pay and Abortion?

Speaking of associative fear-mongering, today's article by Jeffrey Lord qualifies as the stupidest condemnation of Huckabee by association yet. Huckabee has said that there's something wrong with an economy where CEOs make 500 times what many of their workers do, often for running their companies into the ground, and advocates pro-global competitiveness policies designed to help raise wages of the working and middle class. He has never said a word about capping wages of executives. But Mr. Lord simply asserts, with no factual basis, that regretting income disparity = government setting executive pay. From there he spins a fanciful Orwellian tale, in which there are no limits on government power, and in that world it makes sense that the government also has the power to declare a right to kill unborn children. This teaches us... the strange way Jeffrey Lord's mind works.

The associations here are astoundingly irrational. In addition to the original, counter-factual leap into government-set executive pay, there's the the complete contradiction that an all-powerful government invents new individual "rights." A government that micromanages everything subordinates individual rights to the designs of the state. The invention of new "rights" such as abortion is the mark of a political worldview that elevates individual rights above all moral considerations and the general welfare of society. These are completely opposite concepts. (Except that both are embraced by the Democratic party--but that's another topic entirely.) In a command and control society, like China, abortion is not a "right" but a mandate, a tool for achieving government control over population.

Mr. Lord ignores the open and obvious true connection between Huckabee's comments on executive pay and his position (unequivocally against) abortion: belief in the inherent dignity of all human life. As persons made in the image of God, we are not to practice the law of the jungle with each other. Every human being has the right to life, and to fair wages for his or her labor. The point is not to envy the wealthy, but to remind the wealthy of their responsibility to treat their subordinate workers fairly--just as parents have the responsibility to provide for their children.

It seems Mr. Lord's perspective has been so narrowed by party-line politics (Republicans are against abortion and for the law of the jungle in economics; Democrats invent "rights" to abortion, gay "marriage" etc. and criticize income disparity) that he cannot conceive of a political philosophy grounded in human dignity. I hope, for the sake of our nation, that few people share this distorted perspective.

Conservatism's Inquisitors on Brink of Causing Their Own Demise

Polls over the last few days show that Republican primary voters are starting to believe the hype of the pundit classes that Huckabee is a one-state wonder and McCain is the man with momentum. Mike Huckabee was recently running in first place in Michigan and South Carolina, but he is rapidly losing ground to John McCain, and to a much lesser but still significant extent, Fred Thompson.

Much of this is the result of relentless attacks by pundits such as Rush Limbaugh and National Review against Mike Huckabee for being supposedly heterodox as a conservative. Most of what they claim against him is based on exaggerations, mischaracterizations and associative fear mongering. The exaggerations and mischaracterizations (e.g. feigned outrage at a 47% increase in taxes in Arkansas during Huckabee's term, never mind that income rose more than 50% in Arkansas and this 10+ year change only amounts to 3.7% annually; legitimate concern about certain voucher proposals = anti-school choice) are the sheen of legitimacy painted on an irrational fear of Huckabee based on associative thinking. Jonah Goldberg's recent NR article, The Horror of Huck, finally, honestly, reveals the true reasons that Huckabee's record is held to an impossible double standard in comparison to the other GOP candidates: "It's a Compassionate Conservative!" which Goldberg equates with several horror movie villains.

In the minds of Conservatism's Inquisition, Huckabee talks a lot about the struggles of the average Joe, John Edwards talks a lot about the struggles of the average Joe, therefore Huckabee's policy positions must be similar to John Edwards. Huckabee is compassionate in his outlook and embraces conservative social views, George W. Bush calls himself a "compassionate conservative" and supports expanding Medicare entitlements and quixotic federal meddling in education, therefore Huckabee must support expanding Medicare entitlements and more federal money and meddling in education. Never mind that a 10-minute perusal of Huckabee's website would reveal that Huckabee's policy prescriptions do not mimic either Edwards or Bush and actually show a great deal of fealty to the Reaganite principles of peace through strength, the power of innovation, and personal responsibility.

Unfortunately, a lot of voters don't take the time to read through Huckabee's website and they take the characterizations of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk on faith. Even if they don't listen to talk radio or read NR, they are likely to see one of Mitt Romney's attack ads or Fred Thompson's attack performance at the Fox News debate on January 10 and instantly believe the accusations that Huckabee is too "liberal" for Republican primary voters.

But who is more orthodox as a conservative? Only Fred Thompson, who is a dead man walking in this election by now. Despite a South Carolina bump from his uncharacteristic passionate (but entirely negative) performance last week, there is no realistic chance Fred could win the nomination, and even less the general election.

Mitt Romney is also orthodox, if you look at his paint-by-numbers conservative policy statements circa 2007 and ignore what he did or said from 1992 through 2006. But he isn't electable either, not because of his religion but because of his persona. When the nation seems poised at the brink of recession, and in any case a lot of families are struggling economically, people are not drawn to a guy born with a silver spoon in his mouth, a TV-perfect physique and an equally TV-perfect family, with a sense of entitlement that because of his "hard work" (ignore his fortunate accidents of circumstance) he can do anything he wants, including buy the Presidency, and anyone else who isn't succeeding just isn't working hard enough. Even though someone finally got through to him recently with the message "it's the economy, stupid," Romney's rosy declarations that Michigan can get back the same jobs it lost cannot reestablish his credibility with voters having incomes under $100,000.

Which leaves the pragmatic voter who identifies himself or herself as "conservative" with... John McCain. Oops! That's not what the self-proclaimed arbiters of conservatism want! But in expending so much fire power on Mike Huckabee, they have let the public forget McCain's decades of serious heterodoxy from conservative principles:

• Rape of the First Amendment - seriously limiting the ability of citizens to effectively communicate political views to the public through the McCain-Feingold Act, violating the first and most fundamental principle in the Bill of Rights.
  
• Opposition to Bush tax cuts - McCain does not believe the core Reaganite economic doctrine that tax cuts can actually improve government revenue if they are designed to stimulate economic growth. Huckabee agreed to certain tax increases when they were absolutely necessary to pay for critical government functions, but he also believes in pursuing tax cuts and changes that stimulate economic growth and improve American competitiveness.
  
• Opposition to addressing conservative social issues - In the Senate, McCain has fought tooth and nail to prevent votes on conservative social issues, and he also undermined the effort to use the "constitutional option" to stop the Democrats from imposing liberal litmus tests on judicial appointments. Former Senator Rick Santorum has been very outspoken about these points in recent days.

This is only a partial list of John McCain's serious defections from conservative principles. But to the conservative pundits, I ask this question: Would you rather lose your "right to smoke" in public indoor spaces, or your right to free political expression? Would you rather pay a small increase in the gas tax to stimulate innovation toward energy independence or see a return to Clinton tax rates and the death tax? Assuming you can't abide by McCain, you better turn your fire off of Mike Huckabee and onto John McCain immediately. Forget your unelectable puppets and form an alliance with Mike Huckabee before it's too late.

Remember, conservative pundits, that "John McCain looks at things through the eyes of the New York Times editorial board." If you keep encouraging a bitter 3-way split among the core conservatives, you won't get a nominee who listens to you at all. You will become entirely irrelevant, ruined by your own overzealous prosecution of Mike Huckabee.

Huckabee on School Choice

Huckabee's position on school choice appears to be the latest hot issue in the debate over whether Huckabee is "conservative" on anything other than moral issues. The anti-Huckabee right has taken to claiming that he "opposes school choice." Yet Huckabee has strong backing from homeschoolers and frequently says he strongly supports a parent's right to choose their child's education. So which is it?

Before I go any farther, a personal interest disclaimer: school choice is the main issue that first got me interested in politics. I am the product of 16 years of Christian education, and I have never been enrolled in a school financed by taxpayers. My parents sacrificed a lot to give us a faith-based education, even while living in a town with extraordinarily high property taxes to finance best-in-state, gold-plated local public schools. So naturally, they complained about paying twice for education, and I started following the school choice issue before I even entered high school. An essay I wrote in college on school choice landed me my first real job, and I've continued to be active on the issue ever since. So this means a lot to me.

On the other hand, my husband is the product of 20+ years of public education, and he feels it served him quite well, while enabling his parents to still retire early even while none of their four children who all have graduate degrees have ever incurred student loans. Today he is a public school teacher, though his main motivation for teaching in public school is that it pays nearly twice as much as private school would. But he's not a member of any teacher's union, and his experience teaching in the brave new world of "Standards of Learning"-focused education (i.e. the focus of teaching is now on getting the maximum number of students to pass a standardized test) has convinced him that's not what he wants for our children.

Clearly, public education serves some people very well, like my husband and his siblings. But it leaves a lot of families in the cold: residents of bad school districts, average students (nowadays) who slide by because they'll pass the test but there aren't any resources dedicated to challenging them to achieve their true potential, and families who believe that faith should be an integral part of the education experience... and numerous other categories.

So what's the solution? "School choice" is the obvious answer, which generically means allowing families to enroll their children in the school of their choice (or homeschooling) with some form of financial assistance to do so. But not all school choice programs are created equal.

Huckabee has been critical of certain voucher programs, which is the main reason his opponents have labeled him "anti-school choice." But consider why he doesn't support these voucher programs:

• Many voucher programs don't cover the full cost of educating a child, but they require participating schools to take the voucher as the only payment. What happens then? Just like hospitals: if the government (or insurance company) mandates you take certain customers and charge them less than your cost, you have to raise the prices for everyone else to recover your loss. That really hurts the middle class families who pay their own way and usually aren't eligible for the vouchers.
  
• Voucher dollars always come with significant government regulations attached. Many private schools, particularly Christian schools, do not want to participate because the voucher program would force them to water down their religious mission, conform their curriculum and hiring requirements to the state schools, and become more like the public schools they're trying to distinguish themselves from in a myriad of ways.
  
• Vouchers are perceived as undermining local public schools, largely because so far they're always enacted in limited districts with abysmal public schools. None of these programs are extensive enough to give every child in this bad district real choice, so they become a "lottery lifeboat" for some fortunate children while leaving the vast majority in horrible schools.
  
• Huckabee doesn't come out and say this, but vouchers have a terrible history in the South. They were used by many Southern states in the 1960s to defy racial integration orders from federal courts. Coming from Arkansas, the word "voucher" has the same kind of taint as "state's rights"--a potentially-good concept that was terribly misused not so long ago.

So what's a person to do who believes in school choice but takes off the rose-colored and sees some serious problems with vouchers? Exactly what Huckabee does: embrace tax credits as a "family-empowering" alternative to vouchers. When well-designed, tax credits can provide families at all income levels with school choice without the government regulations that accompany a check issued out of taxpayer funds.

And guess what? The Cato Institute, the very same free market think tank that slams Huckabee for raising taxes to build roads (because they think everything should be privatized) agrees that tax credits are much preferable over vouchers! One of their education analysts even published a 5-part series of articles on National Review Online a few months ago making this case (I highly recommend reading all of them: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). So, Rush Limbaugh, NRO, and all the rest, are you going to slam the Cato Institute as "liberal" or "in bed with the NEA" for being reticent about vouchers and preferring tax credits?

No, the real answer is this: Huckabee and Cato are wary of vouchers but support school choice, including private schools. These positions are not inherently contradictory. In fact, if you really want robust school choice and minimal government meddling in private schools, tax credits are the only way to go.

Identity Politics Do NOT Explain the Huckaboom

Many of the conservative establishment pundits are continuing to insist on this talking point. NRO says again today that Huckabee "ran on his religion" to win in Iowa, but he needs to broaden his appeal beyond Evangelicals to win the nomination. That's rich coming from the publication that has gone all-out to convince other types of conservatives that Huckabee is a wolf in sheep's clothing and somehow his occasional support for a small tax increase to cover the state budget is soooo much worse than McCain opposing the Bush tax cuts or Romney raising fees in Taxachussets.

As someone who left the Evangelical camp for Rome Sweet Home a decade ago, I certainly don't support Huckabee because he's an Evangelical. Yes, some people are motivated to support him for this reason. Frankly, I find some downright loony comments out there on the wild west web where people associate their support for Huckabee with visions from God or apocalyptic predictions. But there aren't nearly enough people in this nation who think that way to account for the Huckaboom we're seeing in serious polls.

A few pundits are willing to acknowledge this and look at the Huckaboom phenomenon seriously. I want to commend Michael Medved and David Brooks for being two of today's best commentators on Huckabee's Iowa caucus victory.

Medved says "Stop Lying About Huckabee and Evangelicals!", crunches the numbers, and points out this statistical gem:

Yes, Huckabee’s 46% of Evangelicals was a strong showing, but it was directly comparable to his commanding 40% of women, or 40% of all voters under the age of 30, or 41% of those earning less than $30,000 a year. His powerful appeal to females, the young and the poor make him a different kind of Republican, who connects with voting blocs the GOP needs to win back. He’s hardly the one-dimensional religious candidate of media caricature.

Brooks offers this insightful commentary:

Some people are going to tell you that Mike Huckabee’s victory last night in Iowa represents a triumph for the creationist crusaders. Wrong.

Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize. First, evangelicals have changed. Huckabee is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. He’s funny, campy (see his Chuck Norris fixation) and he’s not at war with modern culture.

Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their leaders’ ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and K Street. Most importantly, he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.

Third, Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.

In that sense, Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition.

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

Exactly! Brooks still is skeptical that Huckabee has what it takes to win the nomination, but he concludes "starting last night in Iowa, an evangelical began the Republican Reformation."

Yes, this is a reformation of the GOP, but it may be more Vatican II (elevating the importance of the "lay" grassroots and tweaking outdated customs) than Martin Luther (wholesale rejection of certain "doctrines"). After all, Huckabee did choose to quote G.K. Chesterton at his victory speech, not Tim LaHaye or even Abraham Kuyper.

I'm not suggesting that Huckabee is a closet Catholic or anything other than an Evangelical. My point is that what makes him a great candidate is that he reaches beyond the Evangelical box, to understand and represent the concerns of people of goodwill beyond denominational labels.

WOOO HOOO!!!

Congratulations Governor Huckabee on a definitive win in Iowa!

Though I can't say I'm surprised. I know Iowa. I went to college there. I have a slew of relatives there. And I knew the good people of Iowa would not be bought. They stand for the middle class, for family values, and for a leader of strong but humble character.

I loved Huckabee's quotation of G.K. Chesterton in his victory speech tonight: "a great soldier fights not because he hates the people in front of him, but because he loves the people behind him." A great contrast with Hillary's aspiration to win over Democrats, Independents, and "Republicans who have seen the light." The American people are sick of the partisanship, and ready for someone who will bring them together. Huckabee is the only candidate of either party who is credible in promoting "vertical politics" instead of partisanship. Even my die-hard liberal grandmother admires him for that.

Now the big test: can Huckabee pull off a second win among the pre-super-Tuesday states? This is absolutely necessary to prove he isn't just a one-state wonder who is completely dependent on a high concentration of Evangelical voters. My money, if I were a betting person, would be on pulling this off in South Carolina, but Michigan is another good possibility (and makes the latter point better) because he can tap into their economic angst unlike any other Republican candidate. We shall see! (And no, I don't have any real money on it, unless you count my campaign contributions. ;-)

But tonight, kudos to all Huckabelievers! As the pundits are acknowledging, and our man Mike, we showed the nation that politics as usual is not inevitable, and the true grassroots are more alive and powerful than ever.