I've never been a Dallas Morning News fan for an amalgam of reasons logical, illogical, personal and professional (a subject for another post), but the DMN's endorsement of Mike Huckabee for the GOP presidential nomination just confirms my negative opinion about them.
It's not that I dislike Mike Huckabee. I'm not crazy about any of the Republican nominees, which is why I haven't bothered with an endorsement. I have problems with each of them and know I'll just hold my nose and vote for whoever isn't a Democrat.
And, truth be told, I was actually leaning toward Mike Huckabee back in October. The problem is, the more I've learned about Huckabee's positions, the less I agree with them. And, laughably, the supposedly conservative (by newspaper standards) Dallas Morning News likes Huckabee for all the reasons I've come to cock an eyebrow at him.
Mr. Huckabee established a respectable record of fiscal responsibility in Arkansas. Rather than run up deficits, he backed raising taxes to pay for needed infrastructure, health care and education. That's called prudence, and it was once a Republican virtue.
Mr. Huckabee is not an ideal candidate. Once a Bush-style Republican on immigration, his recent hard-right turn smells of opportunism. He too often wings it on foreign policy. But Govs. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also took office without foreign-policy experience. Much depends on the quality of a president's advisers. A chief executive's core foreign-policy convictions matter most, and on those, Mr. Huckabee is a standard conservative.
First, Huckabee raised taxes in Arkansas because the state requires a balanced budget. It's not like he had a choice of "running up deficits." And, personally, I don't know that it's particularly "fiscally responsible" to raise taxes rather than reining in government.
Second, Huckabee's immigration stance has been completely at odds with not only most Republicans but most Americans. Americans don't want illegal aliens to be given in-state tuition or scholarship money. They don't want sanctuary cities and they don't want lax enforcement of immigration laws. If anything, Huckabee's stance on immigration, like President Bush's, is a strike against his candidacy.
Finally, the argument about foreign policy is laughable. What the editorial board fails to acknowledge is that both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were elected after the fall of the Soviet Union, when we deluded ourselves that we needn't worry about foreign policy anymore. And Ronald Reagan was never naive about foreign policy. In fact, it was his tough talk and action that helped bring down the Soviet Union. As Hugh Hewitt has pointed out, Huckabee's foreign policy philosophy looks much more like the failed Jimmy Carter strategy than Ronald Reagan's.
The Morning News wraps up its endorsement claiming that what caused the editorial board to choose Huckabee was "a sense that of all the Republicans, he is the change agent the nation most needs," whatever the hell that means. If the argument is that Huckabee won't be as "mean" as other Republicans, I'm not sure I want a guy unwilling to stand up to the folly proposed by a Democratic Congress. What we need isn't merely an agent of change. What we need is someone tenacious enough to get Democrats to pass the right legislation (or veto bad legislation) and strong enough to stand up to Iran. Huckabee hasn't shown that he's that person yet.
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