Reason Magazine - Topics > Mike Huckabee

Whatever Happened to Tax Cuts?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 07:00:00 EST

Mike Huckabee was supposed to be dead right now, politically speaking, and the Club for Growth was supposed to be standing over the corpse holding the knife. The Club—an eight-year-old coalition of supply-siders that helped elect such anti-tax politicians as Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.)—supports the GOP’s anti-tax dogma. Huckabee, who repeatedly raised taxes while governor of Arkansas, does not.

Yet by the dawn of 2008, Huckabee was the driving force in the race for the Republican presidential nomination: on the cover of Newsweek, on top of the Iowa caucus results, campaigning cheek by jowl with Chuck Norris and the martial arts master’s curiously taut skin. Huckabee’s ability to beat establishment Republicans raises questions about how the party’s current coalition thinks and who gets to be part of it. It also challenges a bit of conventional wisdom already undermined by the 2007 elections: the idea that economic conservatism drives the Grand Old Party.

The Club for Growth has a basic theory of politics: Republicans lock up elections when they credibly promise to cut taxes or never to raise them. This trend, the Club’s leaders say, began with Howard Jarvis’ California tax revolt in 1978 and continued as Ronald Reagan slashed the top income tax rates and won two landslide victories in the 1980s. Then the first President Bush broke his no new taxes pledge and got retired by Bill Clinton, and then Clinton raised taxes and got clotheslined by Newt Gingrich.

In 2004 the Club for Growth bought an ad in Iowa in which a middle-aged couple (of actors) declared they would never vote for the “government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating” candidate Howard Dean. (Most of the club’s successful campaigns have relied on cultural conservatism as much as economic conservatism, a gaping hole in its taxes-matter-most theory.) The spot wasn’t the only reason Dean finished a poor third in the Democratic caucuses, but it locked in his image as an unelectable liberal.

But the Club lost most of the elections it tried to influence in 2007, a letdown after a reasonably successful 2006. Its endorsed candidates lost, respectively, a primary and a party convention vote for open House seats in Ohio and Virginia. The group endorsed six candidates for the state Senate in Virginia. Just three won their primaries, and only one was elected. And now Huckabee has jumped from asterisk status in Iowa to winning the state decisively, humiliating the much better-financed Mitt Romney. In 2007 the Club for Growth spent $100,000 to run an ad on Iowa TV comparing Huckabee unfavorably to his predecessor in the Arkansas governor’s mansion, Bill Clinton. It appeared before that state’s Republican straw poll, the traditional kickoff of the caucus campaign. It had no effect: Huckabee finished a strong second in the poll, and his stock never stopped rising. The Club ran more ads before the Iowa caucuses; none of them stopped Huckabee’s triumph.

Nor does Huckabee’s Iowa boom seem to be a fluke. Paul Jost, head of the Virginia chapter of the Club for Growth, was the group’s unsuccessful candidate for the GOP nomination for Virginia’s 1st District House seat. In that state the party has lost ground in four consecutive state elections (2001, 2003, 2005, and 2007), finally losing control of the state Senate in 2007, even though conservatives defeated a tax hike referendum in 2002.

“Our brand is badly damaged,” Jost admits. Like many economic conservatives, he attributes the damage to tax hikes earlier in the decade. Moderate Republicans broke with their party and supported the increases, giving Democrats the votes to pass them. That collaboration, Jost argues, gives Democrats room to blur the differences between the parties and run on competence. It also allows Democrats like Mark Warner and Tim Kaine—the former and current governors, respectively—to tell voters they won’t raise taxes, to raise them anyway, and to feel no electoral backlash.

“The problem in this state is that people don’t trust us on the tax message,” Jost says. “Taxes went up under the Republicans. When the Democratic governors wanted to hike taxes, both houses—which were run by the Republicans, remember —caved in. So why should people believe us right now?” Many Republicans in Virginia tried to change the subject from taxes to immigration, hoping this was a “good government” argument they could win on. It wasn’t.

It sounds a lot like the chorus of gripes coming out of the GOP’s presidential race. Mitt Romney claims that “before we change Washington, we need to change the Republican Party”; John McCain grumbles that “Washington changed” his party; Ron Paul talks as though 12 years in the majority corrupted everyone but him. All of the candidates save Huckabee preach the gospel of lower domestic spending and deep tax cuts.

All of this is what the Club for Growth represents. It enthusiastically attacks incumbent Republicans when they take another course, whether inserting an earmark for a Heroes of Hog-Rendering Museum into the budget or voting to cancel part of a tax cut package. Yet in 2007 the Club couldn’t win.

Joe Carter has an explanation for this. Carter, a Huckabee spokesman who left the Family Research Council to work for the campaign (and has since returned to the council), thinks the Club for Growth is being passed by because the Reaganites were successful. Because conservatives have been able to cut tax rates to acceptable levels, he says, the message no longer attracts voters. “I agree with their basic philosophy,” he says. “I think all Republicans do. But if you’re a CEO making $20 million, your biggest concern is marginal tax rates. If you’re a real entrepreneur or a consumer you don’t care as much about that. You want good schools, you want laws that make it easy to start a business, and you want economic growth.”

It’s a more radical explanation for the tax cutters’ woes than the one the rest of the candidates are giving. The Club for Growth argues that a few terms of lean, clean Republican governance can convince voters to trust them on taxes again. But if Carter is right, the Club’s argument simply won’t work unless tax rates explode. Voters don’t like taxes, he implies, but they can tolerate current rates as long as they’re getting good services.

Huckabee complicates this argument by supporting the glib Fair Tax, a proposal to replace the income and payroll taxes with a national sales tax. It allows the tax-hiking governor to offer tax-cutting rhetoric too. He can say he wants to demolish the Internal Revenue Service even while demanding the tax system be rejiggered to punish the rich. (A national consumption tax wouldn’t actually punish the rich, but the candidate’s crowds gobble it up.)

“If Gov. Huckabee is the nominee, you’ll see a shift from where the GOP is now,” Carter says. “I see politics as more of a split between libertarians and conservatives than liberals and conservatives.” In his opinion, full-bore libertarian philosophy sounds good on the surface, but it won’t equalize opportunity the way Huckabee’s tax and business reforms would. Libertarians would dismiss some of those reforms as statist, but Carter is willing to see those libertarians go. “If you let the libertarians go over to the Democratic Party while the Republicans win the votes of entrepreneurs,” he says, “you’re talking about a new majority party.”

David Keating, the Club for Growth’s executive director, laughs when Carter’s theory is laid out for him. “The whole concept is ridiculous,” he says. “The bad Republicans are retiring and being replaced by supply-siders. We’re still winning the long game.” This is the conversation the old Republican coalition is having as it enters 2008: The room is split into two crowds, each yelling at the other, and none of their arguments are sinking in.

David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.

The Thin Man Goes to Washington

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 07:12:00 EST

In his inaugural New York Times column, William Kristol suggests Mike Huckabee may be the right Republican presidential candidate to beat "a liberal Democrat" who will "want to increase the scope of the nanny state." This is like counting on Godzilla to save us from King Kong.

Losing more than 100 pounds in less than a year is the former Arkansas governor's main claim to fame, and for Huckabee the personal is political. "Although my weight-loss battle was a very personal one," he wrote in the journal Health Affairs in 2006, "my position as governor allows me to help others to see the importance of making healthy lifestyle changes."

Huckabee created the Healthy Arkansas program, "a comprehensive effort to clearly define specific areas where behavioral changes can lead to healthier citizens." As chairman of the National Governors Association, he led the Healthy America initiative, aimed at creating "a culture of wellness across the nation."

Both efforts relied primarily on information and persuasion, but the rationales Huckabee offered for them suggest sterner measures could be justified. Because of the burden that bad habits such as overeating, inactivity, and smoking impose on taxpayer-funded medical care, he said, a state's fiscal health is tied to its residents' physical health. In any case, he said, "states have both the authority and the duty to enact laws and regulations to advance the public's health."

So what happens when people fail to "see the importance of making healthy lifestyle changes"? The Arkansas Clean Indoor Air Act, which Huckabee brags about championing, provides a clue.

Huckabee says the law, which prohibits smoking in virtually all enclosed spaces that are not private residences, is about "workplace safety." Yet the main health benefit from smoking bans comes from encouraging smokers to quit, not from reducing exposure to secondhand smoke. And lest you think that federalist scruples would prevent Huckabee from pursuing his vision of a smoke-free America as president, he has promised to support a national ban on smoking in "public places."

In his 2005 book Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork, Huckabee implies that he does not favor similarly coercive tactics aimed at getting Americans to eat better and exercise more. "We do not need the government to become the ‘grease police,'" he writes, "dictating what size cheeseburgers the law will allow or taxing obese people at a different rate than thin people because of the likelihood of additional health care costs associated with obesity."

But given his broad view of the government's authority to "advance the public's health," it's hard to see how Huckabee can rule out such measures, especially since he portrays the "huge epidemic of obesity" as a crisis that threatens the treasury, the economy, and even national security. "We keep talking about the war on terror," he said in an August speech to the Southern Governors' Association. "Who's going to fight it if we don't have enough people who are healthy enough to show up and pick up a backpack?"

Like other obesity alarmists, Huckabee warns that poor eating habits and lack of exercise could make American life spans shorter. A lot shorter: "If we continue with this trend," he told CNN in 2006, "within another generation you'll see kids dropping dead at their desks at the high school."

To avoid that prospect, CNN reported, Huckabee called for "a culture of health," citing four examples "in which concerted public campaigns, aided by government, led to cultural shifts": littering, seat belt use, smoking, and drunk driving. Notably, littering, failing to wear a seat belt, and driving while intoxicated are all illegal, while smoking is headed in that direction, thanks to Huckabee and like-minded politicians.

For those of us who worry that a President Huckabee would be inclined to force his culture of health on America, there's one consolation: If he's right, Grease Police recruits will be so fat that we'll be able to outrun them easily.

The Audacity of Mush

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:05:00 EST

The first time Barack Obama seized the country's attention, he was celebrating the shades that lie between the more distinctly defined colors of the spectrum. "We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states," he declared at the Democratic convention of 2004. "We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states....We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."

Obama was puncturing some obnoxious stereotypes, but there was something about his rhetoric that seemed empty and cloying to me. It might have been its pedigree. There are three standard stances in mainstream American politics: loyalty to the Red Team, loyalty to the Blue Team, and a can't-we-get-along centrism that claims to fuse the best of both sides. The third stance makes a fetish of political action; its partisans, from Michael Bloomberg to Bill Bradley, sometimes call more loudly for "reform" or for "change" than they do for any actual, specific reform or change. That posture's popularity last peaked during the election of 1992, when the media consensus held that our greatest affliction was "partisan gridlock." It might have been a nightmare brought on by overexposure to the Larry King Show, but I even seem to remember a reporter asking the president if it mattered which party controlled both Congress and the White House, as long as the government was united and able to get things done. The ease of passing a bill was apparently more important than the bill's content.

It's not hard to understand the appeal of bipartisanship, especially when you compare it to the blind fealty and dimwitted demonization that often characterize the alternatives. But the centrists' empty invocations of "unity" usually amount to an equally blind fealty to the conventional wisdom and the rule of experts. Ross Perot captured that spirit in the early months of '92, before his own unconventional views began to emerge, when he said he'd solve the country's most pressing problems by asking panels of specialists what to do. His idea of giving specifics was to say he'd take each of their proposals and "pilot-test it, de-bug it, optimize it."

The true alternative to the culture war is not to declare that we are, as one book put it, "one nation, after all." It is to recognize the near-infinite number of shades beyond red and blue: the authentic, sometimes eccentric combinations of opinions that emerge from people not named Hannity or Colmes. We can hope, perhaps a little audaciously, that there is something in Obama's biracial, globe-trotting identity that leaves him more open to those hidden hues, and thus to ideas outside the Washington consensus. To give the man his due, the senator sometimes offers more than centrist mush. He was against the invasion of Iraq when it was politically risky to say so, and he has criticized the Patriot Act and other assaults on the Bill of Rights. He is clearly more libertarian than his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton—in foreign policy, in issues of personal freedom, and at least arguably in economics. Not that that's a high bar to clear, or that Obama stands in any consistent way for liberty. To judge from the rhetoric that dominates his speeches, as opposed to the policy proposals tucked away on his website, he mostly stands for youth, "change," and platitudes; for "an insistence on small miracles" and "the audacity of hope," whatever the hell those are supposed to be.

You can catch a few more unfamiliar colors flickering behind Iowa's other victor, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Protestant whose outlook mixes touches of anti-state populism (the Fair Tax, homeschoolers' rights) with thick lumps of center-left nannyism (smoking bans, sin taxes, a war on obesity). Huckabee's roots on the religious right give his nanny-state proposals a curious cast: If Democrats like Hillary Clinton have secularized what used to be moral issues, giving us public health arguments against video games and TV violence, then Huckabee has sanctified the public health agenda, turning weight loss and smoke-free living into moral crusades. I don't find that appealing at all, but it does reflect important elements in American culture—the megachurches, the self-help shelf—that are usually absent from Washington's red-blue shouting matches. It's healthy to have Huckabee in the debate, though it's a debate I hope he'll lose.

The candidate who has moved the farthest beyond red and blue is, of course, Ron Paul. The Republican congressman's antiwar, anti-Washington crusade has created a real rainbow coalition: leftists and paleocons, gold bugs and cyberpunks, a patchwork of political positions that do not fit on the familiar spectrum. Like Perot's Reform Party of the '90s, but with a leader who embraces the diversity rather than fearing it, the Paul movement represents a world where "Red America" and "Blue America" are near-meaningless abstractions. Better still, his live-and-let-live libertarianism and federalism offer a workable way for all those multicolored Americas to coexist.

If Paul finishes respectably in New Hampshire, it will be because he draws support from the state's independent voters. If he does poorly, it will be because those independents opt for one of the "safer" alternatives to the status quo: Obama, Huckabee, John McCain. Either way, it's the independents who will be making that choice: not the hard-core Democratic partisans, not the hard-core Republican partisans, and not the drab centrists who would erase even the distinctions between those dueling partners.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of reason.