Posted on 12/04/2007 8:13:17 AM PST by Petronski
With less than a month to go before the Iowa caucuses, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that Rudy Giuliani has fallen back in the pack in the race for the Republican Presidential Nomination. Giuliani’s support has fallen to 18% and four other candidates are within six percentage points of the lead. Mike Huckabee is enjoying an amazing surge and now shares the top spot with Giuliani at 18%. Close behind are John McCain at 14%, Fred Thompson at 13%, and Mitt Romney at 12%. Ron Paul attracts 7% of Likely Republican Primary voters nationwide and no other Republican candidate reaches 2% (see recent daily numbers).
Correctamundo!
For different reasons, the MSM and the GOP power brokers do not want a full fledged conservative like Fred to get the nomination. They can't have that. The media likes the current bloodbath in the GOP and the Republican elites would rather have a moderate or even a liberal be the nomineee.
Fred`s the genuine conservative in the race and the right candidate for all the right reasons.
And, given some of his positions on taxes and some of the tax cuts and reform he pushed through in Arkansas, it's ridiculous to call him a socialist.
His position on illegals and global warming are his successful efforts to get rapist Wayne DuMond released from prison are indefensible are disturbing.
In my opinion (and I have been saying this since at least September) Fred MUST dominate in SC in order to move on. I do not see even a slight win, or worse yet a second place win for him being enough.
I disagree with many here that a Huck insurgence is good for Fred by taking out Mitt. I think their main constituency is the same. People here were hyping Fred to be the laid back Southern Christian conservative from the time he started to run. He has turned out to be the laid back conservative, but I think that the Southern Christian moniker fits Huckabee more.
I think the only way Huck hurts Rudy is if his "surge" helps him win Florida by a large margin (that is the State that I think will be the turning point in the race - even more than SC.) Rudy has such huge margins in the huge delegate big States on Super Tuesday that he can afford a ding (but not a lot more than that). But with Fred, his path to the Presidency is dependent on SC, and if Huck becomes competitive there all bets are off. As for Mitt, I think his money, and his other leads in early States at least lets him hang on for a bit.
So back to the original question (sorry for rambling) I think Iowa is important in fact vital to Huckabee in taking over Fred.
The race is now officially completely, mind-blowingly wide freakin’ open. The space between 1st and 5th is not that much, it could move in a week to be a completely different order.
Huckster and Rudy alas are both the wrong candidate, bipolar opposites in that neither unifies the party on a fiscal *and* social conservative basis.
Consider the many ways the Huckster fails the conservative test:
http://taxhikemike.org
“[Huckabee] has zero intellectual underpinnings in the conservative movement,” says Blant Hurt, a former part owner of, and columnist for, Arkansas Business magazine. “He’s hostile to free trade, hiked sales and grocery taxes, backed sales taxes on Internet purchases, and presided over state spending going up more than twice the inflation rate.”
Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney would better fit the whole GOP base, and primary voters are going to have to sort it out before we end up with what is in my mind a worst-of-all-worlds scenario .... Rudy/Huckabee.
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Anybody have a history showing which candidates, if any, went from 30% to 14% in polling and then came back to win?
***I believe Clinton1 did it for the democrats, calling himself the comeback kid after he fought off the allegation that Gennifer Flowers had a long-going affair with him as guvner. Interesting, huh? The media seemed to go out of their way to give him a pass, even though Flowers had a RECORDED conversation of him telling her to lie under oath about it. Gosh, look at the trouble we as a country could have avoided.
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Why the smart money is on Duncan Hunter
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1926032/posts
Posted on 11/15/2007 3:43:17 AM PST by Kevmo
“Some would say that Huckabee, being (arguably) the most Christian and (arguably) most socially conservative he’s the best choice. I disagree.”
“I believe this is the most blessed nation in the world, for a reason. If we let it become a socialist hellhole, it will no longer be that. If God has indeed blessed this nation, He wants us to protect it, right?”
You are right. Liberalism is bad enough, but it is obnoxious and near-blasphemy to wrap up your political program with a “God wants this” mantle. Huckabee has done that. Very wrong.
Also - It is quite odious of Huckabee to even bring up the Christian “God is behind our rise in the polls” stuff.
Huckabee has some good attributes, but his policies and positions and record is anything but conservative. It should be rejected.
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Unfortunately, what Huckabee offers by way of solutions is a mixture of populism and big-government liberalism; the common theme of his policies is that they are half-baked. If an ill-considered slogan can be used to justify a policy, he is for it. He is a protectionist, because we need to have “fair trade.” He wants to put illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship, because we need them “to do jobs that are going unfilled because nobody here wants to do them.” Energy subsidies and farm subsidies must be increased, because they’re a matter of “national security.”
When he was governor of Arkansas, these instincts led Huckabee to move farther and farther in a statist direction. (Education policy offers a nice example of what happens when his statism and his social conservatism conflict: He opposes meaningful school choice.) The Cato Institute gave him a D on fiscal policy, noting that spending had increased at three times the rate of inflation during his governorship. Not surprisingly, Huckabee is the one Republican candidate who flinched when President Bush vetoed the Democrats’ proposed expansion of S-CHIP. He says he is against socialized medicine, but don’t look for him to resist the drift toward it.”
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmI2ZWZmYTEyMTZhMGI3NTM2ZDRhZTNiMzk2YzU5ZDQ=
“The Huckabee lovefest will not last....he has more baggage than a 747 leaving from Miami back to South America after a shopping junket”
LOL. Time to PING the baggage handlers.
Speaking of junket, maybe someone can recount the Huck wedding registry story.
“His statement on faux News about closing Gitmo as soon as he is President killed him with voters that KNOW our enemy... huckster wants to help them like he does illegals.”
Why does Huck want to close GITMO?
He wants the terrorists in the US?!?
The registries are on the Internet at Target and Dillard’s Web sites under “weddings.” It’s the “Janet Huckabee and Michael Huckabee’s Club Wedd Registry” at Target and “Welcome to the wedding registry of: Janet Huckabee and Michael Huckabee” at Dillard’s.
The governor accused news media of being “tools” for Arkansas Times Editor Max Brantley, who runs a blog that discussed the registries and who has been a longtime critic of Huckabee.
Huckabee said the registries weren’t any different from gift lists for a wedding shower or a baby shower.
A half million dollar home? Not bad on the salary of a small state governor.
G H W Bush didn’t win in Iowa in 1988, either, to an evangelical favorite - Pat Robertson. I guess that ended his hopes. Not.
Or maybe plan B is:
- People realize Huck is a lousy candidate who’s really a tax-and-spend non-conservative populist and find someone better. Like, Romney or .... Thompson.
http://taxhikemike.org/
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmI2ZWZmYTEyMTZhMGI3NTM2ZDRhZTNiMzk2YzU5ZDQ=
Huck is not a fiscal conservative, he is a tax-and-spend populist.
If Huck wants to close GITMO he's a wimp on the war-on-terror.
Sure, I'll vote for Huck over Hillary, but Huck is lining up to be perhaps our worst possible nominee, maybe worse than Rudy even.
I like your explanations but I still can’t get past How you can raise taxes more than Bill Clinton!
Yes, but how much money was spent?
Here ya go.
(Arkansas) Legislators take dim view of Huckabee gift registry
“Yea forget the fact he cut taxes 90+ times, we have a sound bite...”
Huck is a liar and a fraud for saying that.
http://taxhikemike.org/
Former Governor Mike Huckabee loves to claim to have cut taxes an astounding 94 times. One such quote: “I was the first governor in the history of my state to ever lower taxes, the first one in 160 years. We lowered a total of 94 different taxes and fees.”
The Arkansas Times, which has been covering Huckabee since before he was elected governor over 10 years ago, nicely answers that misleading assertion.
That kind of claim is easily proven false. To name a few tax cuts before him: Clinton in 1991 eliminated income taxes on tens of thousands of low-income families; Dale Bumpers did the same in 1973. Clinton cut capital-gains taxes. Gov. Ben T. Laney eliminated all state ad-valorem taxes, reduced inheritance taxes and gave a homestead exemption for local property taxes.
By claiming to have cut taxes 94 times, Huckabee fixed a standard for what is a tax cut: every little exemption, credit, deduction or tax break of any kind. By that standard every governor the past 60 years cut taxes numerous times. No session of the legislature passes without a dozen or more such cuts.
But tax increases have far outweighed tax cuts in magnitude, and they did under Huckabee, too.
The major tax cut that he claimed, the omnibus income tax cuts for working families in 1997, was the program of Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, who resigned before the legislative session where it was enacted. The legislature rejected Huckabee’s plan but he signed the bill patterned on Tucker plan and thus can claim some credit for it.
The measure of upward mobility potential for a candidate is the RATIO of his favorable to unfavorable ratings.
From the Gallup Poll cited above, in the order of each candidate’s potential for upward mobility as more Americans are exposed to him:
Huckabee.....33-16....2.1 ratio positive-to-negative
McCain........55-30....1.8
Thompson.....39-26....1.5
Giuliani.........52-37....1.4
Romney........36-30....1.2
By this measure, Huckabee has the highest potential to rise higher in the polls as his name I.D. and public exposure increase, while Romney has the lowest such potential.
In practical terms, when people hear and see Huckabee’s comments and views and demeanor, by a 2-to-1 margin, they like him. And that 2-to-1 ratio can be expected to be the reaction of voters who are not yet familiar with him. This is especially true given that Huckabee has the largest percentage of the electorate who still have never heard of or been exposed to him. In other words, as more voters are exposed to him, he has the greatest potential to climb even higher, followed by McCain.
The others, especially Romney and Rudy, have the opposite problem. Their high name I.D. based on celebrity and millions of dollars in T.V. ads means the electorate knows them and now doesn’t like them. That too can reasonably be expected to be the reaction of the smaller number of voters who haven’t been exposed to them. And thus, lower upward mobility potential.
“I disagree with many here that a Huck insurgence is good for Fred by taking out Mitt. “
Serious case of wishful thinking among Fred Heads is all. In truth, Huckabee has stolen the campaign oxygen that Fred needed.
Huck helps Rudy. Period.
You’re probably right ;-)...
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