The not-so-subtle effort of establishment conservatives to smear Huckabee continues. Over at Townhall, Matt Lewis quotes Huckabee:

“… if we had played by the rules of the Democrats, I would have won, and if the Democrats have played by the rules of the Republicans, Hillary would have won this long ago.”

Seizing on the same thread, Kathryn Jean Lopez writes: “Mike Huckabee, not letting go.”

Is Huckabee being a sore loser whose whining about sour grapes? Maybe, it’d help to look at Huckabee’s quote in context:

Why do you believe you lost to John McCain, other than money?

He got more votes than me! If you do an analysis of the election, if we had played by the rules of the Democrats, I would have won, and if the Democrats have played by the rules of the Republicans, Hillary would have won this long ago.

If you look at the process, and I’m not bitter about and it’s nothing that I’m complaining about. It is what it is. But the Republicans had a front-loaded system with winner-take-all states, and the front-load was largely states that were states that are not Republican states, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, California. They were winner-take-all states, but they were big states and delegate-rich. Those were the states John McCain plays very well in. I’ve won the states in the South. I won Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, West Virginia and Arkansas…

But those were all proportionate states. So I won them, but I didn’t get all the delegates. But if you had taken that whole system and reversed it, it would have been a very different outcome.

[The January 19 South Carolina primary was a turning point in the campaign.] Fred Thompson’s presence took votes from me. We would have won by 10 points had Fred not been in the race. We would have won handily in South Carolina, but because the conservative vote split, in essence, three ways, and even though I had more than Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney combined, the fact is, their presence kept me from the two points I needed to beat John McCain in South Carolina. [He lost 29.9 percent to McCain’s 33.2 percent.]

Huckabee was a question, he analyzed it. He didn’t volunteer some gripe which is what Lewis and K. Lo suggest. Lewis goes on:

“The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it’s this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it’s a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says “look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government.”

Egad, Huckabee is against lower taxes and less government? Again, some context, please:

Republicans need to be Republicans. The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it’s this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it’s a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says “look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government. If it means that elderly people don’t get their Medicare drugs, so be it. If it means little kids go without education and healthcare, so be it.” Well, that might be a quote pure economic conservative message, but it’s not an American message. It doesn’t fly. People aren’t going to buy that, because that’s not the way we are as a people. That’s not historic Republicanism. Historic Republicanism does not hate government; it’s just there to be as little of it as there can be. But they also recognize that government has to be paid for.

If you have a breakdown in the social structure of a community, it’s going to result in a more costly government … police on the streets, prison beds, court costs, alcohol abuse centers, domestic violence shelters, all are very expensive. What’s the answer to that? Cut them out? Well, the libertarians say “yes, we shouldn’t be funding that stuff.” But what you’ve done then is exacerbate a serious problem in your community. You can take the cops off the streets and just quit funding prison beds. Are your neighborhoods safer? Is it a better place to live? The net result is you have now a bigger problem than you had before.

Huckabee’s point is not that government is better, period as Lewis would have left us thinking but rather that if you want less government, you have to reduce the need for it. Libertarians think government can be reduced without addressing the cultural issues that led to bigger government in the first place. You want less money spent on prisons? Less money spent caring for the elderly? Stronger families are key. The idea that you can have a rotting culture and limited government absurd.  Huckabee’s idea goes back to John Adams, who warned that our constitution was suited for a religious and moral and unsuitable for any other. The less more people is, the less freedom there will be.

Club for Growth attacks Huckabee as well:

Mike Huckabee misses the fundamental point of free-market capitalism, which is that free markets promote economic growth for all people, including the poor, in a way that government simply can’t match. Historically, it has been free markets and private philanthropy–not government–that has generated prosperity, eliminated poverty, and fostered opportunity. When government interferes by trying to manipulate the economy to produce “desirable” results, it almost always ends up doing worse than the market could have done by itself.

Huckabee is subscribing to the liberal, not to mention condescending, notion that people cannot better their lives without government holding their hand a good part of the way. Huckabee is entitled to his opinion, but he shouldn’t pretend to be an economic conservative when he rejects the basic tenet upon which conservatism is based.

Huckabee subscribed to no such notion. Huckabee is no liberal on economics (see his tort reform in Arkansas, his defense of Wal-Mart in his book, his seeking to cut the Capital Gains Tax and today’s response to Maxine Waters proposal to nationalize oil), nor does Huckabee’s statement having to do with government regulations on business (in which case the CFG’s response makes sense.)

I don’t agree with Huckabee on some of this. For example, the Medicare Prescription Drug benefit as passed by Congress has sped the insolvency of Medicare and paid for the drugs of seniors who could otherwise afford them. However, his overall point that if we want to really reduce government, we have to seriously address cultural decay rather than expecting a morally invirtuous people can enjoy the same freedom a virtuous one can. 

Huckabee supporters as well as Independent voters had better be prepared for more of these type of attacks and mischaracterizations from the Conservative media establishment. The 2008 Huckabee campaign is over. But the war on Huckabee has only begun.

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