OPINION
Populist Huck may turn off bucks
E
veryone but Mike Huckabee seems to have forgotten that he finished second in the 2008 Republican presidential sweepstakes, ahead of Mitt Romney, and most people, notably excepting Huckabee himself, are now writing him off as an anachronism. So Huckabee has undertaken what seems to be a one-man crusade to insert himself into the fevered speculation about the 2016 presidential race. The assumption has been and still is that Huckabee will not run because he would have to give up his lucrative media career and might not get it back if he floundered badly in the race. But let’s assume that Huckabee genuinely thinks that 2016 offers him a better chance than did either 2008 or 2012, when he deferred to Romney and a gang of misfits who flamed out even quicker than the field in 2008. It is actually pleasant to imagine that Huckabee is right that Republicans by 2016 will be eager to choose a person like him who, much of the time, shuns the values that breed success nowadays in Repub-
lican precincts: spite for the poor, immigrants, blacks and the works of government, and uncompromising ERNEST war against DemoDUMAS crats and liberals. Huckabee’s political coterie is altogether the evangelical movement, a great force for the Republican Party since President Reagan’s latter days and a movement the Baptist preacher exploited better than Pat Robertson or any of the others. Invoking the Bible and God’s blessings, he brought out swarms of fundamentalists in New Hampshire and Southern and Midwestern primaries. When his poll numbers surged in the early winter of the election season he said God did it, the same as He had “helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000.” Huckabee’s smarmy piety turned off secular and libertarian Republicans. When he ran TV ads in Iowa that showed a glowing cross behind him, Rep. Ron Paul, one of
The activist pope
S
omewhere in the midst of an ava- monarchial traplanche of sickening revelations about pings, Francis has child sex abuse by Catholic clergy it made a shift to occurred to me that if the Vatican sought an return even the most appropriate penance for its sins, it would formalized ritual to go mute on issues of sexual morality for its roots in the gosGENE about 100 years. pel. Rather than LYONS Needless to say, that’s not about to hap- re-enacting Jesus’ pen. washing of his apostles’ feet on Holy ThursInstead, habemus papam. (We have day with carefully groomed young priests a pope.) Catholics have witnessed the — as was long the custom — the new Pope unprecedented resignation of Pope Bene- appeared at an Italian prison. dict, widely seen to have failed utterly to There, Carroll writes, “he washed, dried, cope with the church’s grave crisis — per- and kissed the feet of twelve young inmates, haps even in his own estimation — and the some of them bearing tattoos. Two were remarkable accession of Pope Francis. Muslim. More pointedly, in violation of During the months since his selection, Church tradition, two of the apostolic standthe 76-year-old Argentine has stirred an out- ins were women. When one of the inmates size response throughout the world — galva- asked the Pope why he had come to them, nizing not only the world’s 1.2 billion Roman he said, ‘Things from the heart don’t have Catholics, but members of other faiths and an explanation.’ ” even the irreligious with a shrewd blend of Elsewhere, the new pope has stressed public theater and spiritual humility. a less legalistic, rule-bound encounter Writing in the New Yorker, James with the faith, seeking always to forgive Carroll reports that “even ‘kick the Pope’ rather than to judge. In a remarkable interOrangemen in Northern Ireland love Pope view with the Jesuit magazine America Francis. The press is obsessed with him. he stressed that “we must always consider Time recently named him Person of the the person.” “This is … the great benefit of confession Year.” as a sacrament, evaluating case by case and Who else, indeed? discerning what is the best thing to do for a Renouncing many of the papacy’s
his foes, recalled the (fictitious) warning of Sinclair Lewis that “when fascism comes to this country, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross.” Huckabee corralled 10 delegates to each one for Paul, whose son Rand may be a big contender in 2016. But evangelicals in 2016 will get Huckabee no further than they got him in 2008, so if he runs where will he sow? Republicans, he said, have to quit denigrating poor people and instead make war on the real “axis of evil,” Washington and Wall Street. Republicans haven’t had a real populist candidate since Teddy Roosevelt and Robert M. “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, who is enshrined with Henry Clay as one of the two greatest senators in U.S. history. LaFollette eventually left the Republican Party when he realized that the antislavery party had become the party of the railroads, Wall Street and big industry. It’s hard to imagine “Fighting Mike” in LaFollette mode, but there he was last week outdoing Barack Obama and telling the preachers about the vast and growing gulf between rich and the middle class and poor and how the middle class had lost ground while the 1 percent had prospered. He took on the Club for Growth, Freedom Works and Heritage Action, the bigmoney PACs that fight federal taxes, spending and Obamacare and coincidentally, in
the case of the Club for Growth and Freedom Works, Mike Huckabee. The Club for Growth blunted Huckabee’s momentum in 2008 with ads attacking him as a big-government liberal who raised taxes, spending and debt in Arkansas. Huckabee still complains about the group’s “lies” about him, but the rich bullies actually were factual. Huckabee raised more taxes than any governor in Arkansas history, more than doubled the state debt, raised the government job roster by 22 percent, vastly expanded government health care and in his last months in office got a waiver from the Bush administration for an Obamacare-style pilot program to extend Medicaid to working childless adults, the riff-raff that Republicans everywhere but in Arkansas have tried to block from the Medicaid rolls. He promised in 2000 to extend health insurance to every Arkansan before he left office, but a school crisis intervened and he never got around to it. But there is a disconnect in Huckabee’s strategy. To get his 2016 campaign rolling he would like to tap into the Republican superPACs like those favored by billionaire gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson, who single-handedly kept Newt Gingrich in the presidential race last year. Governor, those bucks don’t go to populists.
person who seeks God and grace,” Francis elaborated. “The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord’s mercy motivates us to do better. I also consider the situation of a woman with a failed marriage in her past and who also had an abortion. Then this woman remarries, and she is now happy and has five children. That abortion in her past weighs heavily on her conscience and she sincerely regrets it. She would like to move forward in her Christian life. What is the confessor to do?” It’s a rhetorical question with no onesize-fits-all answer. But the torture chamber metaphor has particular resonance coming from an Argentine, who presided as bishop of Buenos Aires during that country’s “Dirty War,” when dissidents against the military government were kidnapped, tortured and flung out of airplanes into the Atlantic Ocean. Harping on abstract doctrine, Francis stresses, distorts the essence of belief. “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods … . The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.” At the New York Times, this came out “Pope Says Church Is ‘Obsessed’ With Gays, Abortion and Birth Control.” Actually, writes Mark Shea in the National Catholic Register, he said no such thing. He stressed that not all rules are of equal importance,
and that none should supersede compassion and forgiveness. Anybody expecting immediate transformation of Catholic teaching about what Shea calls “the Pelvic Issues” is apt to be disappointed. On the other hand, an American cardinal who made a point in a recent TV interview of stressing that, contrary to the new pope, “we can never talk enough” about abortion and “the integrity of marriage as between one man and one woman” was quickly reassigned. The Catholic Church has never been a democracy. It’s also true, Carroll reports, that a Papal synod will convene in 2014 to ponder “The Pastoral Challenges to the Family in the Context of Evangelization.” The Vatican has asked Catholic dioceses to distribute “a questionnaire that asks about divorce, birth control, unmarried people living together and gay marriage.” So why ask if no changes are possible? Particularly when many Catholics feel the church has basically been selling annulments to the likes of Newt Gingrich and Teddy Kennedy, while treating divorce as a terrible sin. Hardly anybody thinks birth control wicked. The church, of course, never claimed to be God. As a human institution, it’s prone to all the sin, folly and corruption we’re all capable of. In his own way, Pope Francis appears to be seeking forgiveness. www.arktimes.com
DECEMBER 19, 2013
7