This week David Brooks of the New York Times concluded that Mike Huckabee was now a "top tier" candidate for the Republican nomination. The video below (from GodTube) offers an eight minute summary of the Arkansas Governor's worldview...
Key points (not verbatim):
- I'm from the small town of Hope in Arkansas but give us one more chance! [Bill Clinton came from the same place and made a famous video about a 'place called Hope'].
- The Republican Party as a whole deserved to get beat in 2006.
- We've made the Saudis rich but they've often used that wealth against us. It's about time that the Saudis bore a greater share of the burden of securing their troubled region and it's about time we moved to energy independence.
- Republicans need to be leading the way on the environment and we're not. Republicans need to be leading the way in speaking out against corporate greed and we're not.
- We need a new healthcare policy that focuses on wellness - prevention - not sickness and disease.
- The most important moral issue in America is that every life matters. Not just in the womb but we must respect life at all stages.
- I cut 94 taxes times in a Democrat state but imposed a gasoline tax in order to build a road that 80% of my voters wanted.
- We've had a Congress that has spent money like John Edwards at a beauty parlour!
- Every week while Governor of Arkansas I put a different picture of a citizen of the state in a picture frame in my office. The frame had the caption, 'Our Boss'. We need a Republican who cares as much about people on Main Street as much as Wall Street.
- I believe that there's a God who was active in the Creation process.
Popular with social conservatives, Governor Huckabee alarms many econ-cons. This is the view of Club for Growth:
"Governor Huckabee touts himself as an economic conservative, writing in his biography that he "pushed through the Arkansas legislature the first major, broad-based tax cuts in state history" and "led efforts to establish a Property Taxpayers' Bill of Rights" early on as governor (Arkansas Times 09/22/05), but he only offers a small piece of the picture. It is true that Governor Huckabee fought for an $80 million tax cut package in 1997 that was passed by the Arkansas legislature (Cato Policy Analysis No. 315, 09/03/98); cut the state capital gains tax in 1999 (The Commercial Appeal 02/29/99); and passed the Property Taxpayers' Bill of Rights in the same year, limiting the increase in property taxes to 10% a year for individuals and 5% per taxing unit (AP 03/16/99). However, his record over the rest of his ten-year tenure tells a starkly different story."
Click here for the rest of that story.
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