The victors, pt. 1: McCain and Huckabee
I nearly wrote "Hickabee" in the headline, which is a Freudian slip almost as telling as Times Co. owner Sam Zell launching an f-bomb (see yesterday's post) at a young woman photographer at the Orlando Sentinel who challenged his concept of journalism as lowest-common-denominator hucksterism. But I digress.
John McCain and Mike Huckabee were the big winners on the Republican side in yesterday's 24-state "Super Tuesday" primaries. McCain because he actually won, and Huckabee because he won several southern states plus West Virginia and probably got himself onto the ticket in the fall as the vice presidential nominee. The two have been making nice of late, and I can really see this happening.
Democrats have reason to be both exhilarated and fearful over a McCain-Huckabee ticket. It will be eminently defeatable, but won't be the romp that facing a ticket headed by Rudolph Giuliani or Mitt Romney would have been. McCain and Huckabee have great surface appeal to certain voters who don't know their positions very well. It will be up to the eventual Democratic nominee, be it Clinton or Obama, to make sure voters know what the country faces if McCain and Huckabee take over the government.
For starters, McCain is the ultimate hawk. A prisoner-of-war in North Vietnam (he was a bomber pilot) for more than five years, he is still fighting the Vietnam War in his mind. McCain has promised again and again that he will stay in Iraq until "victory" is achieved, whatever that means. He has expressed willingness to keep U.S. forces in Iraq for even a hundred years if necessary. He seems the most likely among any of the candidates to go to war with Iran, and the most likely to ask Congress to reinstitute the military draft. There won't be any other way to fight a war like that.
Huckabee laid out his vision for America in comments to supporters in Arkansas last night. He promised to scrap the current federal income tax and replace it with the so-called "Fair" Tax, which isn't fair at all if you're in the lower or middle classes. This is essentially a 30 percent national sales tax on top of whatever sales tax your state already charges, and without the exemptions for food and clothing that some states, like Pennsylvania, provide. "Huck" also made clear that abortion will be ended--at least legal abortions--if he has anything to say about it.
If he is picked as McCain's vice presidential running mate, Huckabee will face more scrutiny than many vp nominees do. McCain would be the oldest man ever to hold the U.S. Presidency, older by two years than Ronald Reagan was when he took office. While healthy longevity seems to run in his family--his 95-year-old mother seems 30 years younger than her numerical age--people who have been subjected to torture and brutal imprisonment often suffer permanent health damage which may be invisible for a time but ultimately shortens their lives. There is a much higher risk than normal that Huckabee would ascend to the presidency to finish out a McCain term.
Neither McCain nor Huckabee have truly been subjected to the brutal vetting of their records that is only applied to candidates running for President, the picking over of their past by people who know how to find anything that isn't kosher, the relentless fall campaign ads that highlight whatever is found. By the time this all plays out they will seem like George W. Bush reincarnated. They won't win unless the Democrats really screw up.
McCain and to a lesser extent Huckabee are despised by movement conservatives like Rush Limbaugh. Much of this stems from McCain's votes against both Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and his general refusal to play nice with the really far right. This hatred of McCain is visceral and shows no signs of abating, which is another positive development for Democrats.
I haven't said anything about Mitt Romney in this post, and there really isn't much to say except he lost big-time yesterday. His victories were in insignificant states or in "home" states like Utah and Massachusetts, where he was once governor. The longer he stays in, the better for the Democrats, because it will force McCain to spend more money in the remaining primaries.