The biggest mistake economic conservatives made in opposing Mike
Huckabee’s presidential campaign was to exaggerate the former
Arkansas governor’s heterodoxy. A candidate who favors replacing
the income tax with a national sales tax isn’t exactly a pro-life liberal. The biggest mistake Mike
Huckabee made was explicitly running against economic
conservatives, blasting the “Club for Greed” and the “Wall Street
to Washington axis.”
Huckabee’s mistake was greater. While he did better than almost
anyone thought possible, he lost the Republican nomination to a man
who was initially unacceptable to most economic conservatives: John
McCain. A candidate who could unite the right stood a real chance
of derailing a rickety, underfunded Straight Talk Express. Ask
George W. Bush.
But Huckabee doesn’t seem to have learned his lesson. In an
interview with the Huffington Post, he
excoriated unnamed proponents of a “soulless type of economic
conservatism” and fretted that libertarianism was a greater threat
to the Republican Party than liberalism. And he wasn’t talking
about Bob Barr’s presidential candidacy.
In the process, Huckabee demonstrated a lack of understanding of
the traditional conservative case for limited government:
If you have a breakdown in the social structure of a
community, it’s going to result in a more costly
government…police on the streets, prison beds, court costs,
alcohol abuse centers, domestic violence shelters, all are very
expensive. What’s the answer to that? Cut them out? Well, the
libertarians say “yes, we shouldn’t be funding that stuff.” But
what you’ve done then is exacerbate a serious problem in your
community. You can take the cops off the streets and just quit
funding prison beds. Are your neighborhoods safer? Is it a better
place to live? The net result is you have now a bigger problem than
you had before.
First, it’s obvious that conservatives — and even most
libertarians — believe that funding police officers, court costs,
prisons, and law enforcement in general are legitimate functions of
government. They are far more interested in cutting welfare
spending than any of these expenditures. Second, in this era of
“compassionate conservatism” it is hard to find Republicans leading
the charge for defunding alcohol abuse centers or domestic violent
centers. Finally, what about the damage big government can do to
our social structures?
It gets worse:
My experience in Arkansas was a lot of the so-called
conservatives said “Let’s cut the budget.” But they wanted to add
prison sentences, they wanted to eliminate parole, they wanted to
have harsher sentences for various crimes. And I said “OK, that’s
fine, but that’s going to be expensive. So which do you want?” You
can’t have both, or you do what the federal government has done,
and this is where I think Republicans have been especially
irresponsible. Their approach has been [to] just kick the can down
the road and let your grandkids pay for it.
Maybe that accurately describes the situation in some states, but
the federal budget deficit is surely not a result of combining tax
cuts with toughness on crime. Since 2001, federal spending has
jumped $867 billion versus a $567 billion increase in tax revenues.
By the end of 2006, non-defense discretionary spending had risen
twice as fast under the current administration as under Bill
Clinton.
Republicans in Washington were not ruthlessly cutting spending
— they were increasing spending across the board, on education,
prescription drugs, pork barrel projects, and defense without
setting any priorities.
That is a far cry from the vision Huckabee worries might
overtake the GOP: “[L]ook, we want to cut taxes and eliminate
government. If it means that elderly people don’t get their
Medicare drugs, so be it. If it means little kids go without
education and healthcare, so be it.”
IF THESE WERE merely the musings of a presidential also-ran,
perhaps they would be easy to dismiss. But Huckabee’s presidential
campaign established him as one of the most important evangelical
leaders in the country.
There is a trend among younger evangelicals toward embracing
activist government. Huckabee spoke to it early in his campaign
when he told the Des Moines Register, “I earn the right to
push for a strong pro-life agenda only by making sure I’m concerned
about poverty, hunger and homelessness.”
The problem isn’t the desire to help the poor or to grapple with
the political limitations of economic conservatism in a new era of
big government. The problem comes when good intentions trump
results and self-righteousness substitutes for serious thought
about what government can actually accomplish.
When the columnist and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson
inveighs against the “antigovernment ideology” of his fellow
conservatives, he often cites Hurricane Katrina as their “low
point”: “The response of many Republicans was to use the disaster
as an excuse for cutting government spending.” But who but the most
blinkered ideologue looks at the federal reaction to Katrina as
evidence of the competence and efficacy of munificent government?
Who looks at the waste that poured forth after the Republican
congressional leadership ignored the budget hawks seeking spending
offsets and capitulated to the Gersons and sees a moral
victory?
By stepping up his attacks on economic conservatives, Huckabee
may have repeated the big mistake of his presidential bid. “The
sound you just heard,” writes the blogger Daniel Larison, “was Mike Huckabee’s
hypothetical 2012 campaign imploding.” Unless we are all big
government conservatives now.
