Some of our astute readers have noticed that we do not seem terribly enamored with Mike Huckabee, who by some measures is, for the moment at least, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. A few have asked why--a question with a complicated answer. We thought we'd spend the week outlining the reasons for our aversion to Huckabee.
Our initial reason for being put off by him falls under the heading "all politics is local." One day about two years ago, we saw him speak twice in New York--first at a fund-raiser for his nascent presidential campaign, then at the Monday Meeting, a gathering sponsored by our friends James Higgins and Mallory Factor. At the fund-raiser, Huckabee said something that made us nervous (quoting from memory, not verbatim): We don't have a health-care problem in this country. We have a health problem. The Monday Meeting is off the record, but we don't think we're violating any confidences if we say that Huckabee said nothing inconsistent with this there.
What does Huckabee mean by this? Blogger Jason Steffens, describing a Huckabee appearance in July of this year, elaborates:
I told him that I agreed with his statement that we do not have a health care problem in this country, we have a health problem, and asked him what he envisioned the federal government's role to be in improving citizens' health. He initially explained the basis for his belief that there is a health problem in this country, not a health care problem. He said that we have great health care, but we are too focused on intervention rather than prevention.
He noted that much of the problem is chronic disease and that can be attributed to three things: 1) overeating; 2) under-exercising; and 3) smoking. Other politicians do not focus on prevention because it will involve a cultural attitude shift that will not happen in the span of a presidential term. Gov. Huckabee then discussed, in general terms, shifting incentives away from fixing health problems and toward preventive health care and the success he had in Arkansas doing that.
Huckabee practices what he preaches: A few years ago, he famously lost 110 pounds. And inasmuch as he's just offering commonsense health advice, we certainly don't disagree. Whether healthier lifestyles actually would lower health-care costs is a trickier question. After all, in the long run, we're all dead, and most of us are sick first.
However sensible Huckabee's admonitions to live healthy may be, though, it troubles us to hear them coming from a politician, especially one who aspires to the most powerful position in the world. Living in New York, we've had experience with nanny-state zealotry in the executive: Thanks to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a former chain smoker, there is virtually nowhere in the city we can go to enjoy a cigar. Huckabee has said he would take this policy nationwide.
We're not an absolutist about this. We do not, for instance, favor decriminalizing drugs (sorry, libertarians). We'd be happy with a return to the status quo ante, say, 1985. We admire Rudy Giuliani and Ronald Reagan even though the former gave us a ban on smoking in most New York City restaurants (but not bars) and the latter, the federal drinking age.
Our trouble with Huckabee is that he simply seems too intent on telling people how to live their lives. Hooray for him for losing all that weight. We could stand to lose a few pounds, too--but we'd rather do it without Washington's "help."
No Truck With Huck--II
If you were reading this column last week, you probably anticipated our second reason for criticism of Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign: his support of the so-called Fair Tax. Just to sum up, the Fair Tax proposes to eliminate all existing federal taxes, including those on personal income, payroll and corporate profits. Replacing them would be a heavy sales tax, just under 30%. (Fair Tax proponents describe it as a 23% tax, a figure they reach by adding the tax before calculating the percentage.)
What's wrong with this idea? Absolutely nothing, to hear the Fair Tax people tell it. It offers only benefits and imposes no costs. Mike Huckabee ascribes to it occult powers; he tells the New York Times that enacting the Fair Tax would be "like waving a magic wand, releasing us from pain and unfairness."
Fair Tax proponents claim that it would be "revenue neutral"--that is, it would raise the same amount overall as the current tax system does. This means one of the following three things (or a combination of the second and third):
- Everyone would pay the same amount in taxes as under the current system.
- Some people would pay less, but others would pay more.
- The tax would alter incentives in such a way as to increase economic growth, thereby making people richer without reducing revenues to the government.
We can dispense with the first possibility easily enough. Fair Tax proponents do not claim that everyone would pay the same in taxes under their system--a claim that would be both highly implausible and not much of a selling point (why radically redesign the tax system if the effect is zero?).
But revenue-neutrality remains a zero-sum game: If some taxpayers pay less, others will pay more. It stands to reason that under a system taxing only consumption, those hardest hit would be taxpayers with relatively low income and high consumption, such as young families with children and (as we noted Friday) elderly people living off their (already taxed) assets.
Fair Tax people respond to this point by saying they would counter the added burden with subsidies, which they call "prebates"--a deviation from the elegant simplicity that is the plan's biggest selling point. Still, no matter how complicated they make the system, there is no escaping simple arithmetic: If some taxpayers pay less, others are going to have to pay more, or else the plan is not revenue-neutral.
As we noted last week, Huckabee acknowledges that a few groups would pay more: "illegals, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, drug dealers." This radically simple tax is so precisely targeted that only bad people will pay more. The rest of us will save so much, we can pool our resources and buy the Brooklyn Bridge.
What about the supply-side idea, that the Fair Tax would spur economic growth, thereby generating revenues by way of increased economic growth? The trouble with this is that the Fair Tax is almost ideally unsuited to take advantage of supply-side effects.
It is certainly true that lower tax rates can create incentives for economic activities, thereby increasing revenues. For example, lowering the capital gains tax to 15% prompted investors to unlock their gains, and thereby generated more revenues than the higher rate. But obviously there are limits to this phenomenon, which is why Laffer drew a curve rather than a line. If the capital gains tax were reduced to zero, revenues from it would be zero.
That is what the Fair Tax proposes to do, not only with capital gains, but with earned income, interest, dividends, corporate profits and all other forms of economic activity except consumption. Economic growth would produce revenues only to the extent that people spent more money.
Supply-side effects work on consumption taxes as well. When Congress slapped a "luxury tax" on yachts, people stopped buying yachts. The yacht-building industry was devastated; people working in it lost their jobs; and Congress ultimately repealed the tax. The Fair Tax would impose a 30% levy on all consumption, a powerful disincentive to spend money. People who need to spend money--including the young family and the elderly couple living off their assets--would get hit hard by the tax. Rich people, by contrast, would forgo luxuries or find ways around the tax.
When we wrote about the Fair Tax last week, we got lots of emails from readers demanding to know why we like the current tax system so much. Of course we don't like it at all, and we don't know of anyone who does. But as appealing as the Fair Tax may be, it is only a fantasy. A belief in magic is not a qualification for the presidency.
No Truck With Huck--III
In explaining our aversion to Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign, so far we've covered his views on health and taxes. Whatever a candidate's shortcomings on domestic subjects, though, sound ideas and instincts on foreign policy can go a long way to compensate. (Conversely, however fun-crazy Ron Paul's domestic views may be, his scary-crazy foreign-policy notions disqualify him even as a protest vote.)
So how does Huckabee do on foreign policy? An essay appears under his byline in the January issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, and it is not reassuring. Here's how it opens:
The United States, as the world's only superpower, is less vulnerable to military defeat. But it is more vulnerable to the animosity of other countries. Much like a top high school student, if it is modest about its abilities and achievements, if it is generous in helping others, it is loved. But if it attempts to dominate others, it is despised.
American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out. The Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad. My administration will recognize that the United States' main fight today does not pit us against the world but pits the world against the terrorists. At the same time, my administration will never surrender any of our sovereignty, which is why I was the first presidential candidate to oppose ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty, which would endanger both our national security and our economic interests.
Is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination really likening world politics to a high school and America to a "top student"? Someone, please, tell us this is a nightmare and we're about to wake up! The New York Times raised a lot of eyebrows with this revelation about Huckabee:
At lunch, when I asked him who influences his thinking on foreign affairs, he mentioned Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Frank Gaffney, a neoconservative and the founder of a research group called the Center for Security Policy. This is like taking travel advice from Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, but the governor seemed unaware of the incongruity.
And sure enough, the first two paragraphs of the Foreign Affairs piece are both Friedmanesque (blasting the Bush administration's "arrogant bunker mentality," though Friedman would have come up with a much more labored metaphor) and Gaffneyian (opposing the Law of the Sea Treaty, which the Bush administration favors). There isn't necessarily a logical contradiction between these positions, but they seem highly discordant nonetheless--as do Huckabee's calls, in the same essay, to establish full diplomatic relations with Iran, an enemy state that is pursuing nuclear weapons, while invading Pakistan, a troubled ally that has nuclear weapons.
That latter pair of positions echo Barack Obama's, and suggest that Huckabee has the same defect Obama does: a complete lack of foreign-policy experience. Further evidence from this is in the Times profile:
When I pressed him, he mentioned he had once "visited" with Richard Haass, the middle-of-the-road president of the Council on Foreign Relations. . . . "What you do," he explained, "is surround yourself with the best possible advice." The only name he mentioned was Representative Duncan Hunter of California. "Duncan is extraordinarily well qualified to be secretary of Defense," he said.
Huckabee served more than a decade as governor of Arkansas, and he would not be the first president to have risen from the statehouse in Little Rock. His would-be forerunner, Bill Clinton, took a long time to get up to speed on foreign policy, and his response to the threat of militant Islamist terrorism proved inadequate. Maybe governing Arkansas is not sufficient experience to be president, especially at a time of international peril.
Then again, Clinton's successor was also a governor of a South Central state without a lot of foreign-policy experience, and George W. Bush's campaign pronouncements about a "humble" foreign policy were almost as trite as Huckabee's high school musings. Yet faced with a crisis, Bush had the right instincts, and in our view he has, on the whole, been quite a good foreign-policy president.
We realize, of course, that that last statement puts us decidedly in the minority. But if you are in the majority that doesn't think Bush has done a good job, that's all the more reason you should be wary of Huckabee.
No Truck With Huck--IV
A big reason for Mike Huckabee's rise--and for many conservatives' discomfort with it--is the way in which he has campaigned on his religion. Huckabee is a Southern Baptist and a former pastor, and his strongest competitor for the social conservative vote is Mitt Romney, a Mormon. Many more traditional Christians, especially evangelicals, believe Mormonism is a heresy, and Huckabee is trying to make political hay of this theological dispute. In an interview with the New York Times, he scoffed (albeit in an "innocent voice"): "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"
Peggy Noonan explains why this troubles her:
There is a sense in Iowa now that faith has been heightened as a determining factor in how to vote, that such things as executive ability, professional history, temperament, character, political philosophy and professed stands are secondary, tertiary.
But they are not, and cannot be. They are central. Things seem to be getting out of kilter, with the emphasis shifting too far.
Huckabee has a Christmas ad out, in which he says that "what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ." As the Associated Press reports, this is too much even for one notable conservative Christian activist:
Catholic League president Bill Donahue [sic; his name is spelled Donohue] said the former Arkansas governor went way beyond wishing people a joyous holiday.
He was especially disturbed by the cross-like image created by a white bookcase in the background of the ad, saying he believed it was a subliminal message.
"What he's trying to say to the evangelicals in western Iowa (is): I'm the real thing," Donahue said Tuesday on Fox News Channel's "Fox and Friends." "You know what, sell yourself on your issues, not on what your religion is."
The Huckabee boomlet, and the unease it has prompted among many conservatives, has occasioned much secular liberal Schadenfreude. This is what you get for getting into bed with the religious right, they say. So before we elaborate on what troubles us about Huckabee, we'd like to reiterate our sympathy for the religious right.
As we noted in The Wall Street Journal 2 1/2 years ago, we are not a religious believer, and our views on social issues are middle-of-the-road. But we are appalled by the undemocratic suggestion that separation of church and state means religious believers who hold conservative social views must be excluded from public debate on those questions. Furthermore, the secular left's purported fears of "theocracy" have no basis in reality. As we wrote in 2005:
Last week an article in The Nation, a left-wing weekly, described the motley collection of religious figures who gathered for Justice Sunday [a rally against Democratic filibusters of Bush judicial nominees]. A black minister stood next to a preacher with a six-degrees-of-separation connection to the Ku Klux Klan. A Catholic shared the stage with a Baptist theologian who had described Roman Catholicism as "a false church."
These folks may not be your cup of tea, but this was a highly ecumenical group, united on some issues of morality and politics but deeply divided on matters of faith. The thought that they could ever agree enough to impose a theocracy is laughable.
And the religious right includes not only Christians of various stripes but also Orthodox Jews and even conservative Muslims. Far from the sectarian movement its foes portray, it is in truth a manifestation of the religious pluralism that makes America great. Therein lies its strength.
Politicizing matters of theology runs counter to this pluralistic tradition, and it ultimately is a political loser. There aren't enough Southern Baptists, or evangelical Christians, to elect a president. The religious right is powerful, and deserves to be taken seriously, only insofar as it transcends theological differences and focuses on issues. If it does not, it degenerates into just another form of identity politics. (Blogger Marc Ambinder raises an interesting analogy to failed Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, whose supporters used her "identity as a born again evangelical" as a selling point.)
A successful national politician has to have an appeal beyond identity politics, which is why Barack Obama has a chance, and why his campaign is good for the Democrats, whereas the same could not be said for Jesse Jackson in the 1980s or Al Sharpton in 2004. But it would have been invidious to respond to Jackson's and Sharpton's divisive campaigns by saying: That's what you get for letting black people participate in politics. Sometimes people use their franchise unwisely, but that doesn't mean they deserve to be disenfranchised.
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