Huckabee and the home schoolers
One of my first clues that Mike Huckabee might be big on the Republican side of the election this year came when I saw that the father of a girl in the youth opera company to which my daughter also belongs had a "We (heart) Huckabee" bumper sticker on his minivan. I think he may have written it with white liquid shoe polish on the window, too. I knew he and his wife home schooled their kids. Many, though not all home schoolers are conservative evangelical Christians, and Huckabee is deeply religious, so it all kind of added up. Home schoolers were said to be big supporters of Huckabee in the Iowa caucuses.
But it seems the bloom is off the rose for some home schoolers in Michigan, the next state to hold its primary, and in some in other states as well. The head of the state's Christian home school association has come out for Mitt Romney, ostensibly because Huckabee signed a law when he was governor of Arkansas that required parents pulling their kid out of public school to home school them to wait out a 14-day cooling off period. It was a sensible law, aimed at heading off hasty, panicked decisions because the evolution section of high school biology was coming up or a teacher indicated that gays and lesbians were not actually spawn of Satan.
Home school zealots (and not all are) won't accept even the most reasonable of regulations. The New York Times reported last week that because of legal actions or threats of legal action by the Home School Legal Defense Fund, a number of states have no regulation of home schooling whatsoever. I don't want home schooling banned entirely. I want it preserved as an option for students who truly need to be home schooled, for example for medical reasons or because they are being bullied at public school. Some parents of my acquaintance do home schooling very well, and others do not.
But who really benefits if parents can pull their kids out of school because "they were teaching them stuff I didn't understand," as one home schooling mother famously told the Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot-News a couple of years ago. There have to be regulations to protect kids from nutty parents.
That's an issue for another day. The reasons some home schoolers are abandoning Huckabee for Romney and Fred Thompson i have much less to do with the 14-day cooling off period than Huckabee's sins against the tenets of movement conservatism. Anyone who calls the Club for Growth the Club for Greed isn't going to get the plutocrat vote, and plutocrats have been using the fundies for some time to advance their own selfish economic interests.
It's morbidly fascinating to watch the Republican Party in freefall, each candidate fighting hard, as I put it in a previous post, to in effect be the next CEO of Enron. I suspect John McCain will end up the Republican nominee for President this year, and will lose by not a whopping margin to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or John Edwards. He'll be the Bob Dole of 2008, a respected, elderly war veteran who has certain appealing traits but who, like Dole, won't be able to convince a majority of Americans that he has what it takes to be President.