Romney Should Drop Out

The conventional wisdom from the meanstream media (stole that from another poster at Huck's Army) is that the GOP race is down to two people – McCain vs. Romney. Mitt, of course, has seized on this theme and has asserted that a vote for Governor Huckabee is a vote for John McCain. If this is truly to become a two-man race, and the goal is to defeat the momentum-laden McCain (assuming last night's woeful performance in the debate didn't stop his momentum in its tracks), then the best thing to do is coalesce around the most conservative candidate, the most electable candidate, the candidate with the most upside. That candidate is not Mitt Romney; it's Mike Huckabee.

Most Conservative

Mitt likes to proclaim himself the standard-bearer on the 3-legged stool of conservatism, with the 3 legs being social, fiscal, and national security issues. Like he triumphantly proclaimed last night that of course Ronald Reagan would endorse him. But just because i can slap on a glove and cleats doesn't mean you should put me in at shortstop. Is Mitt Romney the Sidd Finch of politics? Is there any there there?

Consider the 3 leg formulation.

• Social – even if we believe that Romney has finally hit his conservative political puberty and has truly converted to the prolife position (at most it's a position with him, not a cause) and other social conservative bona fides, he would still lag far behind Governor Huckabee's convictions, record, and prospects on this leg. A big win for Huckabee
  
• National Security – Like almost all governors, you'll find little directly relevant foreign policy experience for either candidate. This would turn on judgment, toughness, and leadership. I'm not impressed with Romney's CEO experience and so don't give the leadership advantage that he surely thinks he owns. I believe Huckabee has better judgment and would be tougher with aggressive regimes.
  
• Fiscal – Romney believes this is his trump card. But here's your trump card...
  

TAX FREEDOM DAY

A tax freedom day is the day in the calendar when you've worked long enough in the new year to afford to pay all your taxes. It's a sad commentary on our times, but this date is usually in April, and seems to fall later and later (see table 1 at the link) all the time. In 2007, it is estimated that the national tax freedom day was April 30th. So let's compare the records of Governors Huckabee and Romney in their respective states, looking at the Tax Freedom Day when they took office vs. when each left office.

Governor/State		TFD – Start		TFD - End	Net Effect
Huckabee / AR		April 22		April 22	Same
Romney / MA		April 21		May 6	15 days WORSE

If you don't mind working an extra two weeks for the government, then by all means believe the talking heads that Romney is the fiscal conservative.

Most Electable

I covered this in my Typologies post, showing the polling evidence that Governor Huckabee would be a better general election candidate than Romney. You can also look at the head to head polls compiled at RCP. Against Clinton, Huckabee fares 2-3 points better than Romney does. Against Obama, Huckabee also fares better than does Romney. Granted, neither candidate is polling well against those two right now, but this has been a consistent pattern – Huckabee trumps Romney. Governor Huckabee is more electable than Governor Romney, based on all the evidence we have to study.

Most Upside

Romney has had the powerful two-pronged advantage of both MONEY and MEDIA behind him, and still hasn't won a contested primary other than Michigan, which is practically home for him, given that his father was a popular governor there.

Think about it. Romney has outspent even his well-funded rivals by orders of magnitude that boggle the mind. Millions upon millions on negative ads, distortions of the records of the other candidates. He has all the power of talk radio behind him, all the conservative establishment media serving as surrogate mouthpieces for his campaign.

And what does he have to show for it? If he hasn't been able to beat McCain up until now, why would he all of sudden start doing it next Tuesday or beyond? If anyone should drop out, it should be Romney. The conservative establishment should try something else. That something else is, of course, Governor Huckabee.

Tribute to Henry Hyde

We take a break today from our regularly scheduled blogging to pay tribute to a great American, Henry Hyde. Mr. Hyde served in Congress, representing Illinois for over 30 years. He recently was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest honor for civilians. The citation noted:

A veteran, a lawyer, and a public servant, Henry Hyde has served his country with honor and dedication. During his 32-year career in the House of Representatives, he was a powerful defender of life, a leading advocate for a strong national defense, and an unwavering voice for liberty, democracy, and free enterprise around the world. A true gentleman of the House, he advanced his principles without rancor and earned the respect of friends and adversaries alike. The United States honors Henry Hyde for his distinguished record of service to America.

He is best known to me as a champion of pro-life causes, most notably as the author of the Hyde Amendment, which halted federal funding of abortions and abortion advocacy groups, both in the US and around the world.

His approach and demeanor for congressional politics fits in well with our theme here at Huck The System. True political leadership is about making the country better, not consolidating your power and position. Consider this comment in Rich Lowry's column about Hyde:

He once told incoming congressmen, in the political axiom he lived by, that they "need to be at least as clear on the reasons why they would risk losing as they are on the reasons why they wanted to come here in the first place."

Here's a nice video of fellow congressmen & women paying tribute to Hyde. Note the bipartisanship.



Other good youtube links:
More tribute
Series of videos from fellow representatives

Huckabee's Embryonic Campaign Aborted by the NRLC

I was once a member of the National Right to Life Committee. Not in leadership, by any means, but just a rank & file, dues-paying pro-lifer. I received and thoroughly read the periodic newspaper. In my youth, i even contemplated joining the then-current fashion and getting myself arrested by picketing an abortion clinic while visiting Atlanta for a work conference. I have read and proudly display on my bookshelf such titles as Arresting Abortion by John Whitehead and Chuck Swindoll's Sanctity of Life.

I'm not a member any longer. It would be dramatic to announce that today's endorsement of Fred Thompson by the NRLC was the trigger. Dramatic, but false. I quit the NRLC long ago. Not because i changed my views, but because i couldn't see how my dues were making any difference. I say that not to disparage the organization, which i continued to appreciate, even if i never heard much about them for the past decade or so.

So why should i get worked up over their presidential endorsement of Thompson? It's because it strikes me as an endorsement borne not of principle, but of crass political maneuvering. Call me naive, but i still expect passion-issue groups like NRLC to remain true to principle. And when you have a clear pro-life choice like Mike Huckabee (or even Dr. Ron Paul, for goodness sake), how can you ignore that?

In their statements today, the NRLC reps repeatedly pointed to polls, claiming that Thompson was the most viable candidate behind the pro-abortion Giuliani. They even have a candidate comparison at their site that references, and even sorts by, poll numbers. That's bad enough, but the poll numbers they site there are from early October!

In other words, the NRLC has taken a snapshot of the campaign life at an early embryonic stage, and decided that Huckabee's prospects of a full & happy life as a presidential candidate were not worth it. This was a baby not worth keeping. Look at how tiny it is! How can we consider that truly alive?

So, here we sit, some 5 weeks later, with an updated ultrasound of the campaign. But the NRLC apparently didn't want to see the face of the growing life, much like abortion doctors don't want to show real ultrasounds to their patients.

p.s. I apologize if my theme and post title offend some. I ask that you grant the dramatic license, for the long-run sake of our unborn brothers & sisters. I draw no real parallels between a presidential campaign and the real-life tragedy of abortion. Furthermore, i do not believe that Huckabee's campaign is in any way terminated.

Abortion, The Princess Bride, and the Hijacking of Language

Mike Huckabee, in his speech at the Family Research Council's Washington Briefing (videos linked in prior posts), spoke about his pro-life views and the "holocaust" of abortion on demand. Those who have been fighting the pro-life battle to end (or at least severely limit) abortion didn't blink an eye at the use of that term, but left-wing bloggers immediately jumped in with frothing indignation, and the ADL called for an apology and a promise to stop using that particular phrasing. I even saw one blogger claim that the word "holocaust" should always be capitalized and can only be used as a proper noun to refer to the Nazi extermination efforts against Jews during WWII. Not as a matter of political correctness, but as a matter of grammatical correctness.

I can't see why one group should get to claim exclusivity of a word, even one so charged as holocaust. It is reasonable to hold all the proper outrage and sympathy for what happened in the capital H holocaust, and still be able to use that small-H version of the word to refer to other atrocities. The fact that there are other holocausts does not any way diminish or detract from the big Holocaust.

Reagan & The Pope

Besides, it's not as if Huckabee stands alone, or that this is some novel linguistic or propagandist trickery. Ronald Reagan, in 1983 during his Presidency, wrote a famous essay about abortion. It was entitled Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation. Well worth the read, still a quarter-century later. In this essay, Reagan refers the reader to a quote from Professor William Brennan:

The cultural environment for a human holocaust is present whenever any society can be misled into defining individuals as less than human and therefore devoid of value and respect.

Reagan also quotes approvingly from a book by John Powell entitled Abortion: The Silent Holocaust. (Not incidentally, Reagan also draws parallels between abortion and slavery, which enraged other interest groups.) While it's true that the President does not, in this essay or anywhere else I've been able to find, directly call abortion a holocaust, I do believe that these 2 references are intentional on his part. If he had any squeamishness about the term, he could have easily found a quote other than Brennan's.

Another noted leader of the era, Pope John Paul II, also saw some commonalities, remarked upon in his book Memory and Identity. This, too, set off a firestorm of criticism, prompting then-Cardinal (now Pope himself) Ratzinger to issue a clarification. JP2 rightly called abortion a "legal extermination" of persons deemed less than human.

It is well worth mentioning, even though it is obvious, that there are key differences between the abortion holocaust and the Jewish Holocaust by the Nazi regime. It is especially abhorrent to seek the absolute extermination of an entire group of people. As a Christian, it is doubly painful that the targeted group were fellow God-disciples.

There's enough pain to go around, though. Calling abortion a holocaust is not an attempt to draw perfect parallels to the Holocaust, or to ride on its outrage-coattails. It is a term to refer to grand-scale killing atrocity, particularly one that is based on dehumanization of the victims. It should not be surprising that pro-lifers feel this way about abortion.

The word holocaust
It's a strange word to use in either case, in my opinion, given its etymology. The word is Greek, and literally means "burned whole". As the link points out, the term was originally a Bible word denoting burnt offerings, but its usage expanded in the mid-1800s to refer to a massacre of a large number of persons. The wiki entry goes into greater detail. Interestingly, what we now call The Holocaust was originally called Shoah, or catastrophe. Theologically, shoah makes much more sense than holocaust, which suggests a sacrifice to God. In that sense, it doesn't make sense to use it for abortion, either.

It's a well-traveled word. You can even find cultural references to the word, such as in the move The Princess Bride, when Westley laments, "Oh, what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak." Or a heavy-metal band from Scotland. Or comic-book villain.

Back to Abortion

So what are we to make of the special indignation that greats the use of this word to describe abortion? It strikes me that while some like the ADL are purists in their opposition, others are merely reflecting their politics, objecting as a wedge-point because they do not agree with the pro-life position. One otherwise sober blogger suggests that it aligns the speaker with the forces of intolerance (upon creating the hyperlink here, I note that the author reworded his post to remove the reference to intolerance – I commend him).

I do agree that the term is used to get the audience's attention, and get you to thinking, but it is done not crassly or unsympathetically or certainly not intolerantly. It is an honest accounting of how a pro-lifer feels about the tragedy of abortion.