The unfair rap against Mike
Huckabee
By
STAR PARKER
Founder & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION
What's going on with
Mike Huckabee?
With little
resources, and with a GOP presidential candidacy hovering in
obscurity through the summer, the former Arkansas governor is now
running in a dead heat with Mitt Romney in the lead in Iowa.
The former
Massachusetts governor's spending in Iowa has been 10 times greater
than Huckabee's and, until this week, Huckabee had not run a single
ad (versus Romney, whose ads have already run over 5,000 times).
In various national
polls, Huckabee is coming in a solid third behind former New York
City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson.
The Washington Post's
David Broder provides one hint about the fuel that might be
propelling Huckabee. He says that, according to veteran Democratic
pollster Peter Hart, the attributes that are pushing voters' buttons
this year are "transparency, authenticity and unity."
A just-released The
Economist/YouGov poll shows Huckabee doing well in these areas.
Republican voters rate him first in both honesty and morality.
The long campaign and
the plethora of pre-primary televised debates have been helpful to
Huckabee, whose appeal has come through to voters, but who has not
had a lot of resources for his own marketing. He has come off as
genuine and not like a candidate, in Huckabee's words, "who's sort
of the culmination of a room full of consultants."
There is little
question that on social issues that Huckabee, a Baptist minister, is
the real deal. This is playing well among Iowa Republicans, a third
of whom are evangelicals and 70 percent of whom are conservatives.
But what about the
rap against him that he is a populist with little regard for
traditional Republican proclivities for unfettered markets and
limited government?
He's been accused by
the Club for Growth of "big-government liberalism" and called by
conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg a "statist."
There's some
justification, of course, to these labels. Huckabee invites them
when he expresses reservations about free trade, which he does, when
he talks about energy independence, which he does, and when he
endorses ideas such as a nationally mandated ban on smoking in
public places.
But there are
important strains in what Huckabee is about that defy simple labels,
and in this sense these accusations and generalizations are not
legitimate.
When Huckabee says
that "strong families are the foundation of a strong country," he
means this. This is not a Hillary Rodham Clinton-like political
throw-away line.
The
traditional-values agenda is as much an economic initiative as
anything else.
It's family breakdown
and values breakdown that drive poverty in our country today. Poor
families are overwhelmingly single-parent families.
Crime and
unemployment among black males is a values crisis, and transforming
these young men to productive beings is an economic as well as a
values initiative. This is anything but statism.
It's tough to see how
someone who wants to get rid of the IRS, which Huckabee's "fair tax"
initiative would do, can be thought of as someone who loves big
government.
His plan, which would
replace the income tax with a national sales tax, has plenty of
detractors, including those who see it as politically impossible to
achieve.
But how do you argue
with the idea of taxing consumption rather than income and
production, and freeing every American family of having to share
every intimate detail of their economic life with the government?
On health care,
Huckabee has repudiated mandated universal coverage and supports
reforms that would allow individuals the same tax preferences for
purchasing health coverage as employers and that would allow a
national market, rather than our current state-regulated fiefdoms,
for buying health care Sounds pretty darned free-market to me.
On Social Security,
Huckabee's plan would eliminate the payroll tax and he has expressed
support for the idea of personal retirement accounts.
And, of course,
Huckabee is a hard-core supporter of understanding the Second
Amendment as protection of the rights of individuals to bear arms.
So the simple
big-government-loving box into which many want to stick Huckabee is
just not an accurate picture of the man. Do I agree with many of the
criticisms in areas where he does want to turn to government? Yes.
Mike Huckabee is not
a simple guy. But life is not simple. However, he is honest, he is
clear and many, including me, appreciate his unequivocal stand for
the traditional values that are critical for the future of this
country.
---------------------------------
Star Parker is president of the
Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book
White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.
Prior to her involvement in social
activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles,
California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college,
received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian
magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet
served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based
alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.
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