Steve Skojec

Obviously, I don’t find Ron Paul scary at all. But Goldberg (Editor at Large for The National Review) handles the Huckabee questions that should be considered by conservatives:

For the most part, these allegations [about Paul's weird supporters - SS] strike me as overblown and unfair. But, for argument’s sake, let’s say they’re not. Let’s even say that Paul has the passionate support of the Legion of Doom, that his campaign lunchroom looks like the “Star Wars” cantina, and that many of his top advisors actually have hooves.

Well, I would still find him less scary than Mike Huckabee.

[snip]

So what’s so scary about Huckabee? Personally, nothing. By all accounts, he’s a charming, decent, friendly, pious man.

What’s troubling about The Man From Hope 2.0 is what he represents. Huckabee represents compassionate conservatism on steroids. A devout social conservative on issues such as abortion, school prayer, homosexuality and evolution, Huckabee is a populist on economics, a fad-follower on the environment and an all-around do-gooder who believes that the biblical obligation to do “good works” extends to using government — and your tax dollars — to bring us closer to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

For example, Huckabee has indicated he would support a nationwide federal ban on public smoking. Why? Because he’s on a health kick, thinks smoking is bad and believes the government should do the right thing.

And therein lies the chief difference between Paul and Huckabee. One is a culturally conservative libertarian. The other is a right-wing progressive.

Whatever the faults of the man and his friends may or may not be, Paul’s dogma generally renders them irrelevant. He is a true ideologue in that his personal preferences are secondary to his philosophical principles. When asked what his position is, he generally responds that his position can be deduced from the text of the Constitution. Of course, that’s not as dispositive as he thinks it is. But you get the point.

As for Huckabee — as with most politicians, alas — his personal preferences matter enormously because ultimately they’re the only thing that can be relied on to constrain him.

In this respect, Huckabee’s philosophy is conventionally liberal, or progressive. What he wants to do with government certainly differs in important respects from what Hillary Clinton would do, but the limits he would place on governmental do-goodery are primarily tactical or practical, not philosophical or constitutional. This isn’t to say he — or Hillary — is a would-be tyrant, but simply to note that the progressive notion of the state as a loving, caring parent is becoming a bipartisan affair.

Becoming a bipartisan affair? We’re a few Republican presidents past that point, Mr. Goldberg. That said, I find Goldberg’s thinking on the difference between these two candidates to be more or less on the money. He undersells Paul’s ability to draw votes in a general election (if he was ever to get that far) and disagrees with his foreign policy (which draws me to Paul as much as anything else he represents) but the overview remains valid.

Goldberg nails it, however, on the conclusion:

But there’s something weird going on when Paul, the small-government constitutionalist, is considered the extremist in the Republican Party while Huckabee, the statist, is the lovable underdog. It’s even weirder because it’s probably true: Huckabee is much closer to the mainstream. And that’s what scares me about Huckabee and the mainstream alike.

Note: As I went to write my first post this morning, I noticed that I still had this draft sitting in the can from last week, when I was having internet problems. I finished it up and decided to post it today: 

David Weigel at The American Conservative takes a look at how the animosity toward Hillary Clinton that conservatives and Republicans alike share isn’t enough to fix the GOP. Weigel sums up the reason rather succinctly in the title of the piece:

It Takes an Agenda: Conservatives cannot live by Hillary-hate alone.

Keeping Hillary out of the White House is literally the only motivation some conservatives have to pull the Republican lever in 2008, especially if their party nominates a pro-choice candidate for the first time since 1976. “Just enough people might go to the polls next November nursing one conviction that trumps all others,” Terence Jeffrey wrote a few weeks after the panel (which he also appeared on). “There’s no way they would vote for Hillary Clinton.” Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard executive editor and a sturdy weathervane for Republican popular opinion, expressed the same thing in a late-September column: “Nearly all Republicans, plus a lot of independents, rally around the need to defeat Senator Hillary Clinton and keep her away from the presidency. So it follows, not entirely logically, that they wish for her to win the Democratic nomination.”

Is this wishful thinking from a party and a movement on the ropes? Not according to pollsters. There are voters who have given up on the GOP over the last few years and utterly loathe the Clintons in general or Hillary in particular. Americans are aching to vote Democratic, and polls that test a generic Republican candidate against a generic Democrat give Clinton’s party a double-digit lead. But their enthusiasm flags when they ponder the flesh-and-blood Democratic frontrunner. Pollster Scott Rasmussen points out that at least 45 percent of Americans don’t like Clinton personally. She simply rubs them the wrong way—in every way. Despite that generic lead, she only ties or narrowly outpaces Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and John McCain…

…

There is another reason conservatives can’t count on Hillary: she offends and irritates them so deeply that they have trouble actually strategizing against her. They launch attacks, but compared to the carefully plotted Swift Boat strike on John Kerry or the years-long effort to spotlight Al Gore’s strange bragging and fibbing, the anti-Hillary attacks are erratic, grabbing early media attention and then fading out of the picture. Conservatives fixate on long-dormant scandals, like Bill Clinton’s treatment of Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, without appreciating that reporters no longer want to chase those stories and that their very mention stokes sympathy for Clinton’s wife.

But it’s all some anti-Hillary agitators know how to do. In July, Sean Hannity told professional Hillary slayer Dick Morris the question he wanted some intrepid hack to ask the candidate: “Do you believe the women that claim that your husband serially abused them? Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones. Is that a legitimate and fair question?” Morris repeatedly shook his head and tried to explain where Hannity was going wrong: “Whenever anybody hits Hillary on her personal life, her marriage, or whether she is a lesbian or not, it plays into her hands.”

We heard it from conservative commentators time and again during the 2004 election: people who cast a ballot for the Democratic Presidential candidate weren’t voting for John Kerry, they were simply voting against Bush. And the commentators got it right - it’s simply not as effective to vote against someone as it is to vote for someone. You don’t win elections that way.

That makes 2008 all the more dangerous. Hilary Haters want to see her lose, but they can’t figure out that until the GOP is sorted out, there’s no momentum for a conservative win. Meanwhile, they continue to shun the only candidate - Ron Paul - who not only espouses the bulk of what conservatives should really believe but has a significant shot at beating Hillary on the Democrat’s home turf - the war. That is, if he can survive the ever-so-slowly decreasing odds against his winning the GOP nomination. 

With 65-70% of Americans polled saying they disapprove of the conduct of the Iraq war and more than half saying they want us out of Iraq ASAP, that could constitute a significant voting block that should not be dismissed lightly.

Americans need a candidate they can unite behind. I do think that Ron Paul is that kind of guy, even if he’s unconventional and a bit uncouth. The support he has from youth is an intriguing confirmation on the political front of what we’re seeing in the return of Gen X and younger to orthodoxy on the religious front. From this interesting in-depth profile of Dr. Paul at the Baltimore Sun, we get a glimpse of the paradigm shift:

Paul likes to tell people that when constituents came to visit him in his Washington office, it would invariably be parents with reluctant children in tow. These days, he says, it is more often young people introducing their skeptical parents to him.

There are more than 260 Students for Ron Paul chapters around the country, and one of them is at USC in Los Angeles. There Paul stood under a blazing sun on a hot September afternoon speaking to a rally that swiftly grew from a few hundred students to more than 1,500. Among them was history major Luke Murphy, 20. Murphy found out about Paul from his twin brother, who discovered him on the Internet.

“My little brother is going to a Ron Paul rally in San Francisco tomorrow, and he’s bringing my mother,” he said, noting that septuagenarian Paul may be too “radical” for the “older generation.”

Ron Paul isn’t perfect and his strict federalism at times seems it could be problematic in the legislative pursuit of the common good. But it’s  a far cry from the unsustainable development of the GOP into a platform of tax-cut-and-spend, foreign-policy challenged, liberty-restricting, pro-life lip service paying cookie-cutter empty suits who are seemingly at the sole service of the Israeli lobby and their neocon masters.

We need dramatic, radical change if this country is going to survive its tri-pronged impending economic crisis of credit defaults,  declining currency value, & national debt; its badly planned and executed military operations; its questionable trade agreements and dangerous trade deficits; and its moral crisis here at home. Hitting the reset button on the Constitutional understanding of government is the kind of political enema we’re desperate for if we want a fresh start and a new direction. Ron Paul is the kind of unflinching hard-liner to cut through a lot of the clutter and get us back to our roots.

Even if you think he’s too radical, there’s a time and a place for such things. A teacher of mine used to call it “bending the stick” - if you have a sapling that’s growing with a significant curvature in one direction, the problem will only get worse if you don’t intervene. To counteract the deviation, you have to bend the stick in the other direction and hold it there for a while, after which, the tree will grow straight and true.

I think it’s time to bend the stick. Ron Paul’s just the guy to do it. Hating Hillary is not enough. If we all voted our consciences instead of hedging our bets, anything is possible.