Is GOP too biased to tap Huckabee for vice president?
By Curt Smith
- SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
Updated: 05/04/08 6:47 AM
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- Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, right, might be the best running mate for John McCain, strengthening the ticket by attracting the votes of born-again Christians.
While Democrats duel, the unofficial Republican nominee considers a vice president. John McCain should start by asking what he needs. The admiral’s son fits two legs of his own party’s three-legged stool: foreign policy (zinging terrorism) and economic (scoring spending). Alas, he is out to sea with social and cultural conservatives, the one group without which national Republicans once routinely lost, and will surely lose again.
According to a new Pew Research Forum poll, 44 percent of the electorate terms itself “born-again.” Politically, these Christian, mostly Protestant, evangelicals are the Republican Party’s largest block: 35 percent of George W. Bush’s 2004 vote. More “born-agains” voted then than all blacks and union members.
Moreover, their scorn of secularism, cultural rot and border insecurity tracks the concerns of millions of Catholic, orthodox Jewish and Protestant non-evangelicals.
Prsident Bush coined the term “coalition of the willing.” Born-agains and their friends form the GOP coalition of the winning.
In 2000, McCain attacked evangelical “agents of tolerance.” Mending fences, he still spurns such “values” issues as elitism, political correctness and hostility by state toward church.
Equally unconcerned is daughter Meghan, 23, telling GQ that she likes “bad boys” with tattoos, “bisexual-dating TV,” stripper Dita Von Teese, and “The Big Lebowski” — “I love that [expletive] movie!” Both seem blind to how social/cultural conservatives, tilting Republican, have tipped America to the GOP.
This drift began in the 1960s. Candidates ignoring it lose: Gerald Ford, Robert Dole and George H. W. Bush in 1992. By contrast, evangelicals helped Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan win 49 states. Bestriding the South, born-agains also pivot states like Missouri, Iowa, central Pennsylvania and rural Ohio (only the anti-gay marriage turnout saved Bush in 2004). Without them, Republicans are less a majority party than the Federalists or Whigs.
This year, voting born-agains have treated McCain like Ford or Dole. Some suggest McCain do an extreme values makeover. It would flop — McCain’s a lousy actor — or worse, harm his maverick niche. Others dismiss values voters, wanting an economic conservative vice president where McCain is already strong.
Instead, he needs a running mate with social/ cultural cachet, swelling turnout without changing the Arizonan’s crucial straight-talk front. Only Mike Huckabee can sufficiently help McCain where McCain cannot.
More than any Republican, Arkansas’ ex-governor embodies a silent still-majority trying to save money, buy a home and educate its children. “When you struggle, you look at things different,” said the son of a firefighter who worked “a second job from the shipyard, not Harvard Yard.”
This spring, “entering political folklore,” said CNN’s Lou Dobbs, Huckabee became politics’ David versus Goliath — eight primary and caucus victories, 15 seconds and nearly 4 million votes. As vice president, he would be ready to elect McCain from day one.
In 1960, John F. Kennedy stumped the Northeast, industrial Midwest and West Coast, assigning the South to Lyndon Johnson: sans him, Nixon would have won. Likewise, Huckabee would help sweep Dixie and periphery, wooing people less worried about stock portfolio than human stock — their family. Unlike any other vice president, he would let McCain, running left-of-center, focus exclusively on Blue states from New Jersey to Oregon. In the South, the Arkansan, running right, would become almost a surrogate No. 1. Such amalgams are hard to find.
Specifically, Huckabee would clinch what McCain aides wrongly “believe that he has already won,” the Wall Street Journal says of bornagains. Despite his recent “guns and religion” gaffe, Barack Obama could loosen such evangelical states as Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and even Mississippi. Recently, Houston TV megachurch pastor Joel Osteen lauded Hillary Clinton for “all you’ve done for America.” Kennedy’s fire wall was LBJ. Huckabee would be McCain’s. Overnight he would make the Republicans’ largest block a GOP pro, not con.
George Will thinks “It would be reassuring were [McCain] to select a running mate with executive experience.” Huckabee’s experience dwarfs any potential vice president or president, making Time magazine’s 2005 list of “America’s five best governors.” Another edge is his TV wizardry: acing countless interviews; pitch perfect defending McCain versus the New York Times; excelling in each 2007-08 debate. It is easy to see McCain stumbling in debates this fall. It is even easier to picture Huckabee — another fire wall — trouncing the Democrats’ No. 2.
Finally, McCain and Huckabee like each other, each running a valiant bare-boned campaign, their synergy miming the 1992 Clinton-Gore ticket larger than the sum of its parts. On one hand, Huckabee avoids the me-tooism dooming Ford, Dole and the elder Bush. On the other, the social, economic and foreign policy conservative reaches across the aisle. Four times Huckabee won 4-to-1 Democratic Arkansas, including 40 percent of black voters — unheard of in today’s GOP. Last year, spurning party talking points, he prophesied, “The economy’s in trouble.” Defining a Republican “Big Tent,” Huckabee would show that its Big Top isn’t closed.
Main Street wants a running mate to address, among other things, wage disparity, foreclosure and U. S. sovereignty. Huckabee does. Other rumored vice presidents ape Wall Street from globalism to Nasdaq mania. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist caricatures corporate Republicanism with a George Hamilton tan. Mitt Romney would be perfect if each family earned $300,000. Condoleezza Rice symbolizes her reviled boss and friend. Others hail from states McCain could carry with Jack Abramoff as No. 2: Mississippi’s Haley Barbour, Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn, Utah’s Jon Huntsman Jr., South Carolina’s Mark Sanford. Why not clinch Idaho by picking Larry Craig?
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty couldn’t deliver for McCain on Super Tuesday. Ex-Cincinnati Congressman Rob Portman is unknown in next-door Kentucky. Some hallucinate that ex-SEC head Chris Cox can make California competitive. Maybe McCain plans to revisit amnesty. Each would-be veep helps only with the GOP establishment. Unlike Huckabee, none helps beyond his state.
Twelve years ago, facing a similar choice, Dole tapped Beltway favorite Jack Kemp, whom Will soon dubbed “incoherent.” Incoherent would be McCain ditching a middle-class base that works, for a Fortune 500 base that doesn’t.
Huckabee belongs to — thus, grasps — the coalition of the winning. So did another governor who, more than anyone, made evangelicals Republican. Some call Huckabee as governor a “liberal” for raising taxes. If so, Gov. Ronald Reagan was a greater liberal, having raised them more.
Blue states allegedly feel Huckabee extreme. GOP 1970s elites dubbed Reagan a right-wing nut. Huckabee lacks deep foreign policy bona fides. Henry Kissinger called Reagan “ill-informed.” Reagan would understand Huckabee’s rapport: also, how objections are largely sham — a smoke screen for religious bias.
Reagan’s evangelical mother taught him to hate bigotry. Ironically, the sole obstacle to Vice President Huckabee may be evangelism itself. Leftists bash born-agains and friends — the “religious right” — with relish and regularity. Equally toxic is the GOP’s official and/or neoconservative establishment deeming them, as writer Ring Lardner said, a side dish they decline to order. “Many secular Republicans have contempt for evangelicals,” MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson said. “They want values voters to vote, then disappear” — redolent of GOP bias against Jews and Catholics in the 1940s and ’50s.
Ex-Bush staffer David Kuo’s “Tempting Faith” bared administration disdain for born-agains. Revealingly, the sole cable news network to boycott the book was Fox. Likewise, people “who think summer is a verb,” jokes Huckabee, fear him becoming the elephant in the room. Many neocons don’t mention Huckabee among vice presidents. Fox’s Britt Hume mocks, “We’ll miss the Huck.”
Republicans rarely term John Danforth or Joe Lieberman an Episcopalian minister or observant Jew, respectively. Yet they call Huckabee a “former Baptist preacher” — he hasn’t officiated since 1988 — seeking to ghettoize, thus stigmatize.
“They couch their fears in secular terms,” wrote Newsweek’s Howard Fineman. “Privately, however, what worries the [Republican] insiders is that [Huckabee’s religion will make] Blue and Purple America run shrieking” from the party. Clearly, GOP elites feel a declasse faith is worse than none. For born-agains, such animus may be a turning point — a cause to say “no mas.”
Huckabee’s edge in rhetoric, recognition, executive skill and populism likely will soon become irrefutable. Say that McCain then spurns politics’ Sea Biscuit for Sanford’s Mr. Ed. The snub will be seen as prejudice against nearly one in two Americans: a last GOP insult to family, sanctity of life and religion in the public square.
Some GOP evangelical dons might shrug, preferring access to principle. By contrast, rank-and-file would stay home, or vote Democratic, crippling McCain. It needn’t come to that. Asked to draw McCain’s ideal running mate, you would create Huckabee. Put another way, if Huckabee didn’t exist, we would have to invent him. Happily, he does. All McCain has to do is pick him.
Curt Smith wrote more speeches than anyone for President George H. W. Bush, including the “Just War” and Pearl Harbor anniversary speeches and the 2004 eulogy to President Ronald Reagan. Author of 12 books, and a GateHouse Media columnist, he hosts the NPR affiliate series Perspectives each Saturday at 7 a. m. on WNED Buffalo.
