Over lunch, NPR interviewed a journalist who has spent a lot of time traveling with the “evangelical” politicians over the last several years and has written and reported about them extensively. In other words, he was being treated as an expert on even gelical thought and politicians. (And here I thought the experts on evangelical thought were called psychiatrists.) They were talking about Huckabee and the way he is creating a rift in the evangelical “wing” of the Republican party.
The opinion of the expert was that the reason the evangelicals do not stand uniformly behind one candidate as they have in the past was because no clear heir exists. Huckabee, the only evangelical in the Republican race, “himself a Baptist minister,” divides the evangelicals because he only endorses a part of their traditional “values.” Specifically, per the expert, evangelicals believed in anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, and similar social policies combined with conservative fiscal policies and a generally anti-Federalist outlook. Huckabee however, our expert tells us, combines the standard social outlooks of classical evangelicals (anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, etc.) with a populist platform. Accordingly, he is taking his message directly to the evangelical voters rather than working through their traditional leaders. He also argues for his views on non-traditional grounds, because he speaks of human dignity and the value of life in all stages of life.
While I completely approve of marginalizing the influence of the likes of Pat Robertson, Huckabee, as described by today’s expert, combines the worst of both worlds. I can’t help but think of him in terms of his opposite, someone who would be for conservative fiscal policies, small government, and broadly interpreted civil liberties; someone like the other gentleman from Arizona.
Where have all our Goldwater’s gone?
1 comment:
I'm shocked and disappointed that Huckabee would take money from struggling, hard-working Americans in order to fund his campaign. He said in his drop-out speech that it was..."the sacrifices of a truck driver in Michigan, of a housewife who sold her wedding ring on eBay and gave the contribution to the campaign, a janitor in Alabama who has a wife in a wheelchair who gave $20, not out of his abundance, but out of his poverty, so that our campaign could stay on the track." In a bad economy, why would someone running for President take their money to fund a campaign that was clearly going to be fruitless? What would become of the economy if selfish Huckabee were President?
Jos76
www.jos76.wordpress.com
Post a Comment