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.