The Republicans Find Their Obama

The Republicans Find Their Obama
By FRANK RICH
Published: December 9, 2007

COULD 2008 actually end up being a showdown between the author of "The Audacity of Hope" and the new Man from Hope, Ark.?

It sounds preposterous, but Washington’s shock over Mike Huckabee’s sudden rise in the polls — he "came from nowhere," Robert Novak huffed last week — makes you wonder. Having failed to anticipate so much else, including the Barack Obama polling surge of days earlier, the press pack has proved an unreliable guide to election 2008. What the Beltway calls unthinkable today keeps turning out to be front-page news tomorrow.

The prevailing Huckabee narrative maintains that he’s benefiting strictly from the loyalty of the religious right. Evangelical Christians are belatedly rallying around one of their own, a Baptist preacher, rather than settling for a Mormon who until recently supported abortion rights or a thrice-married New Yorker who still does. But that doesn’t explain Mr. Huckabee’s abrupt ascent to first place in some polling nationwide, where Christian conservatives account for a far smaller slice of the Republican pie than in Iowa. Indeed, this theory doesn’t entirely explain Mr.
Huckabee’s steep rise in Iowa, where Mitt Romney has outspent him 20 to 1, a financial advantage that Mr. Romney leveraged to crush him in the state’s straw poll just four months ago.

What really may be going on here is a mirror image of the phenomenon that has upended Hillary Clinton’s "inevitability" among Democrats. Like Senator Obama, Mr. Huckabee is the youngest in his party’s field. (At 52, he’s also younger than every Democratic contender except Mr. Obama, who is 46.) Both men have a history of speaking across party and racial lines. Both men possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.

Though their views on issues are often antithetical, Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Obama may be united in catching the wave of an emerging zeitgeist that is larger than either party’s ideology.
An exhausted and disillusioned public may be ready for a replay of the New Frontier pitch of 1960. That pitch won’t come from Mr. Romney, a glib salesman who seems a dead ringer for Don Draper, a Madison Avenue ad man of no known core convictions who works on the Nixon campaign in the TV series, "Mad Men." Mr. Romney’s effort to channel J.F.K. last week, in which he mentioned the word Mormon exactly once, was hardly a profile in courage.

The fact to remember about Mr. Huckabee’s polling spike is that it occurred just after the G.O.P. YouTube debate on CNN, where Mr. Romney and Rudy Giuliani vied to spray the most spittle at illegal immigrants. Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado, the fringe candidate whose most recent ads accuse the invading hordes of "pushing drugs, raping kids, destroying lives," accurately accused his opponents of trying to "out-Tancredo Tancredo."
Next to this mean-spiritedness, Mr. Huckabee’s tone leapt off the screen. Attacked by Mr. Romney for supporting an Arkansas program aiding the children of illegal immigrants, he replied, "In all due respect, we’re a better country than to punish children for what their parents did." It was a winning moment, politically as well as morally. And a no-brainer at that. Given that Mr. Tancredo polls at 4 percent among Iowan Republicans and zero nationally, it’s hard to see why Rudy-Romney thought it was smart to try to out-Tancredo Tancredo.

Mr. Huckabee’s humane stand wasn’t an election-year flip-flop. As governor, he decried a bill denying health services to illegal immigrants as "race-baiting" even though its legislator sponsor was a fellow Baptist preacher. Mr. Huckabee’s record on race in general (and in attracting African-American votes) is dramatically at odds with much of his party. Only last year Republicans brought us both "macaca" and a television ad portraying the black Democratic Senate candidate in Tennessee, Harold Ford Jr., as a potential despoiler of white women.

Unlike Rudy-Romney, Mr. Huckabee showed up for the PBS presidential debate held at the historically black Morgan State University in September. Afterward, he met Cornel West, an Obama supporter who deeply disagrees with Mr. Huckabee about abortion and much else. I asked Dr. West for his take last week. After effusively praising Mr. Huckabee as unique among the G.O.P. contenders, Dr. West said: "I told him, ‘You are for real.’ Black voters in Arkansas aren’t stupid. They know he’s sincere about fighting racism and poverty."

Though Mr. Romney’s hastily scheduled speech last week has been greeted by Washington as an essential antidote to the religious bigotry that’s supposedly doing him in, this entire issue may be a red herring. Mr. Romney’s Mormonism has hardly been a secret until now, and Mr.
Huckabee’s eagerness to milk his status as a certified "Christian leader" has been equally transparent from the campaign’s start. Was there really a rising tide of anti-Mormon sentiment in Iowa over the past month, or is Mr. Romney just playing victim?

The real reason for Mr. Huckabee’s ascendance may be that his message is simply more uplifting — and, in the ethical rather than theological sense, more Christian — than that of rivals whose main calling cards of fear, torture and nativism have become more strident with every debate. The fresh-faced politics of joy may be trumping the five-o’clock-shadow of Nixonian gloom and paranoia favored by the entire G.O.P. field with the sometime exception of John McCain.

On the same day of Mr. Romney’s speech, two new polls found Mr. Huckabee with a substantial lead over him and Mr. Giuliani in South Carolina, a stunning reversal from a month ago. Don’t be surprised if a desperate Mitt, who has "accidentally" referred to Mr. Obama as "Osama," does desperate things. South Carolina’s 2000 Republican primary was a jamboree of race-baiting that included a whispering campaign branding Senator McCain as the father of an illegitimate black child. The local political operative who worked for George W. Bush in that race and engineered the infamous Bush visit to Bob Jones University is now in Mr. Romney’s employ.

Mr. Huckabee may well be doomed in the long term. He has little money or organization. He’s so ignorant of foreign affairs that he hadn’t heard of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran a day after its release. His sometimes wacky economic populism riles his party’s most important constituency, Wall Street. And who knows how many other Arkansas scandals will be disinterred along with the paroled serial rapist who popped out last week? That Mr. Huckabee has gotten as far as he has shows just how in sync his benign style is with the cultural moment.

To understand why he can’t be completely dismissed, consider last month’s Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll. Peter Hart, the Democratic half of the bipartisan team that conducts the survey, told me in an interview last week that an overwhelming majority of voters of both parties not only want change but also regard "reducing the partisan fighting in government" as high on their agenda. To his surprise, Mr. Hart found that there’s even a majority (59 percent) seeking a president who would help America in "regaining respect around the world."

This climate, of course, favors the Democrats, especially if the Republicans choose a candidate who brands them as the party of rage and fear — and even more especially if their Tancredo-ism drives a large Hispanic turnout for the national Democratic ticket in Florida, Nevada,
Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. But a Democratic victory is not guaranteed. The huge spread in the Journal-NBC poll between an unnamed Democrat and Republican in the presidential race — 50 to 35 percent — shrank to a 1 percent lead when Mrs. Clinton was pitted against Mr. Giuliani.

Mr. Obama’s campaign, though hardly the long shot of Mr. Huckabee’s, could also fall short. But the Clinton camp’s panic over his rise in the Iowa polls shows that he’s on the right tactical track.

The more polarizing and negative a candidate turns in style, the more that candidate risks playing Nixon to Mr. Obama’s Kennedy. That Mrs. Clinton’s minions would attack Mr. Obama for unseemly ambition because he wrote a kindergarten report called "I Want to Become President" — and then snidely belittle the press for falling for "a joke" once this gambit backfired — is Rudy-Romneyesque in its vituperative folly.

Experience, like nastiness, may also prove a dead end in the year ahead. In 1960, the experience card was played by all comers against the young upstart senator from Massachusetts. In Iowa, L.B.J. went so far as to tell voters that they should vote for "a man with a little gray in his hair." But experience, Kennedy would memorably counter, "is like taillights on a boat which illuminate where we have been when we should be focusing on where we should be going."

The most experienced candidate in 2008 is not Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Giuliani or Mr. Romney in any case. It’s Mr. McCain, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson who have the longest résumés. Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Obama, meanwhile, are both betting that this is another crossroads, like 1960, when Americans are hungry for a leader who will refocus the nation on the path ahead.

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State GOP making overtures to African-Americans

State GOP making overtures to African-Americans
December 9, 2007
By Fran Eaton, SouthtownStar columnist

A few years ago, a Republican running for state representative in Harvey told me he was "pissed off to the height of pissivity" when the Illinois House Republican organization told him they couldn't financially help his campaign.

Such is a common complaint from so-called Tier 3 candidates running in strong Democratic districts or challenging solid incumbents. Republicans in Illinois learned long ago to pick their battles carefully. But J.R. Jordan really was irritated to discover thousands of those precious GOP funds being funneled to incumbent GOP House members facing no opposition that year.
I really couldn't blame J.R., nor the other black south suburbanites who voluntarily sought petition signatures for the 2002 GOP ballot, for being so angry.

Then in 2004, a black man from Maryland ran as a Republican for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. His last-minute entry was a colossal gamble, and no one who supported the scheme for former U.N. Ambassador Alan Keyes to substitute for the abruptly-toppled GOP nominee Jack Ryan had any idea what a disaster it would be. Indeed, Keyes was so awful that he propelled Barack Obama into the national spotlight, and today the former Chicago state senator is a major contender for the Democrats' 2008 presidential nomination.

In 2006, two black Republicans challenged longtime area incumbents, and both struggled to get out their messages of education reform and family values. They also couldn't get any support from the GOP they wanted so badly to represent in Springfield.

So, you might wonder, what's the big surprise? Republicans are white-collar corporate moguls who take advantage of the middle class and abuse the poor, right? Why would they invest in Cook County minority voting blocs, where Democrats rule and reign?

Michael Zak, author of "Back to Basics for the Republican Party," says Republicans haven't always been perceived as so antagonistic toward minorities.

As a matter of fact, Zak writes, 150 years ago, "Radical Republican" U.S. Senator Charles Sumner starkly defined the difference between the newly-founded Republican Party and the Democrats in this way:

"The Republicans inculcate, with whatever of ability they can, that the negro is a man, that his bondage is cruelly wrong and that the field of his oppression ought not to be enlarged. The Democrats deny his manhood, deny, or dwarf to insignificance, the wrong of his bondage as 'a sacred right of self-government.' "

Republicans led the fight against slavery.

Indeed, every Democrat in Congress voted against the 1863 D.C. Emancipation Act, which freed 3,100 blacks enslaved in the nation's capital.

Throughout the past few years, these hidden Republican roots have cultivated an array of minority conservative political leaders. Nationally-prominent blacks, such as former Maryland U.S. Senate candidate Michael Steele, as well as renowned football player Lynn Swann, former Oklahoma Congressman J.C. Watts and former Ohio Attorney General Ken Blackwell, encourage others to follow.

The Illinois GOP will be kicking off its new minority outreach council this weekend. Matteson resident Dr. Eric Wallace - on the February primary ballot as 2nd Congressional District delegate for Fred Thompson - has been asked to serve. Others representing Latino- and Asian- Americans will join minority voices in the Illinois GOP.

Like Illinois, Florida is a major Republican state in the upcoming Super Tuesday primaries. Florida GOP spokesperson Erin VanSickle said her state's Republican outreach to minorities is just beginning to flourish.

"We are finding that the Republican message of lower taxes, small business tax incentives, less government interference and more freedom appeals to minority communities," she said.
The Florida GOP recently held its first African-American party convention and was delighted with the enthusiastic response.

One Republican presidential candidate is particularly focused upon nabbing the black community's vote. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist preacher, credits black church members in gaining 48 percent of the black vote during his gubernatorial re-election.

While that figure is questioned by many, one political consultant says Huckabee approaches minority voters the right way:

"He breaks the traditional mold of the Republicans in trying to persuade African-Americans to vote for him, and that's what he did in Arkansas," Little Rock-based Stacy Williams told an Arkansas reporter. "African-Americans are pretty much like anybody else; if you advertise to them or target them and solicit their support, you're going to be successful."

While that's not a earth-shattering political revelation, Huckabee now appears to be leading in Iowa polls. His Illinois supporters slid him in as the last choice listed on the Feb. 5 Republican ballot.

The chances of getting the Chicago area's black community to vote for anyone but Barack Obama in the upcoming primary seems remote, and voters will need to ask for either a Republican or a Democratic ballot that day; that's something those coveted independent voters are hesitant to do.

But whether or not the new life among black conservatives will spring forth this election cycle, there's hope minorities will return to their alive-and-well Republican roots. It will be up to the Illinois GOP powers-that-be to nurture those tender roots to fruition once again.

One of the first people the state's GOP should contact in their minority outreach is that aggravated and disappointed Jordan in Harvey.

Last time I talked to J.R., he'd gone back to promoting a Democrat.

Fran Eaton is a south suburban resident, a conservative activist in state and national politics and an online journalist. She can be reached at featon@illinoisreview.com

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