Once a man from Hope ran for president and said the era of big government is over. And then there was Mike Huckabee.
The former Arkansas governor doubled down on his attacks on entitlement reform as he announced his 2016 Republican presidential campaign, declaring, “If Congress wants to take away someone’s retirement, let them end their own congressional pensions — not your Social Security.”
All that was missing was an image of Paul Ryan pushing an old lady in a wheelchair off a cliff.
How much does Huckabee’s relative aversion to government-cutting — I say relative because in the same speech called for abolishing the IRS and the Department of Education, calling the latter unconstitutional — really matter?
If you look at the most socially conservative and most economically conservative members of Congress, they are almost always the same people. The most socially liberal and economically liberal Republicans are also usually the same people.
The late Arlen Specter used to described himself as a “fiscal-economic conservative and a social libertarian,” but the issue that finally drove him from the Republican Party was his vote in favor President Obama’s $1 trillion stimulus plan.
And while Huckabee dislikes libertarians at least as much for their perceived social libertinism as their economics, the most prominent libertarian Republicans oppose abortion and gay marriage. One of the biggest exceptions to this general rule, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, actually left the Republican Party.
But Huckabee isn’t entirely an outlier. From Pat Buchanan’s economic nationalist critique of free trade to George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” there have been lots of socially conservative attempts to smooth unfettered capitalism’s rough edges. Huckabee’s is framed in a way that could potentially appeal to evangelicals.
“I earn the right to push for a strong pro-life agenda only by making sure I’m concerned about poverty, hunger and homelessness,” he told the Des Moines Register during his first presidential bid. “If I don’t care about those issues, then my faith is incomplete.”
“Can you say as long as a kid didn’t get aborted, heck, we don’t care where he lives?” Huckabee asked. “Or as long as a kid didn’t get aborted, we don’t care if he gets an education? As long as we didn’t abort the child, we don’t care if he has access to healthcare?”
These questions are valid, even if Huckabee’s economic prescriptions are not.
While Dick Morris once described this as Huckabee’s “new pro-life paradigm,” the two-time presidential candidate is also a product of an older religious right. Evangelicals today say religious liberty may be their top issue, but a lot of organized Christian conservatives once saw politics as a way to re-moralize the culture — Huckabee has traditionally been firmly in this second camp.
If Huckabee even just replicates his 2008 success, Social Security “socons” will be a challenge for the libertarian-traditionalist coalition that has been central to the conservative movement for decades.
