Rossputin.com: Rational Thinking About Our World

I received quite a few comments to my December 20th posting entitled "Huckabee is not a Republican...or shouldn't be"

Many of them were making what I thought were incorrect or simply silly arguments. I was waiting for a few to pile up in order to address them at once, but I was beaten to the punch by a reader, Ben, who submitted this excellent response. Thanks, Ben, for saving me some work.

Nearly all of the above comments deserve responses. I am a social conservative, a fiscal conservative, and a lifelong Republican. Here goes:

To Gerand, you are setting up a straw-man argument. Of course, states have the right of taxation. What Rossputin was pointing out was Huck's overall trend in tax policy, which is not good by a fiscally conservative Republican standard.

To Muwattalis, your read of the immigration debate is oversimplified and misleading. You are going to have to do a whole lot more heavy lifting (or at least sourcing) to show how "libertarianism is in political free fall." Your read of the immigration debate is also largely irrelevant here, since Huck himself is a newcomer to the strong enforcement side - which in fact muddles his otherwise populist views.

Some of us happen to be social and fiscal conservatives. The two wings of the party need each other. Why not pick a candidate who reflects both, rather than one who splits the party and destroys the agendas of both?

To nobodyislistening, simply plastering labels on those who disagree with you as "country club Republicans" only shows the weakness of your position. Hurling these epithets at someone like Rossputin (or, if you care to, me) only diminishes your credibility.

A true conservative? It means more than just being pro-life and pro-traditional marriage. In addition to the fiscal shortcomings so eloquently written about in this post, what about Huck's naive foreign policy that sounds like echoes of Barack Obama? Is this the guy you want as commander-in-chief in a time of war?

To Mark Rolfes, your comment is a total non-sequitur. Like Rossputin and me, you say you are animated by frustration with the lack of fiscal discipline shown by Congressional Republicans. How does that translate into support for Huckabee (who has been anything but an advocate for limited government)? McCain, maybe, for his lead on earmark reform, but he also pushed the giant Medicare expansion. Please clue me in here.

In summary, for all I know, most of the commenters here might be working for the Huckabee camp, since there are no links to follow that would identify them. That being said, their arguments need to be refuted. I'm writing to implore GOP primary voters to think seriously about their decisions. If you're going to support Huckabee, fine, but only if you at least got there by coming to grips with his record and having given some thought to a couple broad questions: 1) What would his foreign and domestic policy prescriptions really mean for our country? and 2) What are the odds he could actually win a general election?

Writing as a Baptist born-again Christian, let me remind you we are electing a President, not a pastor.

I would like to re-emphasize what I think is a crucial point in politics, specifically Republican politics, which I made in the original article:

The Republican Party is indeed a “big tent”. There is room for widely ranging views on a wide range of issues, from social issues to immigration to the war in Iraq. But supporting bigger government and higher taxes is not bringing a new view into the tent; it is burning down the tent, the very fabric of which is made of respect for liberty and limited government.

I know who Ben is, and I know that he thinks about politics and public policy a lot. I think it's quite interesting that people whose religious views are as different as his and mine (he a religious Christian and me a not-particularly-religious Jew) can come so close to agreement on so many things. And that's because we both realize that while a person's faith may guide his decision-making to a degree, following religious doctrine simply must not be the primary goal or modus operandi of a politician.

Think about Iraq: We're trying hard to keep the mullah's from imposing a government based on sharia (Islamic religious law), but we're not trying to eliminate religion from the country. And could you imagine any other approach that would have any chance of success in a very religious place with multiple groups of very strongly held differing opinions?

Well, the US is the most religious industrialized country. Is there any rational argument for making a Baptist pastor (whose every statement comes back to his religion being the most important thing in his life) the president of a nation which has, for example, more Catholics than Baptists, and has plenty of people of other denominations of Christianity as well as Jews, Hindus, etc?

I don't ask this from a politically correct point of view. I couldn't really care less about the liberals' talk of "diversity". My point is that Mitt Romney had something sort of wrong: What made America great was not just Freedom of Religion, but also Freedom from Religion in the sense of a state-sponsored religion, such as in England where the King or Queen is also head of the church. People must be free not to have the religion of others imposed on them through public policy. Let religious decisions or a Huckabee-style Christian version of Sharia be enacted in peoples' own homes if they want to live that way, or worst case at a state level. Our country is great precisely because we have tended to keep people like Mike Huckabee out of the White House.