Huckabee’s Dirty Politics
There can be little doubt by now about the nature of Mike Huckabee’s campaign. Let me put it as simple as possible: he’s probably running the dirtiest campaign of all candidates, that includes Hillary Clinton. The organization which supports him by push-polling - Huckabee has said that he wants them to stop, but no one thinks he truly wants them to stop calling people, and there seem to be close connections between his campaign and Common Sense (the organization / company) - is now actively targeting not just Fred Thompson in South Carolina but also Senator John McCain.
McCain’s campaign became suspicious that something was going when four different individuals told volunteers calling for McCain all said that they couldn’t vote for the senator “because of his 1980 divorce from his first wife, Carol, who raised the couple’s three children while Mr. McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.”
Next came a sleazy attack by Vietnam Veterans Against McCain who say that he betrayed his country and his fellow soldiers as prisoner of war.
And if that’s not enough “[b]y Tuesday evening, a group called Common Sense Issues, which supports Mike Huckabee, had begun making what it said were a million automated calls to households in South Carolina telling voters, according to one of the calls, that Mr. McCain ‘has voted to use unborn babies in medical research’.”
I’m sure that we have some Huckabee apologists who will pretend that Huckabee doesn’t have to know about this nor that he has to silently approve of it, but it’s clear that if this were any other candidate he or she would be destroyed by everyone, including these apologists. Can you imagine what would’ve happened if Clinton did this?
For all his “better than thou” attitude and talk, it seems clear to me that Huckabee isn’t just “not any better” than his rivals, but even worse.
Seem to be? How so? Because some people who oppose him say so, even though he denies it vigorously and has publicly called on the group to stop these calls? Unless you have evidence that there are real ties, Michael, it’s slanderous to keep insinuating it.
At the very least you should be consistent; if you are going to hold Huckabee accountable for what his surrogates do even when he says that they’re acting in direct contradiction to what he’s asked them to do, then how about holding Hillary accountable for each and every one of her supporters who can’t seem to mention Obama’s name without accidentally slipping and talking about crack cocaine use in the same sentence?
Yeah it is, isn’t it? Almost as slanderous as getting people to make these despicable phone calls for you.
I don’t have any sympathy for him anymore. He’s the dirtiest of all.
And Hillary / Huckabee: at least Hillary’s not pretending to the second coming of St. Paul. Huckabee is. Preachers should behave like true Christians. Huckabee doesn’t. Look at the fruits Christine. He’s dirty and nasty.
Michael, you are not keeping your word about moderation.
What is your evidence that Huckabee is ‘getting these people to make these phone calls for him?’
And also, your story strongly implies that he has something to do with the Vietnam Vets against McCain group. Are you trying to pin that on him too, without any proof whatsoever? If someone started saying that Romney was behind that, but had no evidence of it, would you say they were right to start repeating over and over again that it "seems like he’s behind it"?
Ah, it’s fine for Hillary to have her surrogates make nasty insinutations about Obama and then deny that she wanted them to do that, because she doesn’t claim she’s virtuous. Ohhhhkay.
O, as an aside, did you notice that "a senior Huckabee adviser" said that the gloves are off with regards to McCain today?
O, and suddenly phone calls! Funny that!
Yes, he’s just a victim, isn’t he Christine. He would like to make them stop but he can’t. He tried real hard once by asking them "please stop"!
1. No it’s not.
2. It’s indeed less bad when someone like she does it than when someone like Huckasaint who presents himself as a "Christian Leader" is doing it. He’s making a joke out of my faith. Using my faith to mask his nasty character (about which we were warned: people who knew him in Arkansas already told everyone that the Huckaflopper isn’t as kind as he seems).
As to "by their fruits you will know them", that would apply if I were deciding whether or not I wanted Huckabee to be my pastor. Is he virtuous as a Christian church leader? I don’t know. I think it would be very hard for someone to meet the higher standards that I’d expect a church leader to uphold if/when in the arena of politics. Certainly hard to expect that he’d be able to get EVERYONE who is supporting him to act that way.
But the fact is that I expect all candidates to be reasonably ethical, and I apply the same standards whether or not that person makes an issue of being Christian. To me it has nothing to do with whether or not the person is being hypocritical; it’s about holding politicians to some minimum level no matter who they are (regardless of whether they use the Christian label or not.) It makes no sense otherwise, to expect that one person can sling mud but another isn’t allowed to do that. If you oppose that kind of campaigning on principle, then oppose it no matter who does it.
No, something is not ‘less bad’ when one person does it relative to another person doing it. That’s a form of moral relativism.
If you’re saying it angers you more personally because you feel it gives a bad name to Christianity, I can understand that argument- but it’s completely irrelevant to whether or not the action itself is ethical and acceptable or not.
And has it occurred to you that people have been talking about these phone calls for weeks? Just because you’re now hearing about the calls going against McCain (contemporaneously with Huckabee’s campaign saying the gloves were off) doesn’t mean that the timeline really happened that way. For that matter, even if it did, it’s certainly plausible that both Huckabee’s campaign and this other group realize that they now have to try to draw support from McCain.
You also didn’t answer yet whether or not you are purposely saying that Huckabee has ties to the Vietnam Vets group.
Funny that he does present himself as the Preacher-in-Chief, Christian Leader, etc. then Christine. If he doesn’t want to be judged as a preacher, he should stop presenting himself as one.
You don’t. If this were someone else, you would be all over that person.
No it’s called judging people by their own standards. If he doesn’t want to be judged by this standard, perhaps he should stop referring to himself as a Christian - ahem - leader.
If it were anyone where we had evidence of a real connection, I’d be all over it no matter who it was, Michael. That’s one reason I keep asking you about the Vietnam Vets group. I said yesterday, and I stand by this, that I think whoever is doing that is despicable and that it will hurt the campaign of any candidate who might be connected. If you can provide a shred of evidence that Huckabee is connected to that, I’ll denounce him immediately. Same thing if I see evidence that Romney, Giuliani, Thompson, Paul, whoever…is backing that effort in any way.
The key point here though is evidence. How in the world do you expect someone to disavow a group if he does it publicly but you refuse to believe him?
And about running a clean or Christian campaign…here’s the problem as I see it. The moment someone says he/she wants to do that, what happens with people who support him/her who don’t agree that the game should be played that way? Why, they organize themselves to take matters in their own hands and do the dirty work, don’t they? And then what exactly is the candidate supposed to do about it?
Which I repeat, is a form of moral relativism. A Muslim fundamentalist who has the standard that says that his wife and daughter should wear headscarf, and then kills her if she doesn’t obey- you judge him according to his standard and say he was acting on his conscience, do you?
Look Michael, if you admit that the real complaint you have is that a person who makes an issue of his Christianity in a political context then ends up making Christianity look bad, I have no problem with that. It’s the part where you’re taking a play out of the Democrat/liberal handbook and saying that any lapse of ethics or morals by an avowed Christian is double plus bad that I really, really disagree with you. It bothers you because of how people then see the hypocrisy, and that reflects badly on our faith- fine, I agree with you there. But to then use that to defend other people who have similar lapses, and act as though what they did wasn’t as bad, is wrong.
Since I’m getting a bit tiread arguing about the same points, here’s a short response: look at the Bible. Look at what Paul wrote about Christian leaders. They will be judged by more severe, strict measures than the others.
If Huckabee wants to play Christian Leader, lets judge him in such a way.
Christine, in my recent post on the "end of the big tent", I do exactly that. So is it ok if *I* continue to call out Huckabee on the gross hypocrisy inherent between his gentle manufactured persona and his pattern of blatantly brutal and deceptive political tactics running from before Iowa all the way through to now?
If he had not used deceptive, two-faced tactics so frequently in the past, I might be more willing to believe this particular denial. As it is, Huckabee is paying the price that comes with being two-faced in the past: lack of credibility.
Yes, Jason, if one criticizes all candidates that way then there’s a consistency in that. And again, there’s a difference between what you are saying (that you won’t give him the benefit of the doubt) and Michael’s post where he says that the group is acting on behalf of Huckabee. Read the post and see if you don’t see what I mean- he’s not saying that he isn’t willing to take Huckabee at his word, he’s saying that since others have said that the group is directly tied to Huckabee, we’re to believe that this is fact.
Michael: that’s a bit selective, isn’t it, since the Bible also tells us that we are to leave the judgment up to God? I agree that Paul exhorts us to use that kind of caution when choosing whether or not to follow a religious leader- but as much as Huckabee uses a Christian message about the type of moral leadership that he says he brings to the table, he’s STILL not asking us to follow him in his religious theology so I see no reason to apply that kind of thinking here. If I were deciding whether or not I wanted to trust his theology, I’d cautiously examine whether or not he lived up to his religious principles. In deciding whether or not I could consider voting for him for secular office, I’m going to assume he’s got his faults like everyone else and I’ll use the same standards of ethics for my yardstick that I’d use to measure anyone else.
Ohhhhh, But connections between Romney donors and the Club For Growth million dollar smear campaign gets a pass. Please…you people are ridiculous. Talk about the double standard. Where’s the outrage! How many millions of viewers did CFG’s distorted presentation reach? If their 527 can say and do what they want..so can common sense. My opinion…get em all off the air.
Actually it says that with regards to punishing someone, saying that person will be saved, etc. He also calls on us to condemn hypocrites, which is what Huckabee is.
Your reading of the Bible seems to be awkwardly positive for Huckabee Christine.
Michael: It’s not only the Bible, but also our secular system of justice which says that people are innocent until proven guilty. I’ll come back here and post in an instant that Huckabee is a slimeball just as soon as you show me how you can prove that he’s calling the shots on the push polling.
no one can prove that, they’re too smart for that and you know it. The question is what does common sense tell you?
And this isn’t about a ‘conviction’ in a courtroom Christine. That rule applies in the courtroom, in the legal system and no where else.
Common sense tells me that there’s somewhere around equal chance that Common Sense Issues is a group who believes that what they are doing is the only way to get Huckabee elected so they’re going to do it no matter what, vs the chance that Huckabee is complicit in it as a way to run a negative campaign but distance himself from it.
That’s what common sense tells me; and also that since ‘no one can prove it’, that also no one ought to then claim it as fact. State it as your opinion if you wish, but that’s not what you’ve done.
You also still haven’t clarified the point about Huckabee not being involved in the Viet Nam Vets against McCain group. I’m assuming you don’t think he was tied to that, but your article which lumped that together with the other issue under the headline "Huckabee’s Dirty Politics" certainly implied that and that’s a terrible smear.
Well, they can sue me for slander. I’m sure they won’t though.
I didn’t say that anywhere, so that should be all the clarification you need? And: I wouldn’t hold Huckabee above those attacks, although I don’t think he’s responsible for them.
Look at your first three paragraphs, Michael:
1. Huckabee is running a sleazy campaign, and seems to have connections with a group doing push polling against his opponents including McCain.
2. McCain’s campaign noted that people were telling them a nasty, false story they’d heard about him and they were concerned about where that was coming from.
3. Then attacks started coming at McCain from this Viet Nam Vets group [and actually, the story says that the false rumor had come from their pamphlet, not from push polling, so this wasn't separate from #2]
Then you go back to your main theme about the push polling and Huckabee secretly approving it.
How could anyone not infer that you were making a connection between ALL of the negative campaigning against McCain with Huckabee’s camp doing this stuff?
So yes, more clarification was needed.
Yup.
Yup.
Yep.
I don’t know, I didn’t receive the same complain from anyone else. And… it is funny that these people attack mccain at the same moment that a pro-huckabee group does so as well, no?
I am calling it suspicious.
By the way with regards to the comment about Clintonesque campaigning: I think that Huckabee is out-clintonesquing the Clintons.
Perhaps there’s something in the water in Arkansas.
Everyone tries to out-Clinton the Clintons. It’s part of why a lot of us are unhappy that she’s in the campaign. No one is going to unilaterally disarm when they know the arsenal that they’re going to face.
Having said that though, this would be completely amateur hour compared to the way the Clintons campaign. Have you seen Ed Morrissey’s articles about the Jay Rockefeller memo from the time of Hillary’s health care task force, advising that they do character assassinations on those who might politically oppose their plans?
Are you arguing that Huckabee is running such a sleazy campaign against his Republican rivals because Hillary Clinton is participating in the Democratic race?
No, I’m not saying that- I’m referring to what I think is to come. And in fact, I do think that mentality tends to push people like Common Sense Issues to do sleazy things- they think that if the candidate they prefer is going to run a clean campaign, that he’ll lose. So they feel they have to ‘help’.
Perhaps this post points out to the Huckapologists that Huckabee is sleazy. I should point to this post as proof that he’s running a sleazy campaign, too.
You have provided no conclusive proof that Huckabee is fighting a dirty campaign. Supposition is not proof. Huckabee has been the victim of a misinformation campaign.
Well, since his "let me show you the attack ad that I am too nice to show anyone" dirty trick in Iowa was in the form of a press conference, I think the "proof" is pretty good.
The proof of a "misinformation campaign" is………ZERO.
You have provided no conclusive proof that Huckabee is fighting a dirty campaign.
Silly me. Just because a couple are campaign insiders & just because that same couple are major contributors to the Huckabee campaign & paid for the sleazy push-polling doesn’t mean it isn’t purely coincidental, right???