December 26, 2007
Huck-a-Whack, Boxing Day Edition
I hope the Governor enjoyed his Christmas off. I thought of letting the spirit of Christmas pervade me and setting aside the Quotidian Huck-a-Whack® Then I saw this:
But as Huckabee now mounts his closing argument for the Iowa caucuses, he has moved full bore into the rhetoric of economic populism. "I am out to change the Republican Party. It needs changing. It needs to be inclusive of all those people across America for whom this party should stand," he said Sunday, on CBS's Face The Nation. On the trail, he speaks regularly of challenging the "Washington to Wall Street power axis." He frankly acknowledges the suffering of the stagnating middle class, and even offers up government as a part of the solution. "The President ought to be aware that the people struggle," he said in Muscatine on Friday morning. "He ought to be aware every time a decision is made — whether [or not] it's to raise taxes — how it's going to hurt the family out there, who can barely pay the grocery bill as it is."At some of these events, if you close your eyes, you would think a Democrat was speaking — Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton turned southern Baptist. "I really think that a lot of people who are elected to government forget," Huckabee will say. "They are not elected to the ruling class but to the servant class."
Hat-tip: Hugh, who says The GOP does not need changing. I don't know about that, but I cannot argue with his follow up:
What the GOP definitely does not need is neopopulism, class warfare, and identity politics of the sort Mike Huckabee has been selling the last four weeks. Huckabee's lunge left may not have been premeditated, but it clearly displayed a candidate with no anchor in the GOP's tradition of fiscal restraint, free trade and low taxes and a very limited understanding of the world's most dangerous forces.
I also agree with Hugh's close. This may sell in Iowa, but this is not a winning GOP strategy.
2008 Race Posted by jk at December 26, 2007 1:13 PM
Whosoever believeth the lies of the Hucksterbee, let him be damned.
And um, Hugh Hewitt needs a history lesson. The GOP now is for free trade, but it hardly has a tradition of it. Abraham Lincoln was a protectionist, touting the Republican Party's Whig heritage that favored a "high, protective tariff."
Which president signed Hawley-Smoot? Hint: the same one who tried to "fix" the Great Depression early on with massive tax hikes and work programs. NOT Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- FDR merely continued what was started before him.
FDR instituted rationing. Which president worked with the Fed to initiate the first-ever price controls?
Posted by: Perry Eidelbus at December 26, 2007 3:31 PMYeah, Hewitt is a little more generous toward the party than I am feeling these days. To be fair, I take that quote out of context, he sez:
I will defend the GOP a bit. It has stood against "neopopulism, class warfare, and identity politics of the sort Mike Huckabee has been selling." It disturbs me that they are not more dedicated to free trade, but against Senator Clinton who wants to roll back NAFTA, they remain a far least-worse camp.
Posted by: jk at December 26, 2007 6:06 PM
Hewitt is such a GOP shill. That quote is even worse.
"its traditional stand against excessive spending and the growth of government..."
That's a load of horse****. The GOP came from the Whig Party, as I said, and started with a tradition of *big* government. Lincoln was "The Great Centralizer" who expanded the federal government far more than any of his predecessors (perhaps combined). As I coincidentally was telling a friend at lunchtime today, Milton Friedman once pointed out that the federal government until the Civil War functioned on revenues generated almost solely from a modest import tariff -- a uniform one that favored no nation over another, and whose purpose was to fund a minimal federal government. Well, Lincoln brought back non-commodity-backed paper currency, instituted the first income tax, instituted the first-ever draft, and suspended habeas corpus. Two of these were later found unconstitutional; it's a shame all four weren't. Scholar Tom DiLorenzo has also noted that Lincoln had 300 newspaper editors thrown into prison, because of their writings against the Civil War. (And people accuse Bush of stifling freedom of speech???)
You can read more in an older post of mine, "The big government traditions of the GOP." http://eidelblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/big-government-traditions-of.htm
Teddy Roosevelt was a "progressive" who liked government to start doing more for the people, such as the relative few to enjoy "national parks" courtesy of the tax dollars of the many.
Calvin Coolidge was the first supply-sider president, if only because he was only the second to preside under an income tax. Unfortunately, he hardly established a tradition of low taxes and limited government. Hoover's and Nixon's sins I already documented above.
It wasn't until Bill Buckley, and then Goldwater, that the GOP started shifting toward limited government. Even then, it was mostly only *talk*. Spending never decreased under Reagan or either Bush. The best we could hope for was a tax cut -- equivalent to hoping a mugger will only take your cash and leave you your credit cards.
Posted by: Perry Eidelbus at December 28, 2007 1:50 PMWell, I'm a GOP shill and the only time I really care for Mr. Hewitt is when he is shilling.
I love history, Perry. I'm writing a history book. But I don't know the value of party history beyond academic interest. I shill for the Reagan and post-Reagan GOP. I don't accept TR, Hoover or Nixon policies any more than Speaker Pelosi celebrates the Dixiecrats who blocked civil rights legislation.
I'm not certain where the Whigs stood on identity politics, but I am comfortable backing Hewitt's claim that -- for all its flaws -- the Republican party of my voting years has clearly been the better party for those opposed to "neopopulism, class warfare, and identity politics of the sort Mike Huckabee has been selling."
Posted by: jk at December 28, 2007 2:06 PM | What do you think? [4]