As I was looking at Casting Stones, I came across this post that had some interesting information on an important Michigan endorsement for Romney.  Apparently, Marlene Elwell, an old Christian Coalition hand and one-time Pat Robertson backer, has been working hard to stop Huckabee, and here is one of her reasons:

Though she says the Huckabee camp repeatedly tried to sign her during 2007, Elwell calls the former Arkansas governor a liberal on non-hot button social issues like education.

What this means in the real world is that one of the few candidates actively supported by a large network of homeschooling families and one of the strongest defenders of homeschooling in the race is “liberal” on education because he doesn’t support school vouchers.  This takes crazy litmus-test politics to a new level, or a new low, depending on how you want to look at it.  The principled reason to support vouchers is that you support the right of parents to choose where their children can go to school, so it is preposterous to say that a leading defender of homeschooling is simply a “liberal” on education without any qualification.  If you don’t like his position on vouchers, fine, but let’s be honest about what the real objection is.  Vouchers are a debatable policy, and they are unusually unpopular with the actual suburban middle-class voters whose schools would be affected by these policies (or who fear that these policies might affect their schools).  How vouchers went from being a slightly oddball, Jack Kemp-esque initiative proposal in the ’90s to the end-all, be-all of education reform on the right is one of those mysteries that someone else will have to solve.

Not to beat the point to death, but I did a little digging and found this news item from last year:

During a speech delivered in the heart of the financial district, where compensation packages routinely reach into the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, Mr. Bush announced that he would ask corporations to curb excessive executive pay.

When it comes from Bush, Republicans may not be happy with it, but they aren’t exactly declaring him the second coming of Huey Long.  What shocking socialist rhetoric has been pouring forth from Huckabee’s mouth?  One news story reported late last year:

He calls himself the candidate who isn’t a “wholly owned subsidiary” of investment banks, decries large executive-pay packages and says the party needs to shift its focus from Wall Street to Main Street.

The logic of the backlash against Huckabee seems to be this: if you have a net worth of $20 million-plus, you can call for curbing executive pay packages, and if you don’t have that much your similar calls to do this are proof that you are a wild-eyed left-winger.  Or something like that.  It does make sense that an establishment embarrrassed by or tired of Bush would be unwilling to rally around Huckabee, but that would confirm the point that they see the two men as being markedly similar and it would likely mean that they are quite similar.

Let us all cast our minds back to those early days of the 2000 campaign when Bush unveiled the “compassion” agenda (in 1999) and see what he said:

The purpose of prosperity is to make sure the American dream touches every willing heart. The purpose of prosperity is to leave no one out–to leave no one behind.

In Michigan the other day, Huckabee said:

My goal is not to make rich people poor, it’s to give poor people a shot at the American dream.

Now I don’t like Huckabee or Bush, but can someone explain to me what the substantive differences are between the two of them?

At Taki’s Top Drawer, I have a new post on the apparent demise of the Giuliani campaign (whose demise seems to be confirmed by the Rasmussen South Carolina and Florida polls and the latest California numbers).

Ross disagrees with my “Huckabee is another Bush” argument:

George W. Bush is a preppy blueblood whose candidacy had the blessing of both movement conservatives and the Republican Old Guard; Mike Huckabee is a working-class Arkansan whose primary-season insurgency has exactly zero institutional support. George W. Bush had Dick Cheney and Karl Rove whispering in his ear; Huckabee has, well … Ed Rollins and Jim Pinkerton. It’s next-to-impossible to imagine Bush saying the sort of things Huckabee has said about Wall Street Republicans and the Club for Growth; it’s next-to-impossible to imagine him delivering the speech that Huckabee delivered at the Values Voter Summit. And it’s absolutely impossible, to take a pair of issues near to Larison’s heart, to imagine Bush adopting the Krikorian Plan as his immigration policy, or delivering the following remarks on foreign policy…

I would grant the point about immigration more readily were I persuaded that Huckabee’s sudden 180-degree turn on immigration was anything other than the most cynical opportunism.  The people who are going to be disappointed are the restrictionists who buy into his rhetoric on border security (even Bush found himself forced to sign a border fence bill, albeit one he had no intention of implementing) and the foreign policy realists are probably going to be disappointed by someone who thinks we should send troops into Pakistan and who thinks all Palestinians should be sent to Egypt.  He eschews democracy promotion, which is all very well, but he is entirely supportive of the war in Iraq and, as I just mentioned, he is actually vastly more hard-line against the Palestinians than Bush (who once dubbed Ariel Sharon “a man of peace”) has been.  Giuliani is also skeptical of democracy promotion, probably thanks in part to the influence of Martin Kramer, but with respect to everything else Bush has done abroad he is entirely in agreement.  

When Bush was a candidate, you heard nary a word about democracy promotion, and foreign policy realists fell for it, because they concluded, reasonably enough, that realists were going to be in charge.  If Bush were running as a candidate for the first time in 2008, you would probably see someone taking a much firmer line on border security and enforcement.  Based on his record, Huckabee was every bit as liberal on immigration at the start of last year as Bush was in 1999.  His foreign policy remarks are actually eerily similar to Bush’s in some ways (his attacks on the “arrogant bunker mentality” are just the flip side of Bush’s call for a “humble” foreign policy, and remember when then-Gov. Bush derided Clinton for his presumptuous forcing of a peace deal on the Israelis?).  It is hard to conclude that he is not a much more glib version of the exact same kind of Republican.  The thing that worries me about Huckabee is that his restrictionist pose and his nods towards foreign policy realism will dupe anti-Bush conservatives into thinking that he is the antithesis of Bush and what Bush represents, when he is, in fact, just an updated version of the same and he is someone who is running campaign similar to the one Bush did in 2000.  Huckabee’s humbler origins are a much better fit for the role Bush was trying to play.  The “different kind of Republican” who comes from political aristocracy and the business world never really worked, which is why Bush had to turn up the folksiness to 11 and talk about his “favourite philosopher,” who was, as you’ll recall, Jesus Christ.  In 2000 conservative pundits were praising Bush’s everyman appeal and they were mocking the complaints that he was unintellectual, and now many of the same people are complaining that…Huckabee is appealing to the everyman and isn’t very intellectual.  Huckabee is a higher-octane version of Bush, perhaps so much so that the people who indulged or suffered Bush despite his flaws will not stand for someone who has most of those flaws in greater abundance.  Plus, the lack of institutional support seems based as much on movement institutional support for the candidates whom Huckabee has displaced or defeated (i.e., Thompson, Giuliani and Romney) as it is on substantive disagreements with Huckabee.  I don’t deny that establishment elites are almost as uniformly against Huckabee as they were for Bush, but I would stress that this is evidence of the inconsistency of the former in their preferences rather than proof of great differences between Bush and Huckabee.

Clark Stooksbury correctly objects to Jonah Goldberg’s recent (mis)characterisation of Crunchy Cons and Rod Dreher.  Goldberg had lumped Rod in together with Michael Gerson and saying that “both of these derive from the kind of thinking that led George W. Bush to insist in 2000 that he was a “different kind of Republican” because he was a “compassionate conservative” — a political program that apparently measures compassion by how much money the government spends on education, marriage counseling and the like.”  This is just badly wrong.  There’s no other way to say it.

Rod responds here.  I had noticed the same thing, but at first it was such a minor part of Goldberg’s column that I didn’t want to rehash the same old arguments over what was almost a throwaway line.  I really didn’t feel compelled at the time to point out (yet again) that Goldberg misunderstands what Rod has been talking about, but it occurs to me that this excerpt illustrates what seems to be a recurring pattern in Goldberg’s writing.  On more than one occasion, he has conflated very different ideas on the right and claimed that they are very closely related, when their only point of contact is that they both represent something other than current establishment conservatism.  Thus the proponents of Sam’s Club Republicanism can be bizarrely identified with the politics of Sam Francis, and now the ideas of Gerson and Dreher can be traced back to the same source.  This might not be terribly interesting to most people, except that this also appears to be what Goldberg has done in his book Liberal Fascism with the two non-conservative ideologies mentioned in the title.  There may be substantive similarities between liberalism and fascism in certain respects, and it is correct to identify fascism as a leftist ideology, but at a certain point specific differences matter and fine distinctions become important for understanding how two sets of ideas that may share a few assumptions lead people to significantly different conclusions and actions.  Those distinctions become important for understanding why Dollfuss and Schuschnigg or Metaxas, for example, may have been conservative authoritarians, but they were definitely not fascists despite some superficial similarities or a shared interest in corporatist economics, and they remain just as important for understanding what FDR and Wilson were and were not.  Conflating or identifying two significantly different things, as it seems Goldberg tends to do, ultimately makes for very unedifying intellectual analysis.  These conflations suggest either some misunderstanding of the matters at hand or a polemical goal of lumping together various political adversaries in order to associate all opponents with the errors of those assumed to be the worst.

An agreement spanning hard-line Shia Muslims, secularists and Sunni representatives set the outlines for a broad-based alliance capable of mounting a parliamentary challenge to the ruling coalition led by the prime minister Nouri al-Malaki.

A shared platform welded together the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, the moderate former prime minister Ayad Allawi and even a Sunni leader, Salah al-Mutlak.

A statement said the parties would resist proposals to grant regional governments control over oil resources and push for the abandonment of a referendum on the disputed city of Kirkuk. ~The Daily Telegraph

When the administration has pressed for Iraqi political reconciliation, I do not think this is what they had in mind.  Now, in addition to the fractiousness within the government and the reluctance of Maliki to press very hard on these measures, there is an organised bloc dedicated to thwarting the legislative agenda that the “surge” was supposed to make possible. 

Blogging should be light today, but I did want to comment on this Obama memo (via Sullivan).  Seriously, this is the best his campaign can do?  Of course, they have to cry foul about the “fairy tale” attack and pretend that it has something to do with race, because the criticism is accurate.

As I was looking over the CBS/NYT poll and I came upon the remarkable results from the “shares your values” questions (questions 44 and following), I began to wonder how the respondents are making their judgements.  On McCain, 62% say he “shares their values,” 24% say no; 63% say the same of Huckabee, while just 13% say no (24% don’t know).  Meanwhile, Romney’s results are 48/24 (with 29% saying they didn’t know).  There almost has to be some kind of circular reasoning going on here.  I think it goes something like this: McCain and Huckabee have both won early state contests for the nomination, which apparently means that the voters must have recognised that these candidates “shared their values” and therefore supported them, while Romney kept losing to both, implying that he doesn’t “share your values” as much as the others.  Giuliani fares poorly as well, perhaps reflecting his lack of electoral success.  How else do you explain the sudden increase from 47 to 62% of Republicans who believe McCain “shares their values” in the last month?  Literally nothing has changed about McCain in the last month, except that he has perhaps become more obnoxious.  For that matter, how could more than a fifth of Republicans not know the answer to this question just a month ago? 

If this doesn’t explain it, the gap between Republican voters and conservative activists is even greater than I imagined–how else do we explain this phenomenon of strong voter affinity for the two candidates most loathed by party and movement activists?  However, we must be careful and not commit the Giuliani Fallacy.  That is, we should not conclude some radical transformation of a political coalition based on nothing more than transitory poll numbers.

On MTP Clinton reasonably questioned Obama’s self-serving story about his allegedly bold and consistent opposition to the war, noting that he has built his reputation in foreign policy on opposition to the war when his opposition has been, at least since he entered the Senate, largely rhetorical and bereft of leadership before he started running for President.  This is true, even though Hillary Clinton has said it.  If you want a real antiwar Democratic leader, you might look to someone like Russ Feingold, who has actually consistently opposed the war by, well, voting against it and voting to end funding for it. 

It is all very well that Obama spoke against the war when he was at no political risk as a state senator in one of the most liberal districts in a Democratic state.  He then subsequently distanced himself from that opposition when the war was initially popular and it seemed that being antiwar was a political loser for an ambitious politician and embarrassing to someone chosen to give the keynote address at a convention that was nominating two war supporters, only to rediscover his previous “superior judgement” once the country had turned against the war and he was gearing up to run for President.  Because Hillary Clinton is so deeply unpopular with so many political observers, many do not want to credit these criticisms, but they are pretty accurate.  On this specific point, it is, dare I say it, Obama and his campaign that have played the part of the Clintons and the Clintons who have (for entirely self-serving reasons, of course) opted to tell the truth.