I Heart Am Not Unalterably Opposed To Huckabee

Daniel Larison, looking at the numbers from another meaningless straw poll, observes that "virtually nobody hearts Huckabee." Meanwhile, Ogged and Becks at Unfogged are wondering why nobody on the Republican side seems to be taking former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee seriously as a Republican candidate. Myself, I couldn't guess. I mean, I figure I know enough about the nature of the presidential primary and funding and media cycles to come up with some decent explanations as to why Huckabee isn't outpolling Sam Brownback for the Christian right vote, or Mitt Romney for the support of the Republican establishment, but I wouldn't wager money on any of them. The higher mysteries of becoming a presidential candidate are beyond me. Moreover, I don't particularly care too much, as I can't see myself voting for Huckabee for president anyway, even assuming he got that far; his approach to taxes, immigration, labor and a dozen other issues are pretty standard corporate GOP fare, and that's nothing I care to support.

Still, all things considered, there are things I kind of like about Huckabee, things that I wouldn't mind seeing injected into a presidential campaign. We lived in Arkansas for three years, and in that time, Huckabee handled some hard issues as responsibly as I think anybody could, and he stood firm on some important, simple ones as well. It could well be that it is these very things that I like about him--mostly, Minivet notes, involving the "Carter-y social-activism side of the Christian political tradition"--that are making him less than popular with the Republican primary base; if so, so much the worse for the Republican base (though, honestly, I probably couldn't have a much lower opinion of them than I do already). Anyway, herewith three reasons why someone like myself thinks well of Huckabee:

1. He resolutely opposed, and forced the Republican party in the state to oppose, any move towards establishing a state lottery. The pressure to do so from various interest groups and government agencies was immense; every state surrounding Arkansas has a lottery, and the mournful cries about dollars lost to other states were (and still are) constant. But Huckabee's line in the sand was the right one to draw: lotteries draw money away from the most at-risk populations and families, and their returns simply aren't worth the civic costs. This may seem like a small point--and a question which would be moot for a presidential candidate anyway--but it connects to a much larger and harder stand Huckabee took.

2. Huckabee dealt with a peculiar public education crisis in Arkansas, and he pushed through a solution to it--a partial and incomplete solution, to be sure, but a solution nonetheless--that avoided the typical delusion that lottery money would save the schools (a delusion that those contesting for the governor's chair after him appear willing to give in to). Lots of states have a hard time raising revenue for their schools, of course; what made Arkansas's crisis peculiar was, as I explained in part here, it was driven by a long series of state court cases arising out of extreme inequities of funding between various school districts in the state. Obviously, any real solution to the terrible unfairness in the level of public education available to different populations around the country has got to involve, among other things, rethinking the property-tax basis for school funding; outside such egalitarian reforms, however--and the political will for such certain wasn't present in Arkansas--you either have to raise taxes, cut costs, or find some better way to move the existing money around. Huckabee proposed the latter, struggling to get a controversial school district consolidation act through the legislature which would have significantly redistributed state funds to many of the newer, larger districts. This made him extremely unpopular with conservative rural white voters across much of the state. (Even though, as it happened, the school districts most frequently affected by the plan finally adopted were majority African-American ones from the eastern Delta region, since for historical and economic reasons those were the districts whose tax base and demographic stability--some would occasionally have fewer than 70 students in the whole district--were so low as to defy efforts to make them self-sustaining.) A communitarian with populist and localist sympathies like me shouldn't like school consolidation, and I don't--in principle. There were teachers I knew in small school districts who were appalled at what their Republican governor was doing. But in the real world, to deny that the state itself is also a community, one which can claim the allegiance of its citizens and thus impress upon them their mutual obligations to every child in its borders, is foolish. Huckabee's plan wasn't perfect, he didn't get exactly what he wanted, and its application has been slow, regardless. Still, it was a realistic plan, it provided more money, played no favorites, allowed for exceptions for particularly isolated or well-performing districts, and took some of the pressure off poor schools. It's what governors are supposed to do.

3. Finally, Huckabee's actions regarding social policy as governor show him to be a lot closer to the kind of thoughtful "compassionate conservative" that John DiIulio thought George W. Bush would be, but wasn't. He seems to be fully aware--or, at least, more aware than most Republicans--that when it comes to people making moral and healthy (and thus beneficial in a civic sense) lifestyle choices, one's economic and environmental context matters. So he leaned on school districts to cut their reliance on junk food sales to raise money, and pushed through laws banning the sale of sugar-loaded sodas in the elementary schools and making regular BMI testing available. He's a proponent of "covenant marriage," recognizing that fighting poverty--not just the pure lack of jobs and/or terrible wages for the underclass (though he did do something about that latter point), but also the financial and emotional disarray which perpetuates many people's existence in that category--often means fighting the culture of easy divorce and the lack of enforcement of economic obligations which comes along with it. Does this make him "moralistic" or "judgmental"? Darn straight it does. But his moralistic interference, at least insofar as his actions in Arkansas indicate, flows from an aggressive, even egalitarian concern for social betterment, not a crusade to convert.

So, is he a real egalitarian? Probably not. But he, like Governor Bob Riley of Alabama, has at least attempted to introduce socially and morally egalitarian policies and arguments into the Republican playbook. If conservatives are truly interested in "conserving" families and civic health and decency, they'd give Huckabee another--and much longer--look.