Mike Huckabee, Republican Candidate for President

Now that he's the current front runner, let's take a look at some of Mike Huckabee's positions on the issues.

All these quotations are from his campaign website.

Abortion:

I support and have always supported passage of a constitutional amendment to protect the right to life. My convictions regarding the sanctity of life have always been clear and consistent, without equivocation or wavering. I believe that Roe v. Wade should be over-turned.

And:

No candidate has a stronger record on the sanctity of life than I do. I have always been actively and aggressively pro-life. I first became politically active when I helped pass Arkansas' Unborn Child Amendment, which requires the state to do whatever it can to protect life.

As Governor, I used that Amendment to pass pro-life legislation. The many pro-life laws I got through my Democrat legislature are the accomplishments that give me the most pride and personal satisfaction. I banned partial birth abortion, I required parental notification, I required that a woman give informed consent before having an abortion, I required that a woman be told her baby will experience pain and be given the option of anesthesia for her baby, I allowed a woman to have her baby and leave the child safely at a hospital, and I made it a crime for an unborn child to be injured or murdered during an attack on his mother.

He's also opposed to research on embryonic stem cells.

The War on Terror:

I believe that we are currently engaged in a world war. Radical Islamic fascists have declared war on our country and our way of life. They have sworn to annihilate each of us who believe in a free society, all in the name of a perversion of religion and an impersonal god. We go to great extremes to save lives, they go to great extremes to take them. This war is not a conventional war, and these terrorists are not a conventional enemy. I will fight the war on terror with the intensity and single-mindedness that it deserves.

And:

s president, I will fight this war hard, but I will also fight it smart, using all our political, economic, diplomatic, and intelligence weapons as well as our military might. The terrorists unfortunately have a great many sympathizers all over the world, folks who are happy to show up and be filmed shouting "Death to America," but the actual number of those willing to blow themselves up is relatively few, and they train and plot in small, scattered groups.

It's an enemy conducive to being tracked down and eliminated by using the CIA and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command. We can accomplish a great deal, we can achieve tremendous bang for the buck, with swift, surgical air strikes and commando raids by our elite units, working with friendly governments, as we've done with the Ethiopians in Somalia. These operations are impossible without first-rate intelligence. When the Cold War ended, we cut back on our human intelligence, just as we cut back on our armed forces, and both have come back to haunt us. As President, I will beef up our human intelligence capacity, both the operatives who gather information and the analysts who figure out what it means.

Faith and Politics:

The First Amendment requires that expressions of faith be neither prohibited nor preferred. We should not banish religion from the public square, but should guarantee access to all voices and views. We should share and debate our faith, but never seek to impose it. When discussing faith and politics, we should honor the "candid" in candidate - I have much more respect for an honest atheist than a disingenuous believer.

Iraq:

I am focused on winning. Withdrawal would have serious strategic consequences for us and horrific humanitarian consequences for the Iraqis. If we leave, Iraq's neighbors on all sides will face a refugee crisis and be drawn into the war: Iran to protect the Shiites; Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan to protect the Sunnis; and Turkey to protect its control over its own Kurd population. Iraq is a crossroads where Arab meets Persian and Kurd, Sunni meets Shiite, so if it's not a peaceful buffer, it can easily become a tinder box for the region. When we deposed Saddam, we emphasized Iraq's central location as a prime place to establish democracy and have it spread. That was the potential dramatic upside. Now we're faced with the potential dramatic downside that the terrorists are fighting to take advantage of: Iraq's central location as a prime place to create chaos and have it spread .

And now some Republican criticism of Mike Huckabee.

The Club for Growth from January, 2007:

"Governor Huckabee says he is a fiscal conservative," Club for Growth President Pat Toomey said, "but his ten-year economic-policy record as the governor of Arkansas is mixed, at best. His history includes numerous tax hikes, ballooning government spending, and increased regulation. To be sure, Governor Huckabee's record displays an occasional deference to a pro-growth philosophy, but that is only a small slice of a much bigger picture. The Club for Growth feels citizens deserve a full picture of where Governor Huckabee stands on the critical economic issues of the day."

And:

By the end of his ten-year tenure, Governor Huckabee was responsible for a 37% higher sales tax in Arkansas, 16% higher motor fuel taxes, and 103% higher cigarette taxes according to Americans for Tax Reform (01/07/07), garnering a lifetime grade of D from the free-market Cato Institute. While he is on record supporting making the Bush tax cuts permanent, he joined Democrats in criticizing the Republican Party for tilting its tax policies "toward the people at the top end of the economic scale" (Washington Examiner 09/13/06), even though objective evidence demonstrates that the Bush tax cuts have actually shifted the tax burden to higher income taxpayers.

Richard A. Viguerie on Huckabee from a press release yesterday:

Mike Huckabee’s victory in the Iowa caucuses is bad news for the Republican Party.

And from the website:

“A fiscal conservative is a person who truly understands that it’s not a problem in the federal government that our taxes are too low,” the former governor told the crowd at CPAC in 2007. “It’s a problem that our spending is too high and out of control.”

But by Gov. Huckabee’s own definition, there’s serious reason to doubt that he’s a truly fiscal conservative himself.

Much of conservatives’ concern about Gov. Huckabee centers on his record of raising taxes. He signed Americans for Tax Reform’s no-tax pledge, but only after dismissing such covenants as dangerous. He blasts the fiscally conservative Club for Growth as the “Club for Greed”. He publicly opposed repealing a tax on groceries and medicine, though he claims that he’s “always philosophically supported” axing the tax. According to ATR, after his 10 years in office, Gov. Huckabee had raised the state’s sales tax by 37 percent, motor fuel taxes by 16 percent, and cigarette taxes by 103 percent.

Not surprisingly, all these tax increases allowed for greater spending. According to Americans for Tax Reform, state spending under Gov. Huckabee rose by 65.3 percent during 1996 to 2004. The number of workers on the state’s payroll increased by 20 percent during his tenure, and its general debt obligation rose by nearly $1 billion. The spending increase is due largely to the creation of new government programs and the expansion of existing ones.

And:

Though he told The Washington Times that he supports “empowering people to make their own decisions”, Gov. Huckabee has consistently initiated and supported government meddling in the market economy. Not only did he increase Arkansas’s minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.25 per hour, but he even encouraged the U.S. Congress to do the same thing nationally. He ordered Arkansas regulatory agencies to investigate “price-gouging” in the nursing-home industry and threatened to launch a government investigation of “gouging” on gas prices after September 11, 2001. He signed a bill forbidding private companies from increasing prices on services like roof repair and tree removal by 10 percent in advance of a natural disaster.

Even Rush Limbaugh has his doubts. This from The Politico:

"Ladies and gentlemen, Gov. Huckabee, mighty fine man and is a great Christian, is not a conservative, he’s just not," Limbaugh said. "If you look at his record as governor, he’s got some conservative tendencies on things but he’s certainly not the most conservative of the candidates running on the Republican side."

From Rush's website. A Huckabee supporter called in to plead his case:

Well, I've been listening, I'm a 24/7 subscriber and everything, but I'm also a big Huckabee fan. I think you've been unfair, and I think Club for Growth has been unfair. Ronald Reagan had the same problems as what Huckabee had in his -- went up double, taxes went up. And it's because of the format of -- it's the format of the government, you know, you have to have a balanced budget as governor.

And Rush responded:

Can you tell me -- I mean, I understand the technique here, because this is the second or third attempt on the part of Huckabee supporters, who, by the way, you know, I think he's a fine man. He's just not a conservative. And this is what, to be quite honest with you, offends me greatly with this attempt to compare him to Ronald Reagan. You have to go back and cite their records as governors, some sort of a non-establishment candidate and so forth. Could you tell me something about Huckabee rather than trying to compare him to Ronald Reagan, a comparison of which I will blow out of the water in mere moments?

And then:

Here's my problem with this. I say this with all compassion, and I say this with love and respect for all of you who support Huckabee. But how dare you compare Mike Huckabee to Ronald Reagan. That is simply intellectually vapid, and it's grasping at straws. Ronald Reagan not only served as a governor, but he wrote and spoke for years about conservatism. Ronald Reagan was there at the beginning in 1964 about conservatism. I said yesterday, I have not spent a lifetime advocating conservative principles only to throw them away to embrace a particular candidate. I don't support open borders and amnesty. I don't support the release of hundreds of criminals. McCain supports open borders and amnesty. Huckabee released hundreds of criminals. I don't support repeated increases in taxes. I don't support national health care, whether you call it a children's program or whatever it is. I don't support anti-war rhetoric. I don't support Republican candidates trashing the war in Iraq when we're winning it. I don't support Republican candidates claiming the president doesn't read the National Intelligence Estimates as an excuse for him not knowing what the hell is in one. And that's Governor Huckabee.

As a Republican, when you've lost Rush Limbaugh you've lost everything.