How to Ruin a Political Career

Maybe, it’s none of my business. After all it’s Mike Huckabee’s political career and he can ruin it if he wants to.  However charging that Sean Hannity endorsed Mitt Romney because of the latter’s ties to Bain Capital when those ties are limited at best bodes ill for a comeback should he be shut out of this election.

Huckabee could find himself very fortunate and be the Vice-President of the United States under John McCain and after 1 term or less (when you’re the Veep of a 72 year-old Cancer survivor the or less is probable), he could be President, if not he’s making his road back to the political forefront much harder.

Huckabee is young enough and has enough positives that if he’s willing to acknowledge his mistakes and learn from them, he could someday be a serious contender. However, that’s going to be much harder should he alienate the folks in talk radio by suggesting that they’re for sale. To disagree with the endorsements of Romney by Hannity, etal is one thing, but money or threats of losing stations is not their motivator. While Governor Huckabee remains blind to the huge rupture in the Republican Coalition that McCain’s nomination would cause, talk show hosts aren’t.

McCain is unacceptable and Paul is unacceptable. Between Huckabee and Romney, they chose Romney and Huck has to ask himself why. Here are my thoughts as to why:

1) Limited appeal to non-Evangelicals. Huck’s high mark was about 12%.  If that’s his high water mark, there’s no way he wins the Presidency. The truth is that Alan Keyes in 2000 was far better at cross-faith promotion. Keyes, a Roman Catholic was popular with quite a few Evangelicals and won 23% of the vote in Mormon Utah (where the latest polls have Huckabee at less than 4%.) Whatever his fault, Keyes never made moral issues sectarian issues, but hit a broad base of the faith community.

2) The Class Warfare Rhetoric. Yes, Huck, it’s great for the GOP to reach out to those at the bottom rung of the economic ladder, and those in the middle. They’re the ones that benefit from conservative policies. The Rich aren’t as personally affected by high taxes, high regulations, and the failure of social security. The rich will be fine personally, it’s the poor and the middle class that really feel the consequences.

However, you can reach out to the poor without using the tools of Karl Marx. We don’t need to set rich against poor, black against white, workers againt employees, that’s the way of Democrats and Socialists, and it does little for the poor, and much more for pandering politicians.

3) Amnesty: While Huckabee is correct that Mitt Romney hit conservative puberty at 60, but Huck didn’t reach border security puberty until this past December.  A mid-campaign flip flop on that issue doesn’t inspire confidence.

4) Clemencies and Gifts:  The sheer number of clemencies was alarming. It was also predictable that it would break given that the Wayne Dumond issue was raised in the 2002 Gubenatorial Campaign. Huck should have been out front with his side of the story. Even though, many clemencies were given, they were blown of proportion as a number of total clemencies was cited (about 1000) rather than those released from prison (about 100) and then there was the issue of gifts. There’s something unseemly about a former pastor claiming to be modeling servant leadership taking $23,000 in clothes from a contributor in a single year. Best thing Huck could have done would have been to own up that he’d made mistakes with receiving the gifts not issue the typical politician defense that some board had found that he didn’t commit a crime.

5) Arkansas Tax and Spending Record: This was another area where there was truth to charges against Huckabee. He did raise taxes as governor, more than he cut them. Many living in Arkansas, even some conservatives would defend them as necessary to the state’s roads and schools. Yet Huck  continued to insist that tax increases were by referendum or court order, when most were not. Thus Huck distracted from the main issue rather than addressing it, which he could have done by citing the state’s (still small) tax burden and explaining that a Democratic legislator made spending cuts hard to accomplish.

6) Misc. Libealism: Global Warming, Closing Gitmo were all bad news positions for Huckabee.

So what can Huckabee do? I’d suggest he head back to Arkansas if he doesn’t win outside of there on Tuesday and file for the US Senate against David Pryor, thus giving the GOP a desperately needed competitive race. If elected, Huckabee should see how Jim DeMint votes and go and do likewise.

Give him 8 years and a chance to see what type of conservative he’d be in Washington, and then we’ll talk.