Link Banana

Speaking of the Obama speech… Though I’ve never been as down on Mike Huckabee as most, I was never a fan. And then he says something like this:

As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!” I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

(via Donklephant, through Daily Kos)

Ross Douthat engages in what I must admit is one of my favorite acts: attacking out of touch political elites. Although he may not be completely correct, this does resonate:

The failure of conservative voters to fall in line behind Mr. Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, among others, reflects a deeper problem for the movement’s leadership. With their inflexibility, grudge-holding and eagerness to evict heretics rather than seek converts, too many of conservatism’s leaders sound like the custodians of a dwindling religious denomination or a politically correct English department at a fading liberal-arts college.

Or like yesterday’s Democratic Party. The tribunes of the American right have fallen into the same bad habits that doomed their liberal rivals to years of political failure.

Christopher Hitchens has an incisive essay about Mike Huckabee’s “straightfoward racist appeal” about the Confederate flag in South Carolina and uses it to make some interesting comments about race in America. He begins:

In this country, it seems that you can always get an argument going about “race” as long as it is guaranteed to be phony, but never when it is real. Almost every day brings news of full-dress media-oriented spats about Don Imus, Bob Grant, or the recent nonstory about how some golf show had managed to mention Tiger Woods and the word lynch in the same news cycle. The preceding week had involved some trivial but intense parsing of an exchange between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But just let the real thing occur, with a full-blooded and full-throated bellow of old-fashioned authentic racism, and you can see the entire press refusing to cover it for fear of having to confront the real and unvarnished thing (and perhaps for reasons having to do with other “sensitivities” as well).

David Brooks’s latest column is well worth reading.

But then a great tightening occurred. Conservative institutions and interest groups proliferated in Washington. The definition of who was a true conservative narrowed. It became necessary to pass certain purity tests — on immigration, abortion, taxes and Terri Schiavo.

An oppositional mentality set in: if the liberals worried about global warming, it was necessary to regard it as a hoax. If The New York Times editorial page worried about waterboarding, then the code of conservative correctness required one to think it O.K.

Apostates and deviationists were expelled or found wanting, and the boundaries of acceptable thought narrowed. Moderate Republicans were expelled for squishiness. Millions of coastal suburbanites left the party in disgust.

At Slate, economist Steven Landsburg argue that Mike Huckabee’s FairTax plan is actually good. The highlights of the plan, for those who don’t know, are an end to the IRS and income taxes, and an introduction of a 30% sales tax. The piece contains a fair bit of shirking-conventional-wisdom-because-I-can, but maybe the revisionism is necessary for a plan that has been so universally criticized (even by me).

Bottom line: Unlimited IRAs, coupled with somewhat higher tax rates, have advantages and disadvantages, but the advantages are bigger. And whatever can be said about unlimited IRAs coupled with somewhat higher tax rates can equally be said of a national sales tax.

David Brooks’s prescient remarks on Huckabee’s Iowa victory:

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

Will Huckabee move on and lead this new conservatism? Highly doubtful. The past few weeks have exposed his serious flaws as a presidential candidate. His foreign policy knowledge is minimal. His lapses into amateurishness simply won’t fly in a national campaign.

He’s also got some great words about Obama’s victory in Iowa. I feel like I’ve recently become a rabid Brooks fanboy. I’m strangely comfortable with that reality.

Three big takeaways:

• Among Democrats: Obama took first, followed by Edwards, then Clinton
• Among Republicans: Huckabee, followed by Romney, then Thompson and McCain
• Dem. Senators Biden and Dodd have both dropped out of the race

Anyone who’s following along (probably a small number, I would concede) recognizes that it’s crunch time in the campaign to be a major party’s nominee for president. Iowa’s caucus and New Hampshire’s primary are both happening within this week. Recently:

• Huckabee’s raised a few eyebrows with his odd handling of a negative ad his campaign had made about Romney (he stopped it from airing, but showed it to the press)
• Dennis Kucinich (every liberal’s favorite Dem) told his supporters to go Obama in the IA caucus
• McCain’s resurgence in NH is making Romney battle against irrelevance just as Huckabee has neutered him in Iowa

All those stories and more are covered (and well) at Time’s “The Page by Mark Halperin.”