Britain and America

Do celebrity endorsements make a difference?

Over the weekend Oprah Winfrey openly endorsed and campaigned for Barack Obama.  Before then Mike Huckabee's surging campaign received help from Chuck Norris.  Do endorsements make a difference?  The video above attempts to answer that question.

Whatever the answer to that question, Huckabee is surging in the Republican race - he is now only 4.2% behind Rudy Giuliani in RealClearPolitics' national tracking of the crowded GOP field.  His support has more or less doubled in just a month.  Governor Huckabee is now well ahead in Iowa.  He also leads in South Carolina.  And is picking up reasonable support in the Giuliani stronghold of Florida.

The 'Oprah effect' on the Democrat race is yet to be properly tested but Hillary's national lead remains formidable.  Her difficulties are in the early states - notably Iowa, where Senator Obama has moved into a narrow lead.

Introducing Mike Huckabee

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.