Ron Paul isn't that scary

It's that over-do-gooder Mike Huckabee who should be making conservatives nervous.

As the hopeless but energetic presidential campaign of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) builds momentum in name recognition, fundraising and cross-ideology appeal, media conservatives are beginning to attack Paul in earnest. Republican consultant David Hill condemns the candidate's "increasingly leftish" positions. Syndicated columnist Mona Charen calls Paul "too cozy with kooks and conspiracy theorists." Film critic and talk radio host Michael Medved looks over Paul's supporters and finds "an imposing collection of neo-Nazis, white Supremacists, Holocaust deniers, 9/11 'truthers' and other paranoid and discredited conspiracists."

For the most part, these allegations strike me as overblown and unfair. But, for argument's sake, let's say they're not. Let's even say that Paul has the passionate support of the Legion of Doom, that his campaign lunchroom looks like the "Star Wars" cantina, and that many of his top advisors actually have hooves.

Well, I would still find him less scary than Mike Huckabee.

While many are marveling at Paul's striking success at breaking out of the tinfoil-hat ghetto, Huckabee's story is even more remarkable. The former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister is polling in second place in Iowa and could conceivably win there. He's still a long shot to take the nomination and a pipe dream to take the presidency, but Huckabee matters in a way that Paul still doesn't. One small indicator of Huckabee's relevance: His opponents in the presidential race are attacking him while the field is ignoring Paul like an eccentric who sits too close to you on the bus.

So what's so scary about Huckabee? Personally, nothing. By all accounts, he's a charming, decent, friendly, pious man.

What's troubling about The Man From Hope 2.0 is what he represents. Huckabee represents compassionate conservatism on steroids. A devout social conservative on issues such as abortion, school prayer, homosexuality and evolution, Huckabee is a populist on economics, a fad-follower on the environment and an all-around do-gooder who believes that the biblical obligation to do "good works" extends to using government -- and your tax dollars -- to bring us closer to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

For example, Huckabee has indicated he would support a nationwide federal ban on public smoking. Why? Because he's on a health kick, thinks smoking is bad and believes the government should do the right thing.

And therein lies the chief difference between Paul and Huckabee. One is a culturally conservative libertarian. The other is a right-wing progressive.

Whatever the faults of the man and his friends may or may not be, Paul's dogma generally renders them irrelevant. He is a true ideologue in that his personal preferences are secondary to his philosophical principles. When asked what his position is, he generally responds that his position can be deduced from the text of the Constitution. Of course, that's not as dispositive as he thinks it is. But you get the point.

As for Huckabee -- as with most politicians, alas -- his personal preferences matter enormously because ultimately they're the only thing that can be relied on to constrain him.

In this respect, Huckabee's philosophy is conventionally liberal, or progressive. What he wants to do with government certainly differs in important respects from what Hillary Clinton would do, but the limits he would place on governmental do-goodery are primarily tactical or practical, not philosophical or constitutional. This isn't to say he -- or Hillary -- is a would-be tyrant, but simply to note that the progressive notion of the state as a loving, caring parent is becoming a bipartisan affair.

Indeed, Huckabee represents the latest attempt to make conservatism more popular by jettisoning the unpopular bits. Contrary to the conventional belief that Republicans need to drop their opposition to abortion, gay marriage and the like in order to be popular, Huckabee understands that the unpopular stuff is the economic libertarianism: free trade and smaller government. That's why we're seeing a rise in economic populism on the right coupled with a culturally conservative populism. Huckabee is the bastard child of Lou Dobbs and Pat Robertson.

Historically, the conservative movement benefited from the tension between libertarianism and cultural traditionalism. This tension -- and the effort to reconcile it under the name "fusionism" -- has been mischaracterized as a battle between right-wing factions when it is a conflict that runs through the heart of individual conservatives. We all have little Mike Huckabees and Ron Pauls sitting on our shoulders. Neither is always right, but both should be listened to.

I would not vote for Paul mostly because I think his foreign policy would be disastrous (and because he'd lose in a rout not seen since Bambi versus Godzilla). But there's something weird going on when Paul, the small-government constitutionalist, is considered the extremist in the Republican Party while Huckabee, the statist, is the lovable underdog. It's even weirder because it's probably true: Huckabee is much closer to the mainstream. And that's what scares me about Huckabee and the mainstream alike.

Barnes: Herd Journalism, Iraq Edition

I think it was that great Democratic wit Gene McCarthy who described journalists and reporters as blackbirds on a telephone wire. When one flies to the telephone wire across the street, they all do. There's also a non-bird name for this phenomenon. It's called herd journalism. And just this week we've seen it pop up in stories about the pacification of Baghdad, crushing of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and almost complete end of the Sunni-Shia civil war. Taken together, these stories amount to a consensus that the surge of additional American troops and the counterinsurgency strategy adopted by General David Petraeus has worked - and worked brilliantly.

The herd? It consists, so far, of the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, New York Times, and Newsweek - and no doubt others that I have yet to come upon. And the herd is likely to grow larger because the evidence of success in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq is so palpable that reporters, regardless of their view of the war, were bound to acknowledge it at some point. Yes, they've taken a while to do so. For several months, the American press corps in Iraq merely - and sometimes grudgingly - reported the claims of American military officials that the number of American combat deaths, Iraqi deaths, suicide bombings, roadside attacks, and other forms of violence were declining precipitously. Now they're reporting progress that they've seen with their own eyes. This is a big step for a media contingent that appeared to be as locked into the idea that the war is lost as Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is.

No more. The Los Angeles Times story on Monday, written by Doug Smith and Saif Rashid, focused on a Baghdad neighborhood where Sunnis and Shiites are working together to defeat both al Qaeda and Shia militias. This grass-roots reconciliation "has spread rapidly into the mixed Iraqi heartland," they write. The Post entry was an editorial on Sunday that even praised President Bush for changing his strategy in Iraq against the advice of Congress and the foreign policy elite. The Post, of course, has been particularly derelict in reporting progress in Iraq. One of its chief foreign affairs reporters, Robin Wright, told Howard Kurtz on CNN recently that she was waiting for a trend to appear. Well, it has.

The New York Times gave lavish page one coverage today to a story of a family that has moved back into its home in a once violence-wracked neighborhood of Baghdad. "The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real," write Damien Cave and Alissa J. Rubin. Notice that they write this on their own authority rather than rely on an American official to say it. And in Newsweek, veteran correspondent Rod Nordland writes that in the past, when he returned to Baghdad, he had always found one "constant": things had gotten worse. "For the first time, however, returning to Baghdad after an absence of four months, I can actually say that things do seem to have gotten better, and in ways that may even be durable," he writes.

Newsweek, not surprisingly, turned quickly to the next problem in iraq. That's the feeble central government, which has yet to take legislative measures aimed at reconciliation of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. "[The] biggest concern - other than a Qaeda resurgence - is that the Iraqi government has been slow to take advantage of the relative peace to restore services and speed reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis," Nordland writes. Reconciliation, however, is already speeding ahead at the local and provincial level. The national government isn't irrelevant in this regard. But while American politicians and press may be waiting for it to act, the people of Iraq, with help from American troops, are moving ahead. That's the real story.

Cheering for Ron Paul

What can you get for a trillion bucks? Or make that $1.6 trillion, if you take the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as tallied by the majority staff of Congress's Joint Economic Committee (JEC). Or is it the $3.5-trillion figure cited by Ron Paul, whose concern about the true cost of this war for ordinary Americans shames the leading Democrats, who prattle on about needed domestic programs that will never find funding because of future war-related government debt?

Given that the overall defense budget is now double what it was when President Bush's father presided over the end of the cold war--even though we don't have a militarily sophisticated enemy in sight--you have to wonder how this president has managed to exceed cold war spending levels. What has he gotten for the trillions wasted? Nothing, when it comes to capturing Osama bin Laden, bringing democracy to Iraq or preventing oil prices from tripling and enriching the ayatollahs of Iran while messing up the American economy.

That money could have paid for a lot of things we could have used here at home. As Rep. Paul points out, for what the Iraq war costs, we could present each family of four a check for $46,000--which exceeds the $43,000 median household income in his Texas district. He asks: "What about the impact of those costs on education, the very thing that so often helps to increase earnings? Forty-six thousand dollars would cover 90 percent of the tuition costs to attend a four-year public university in Texas for both children in that family of four. But, instead of sending kids to college, too often we're sending them to Iraq, where the best news in a long time is they [the insurgents] aren't killing our men and women as fast as they were last month."

How damning that it takes a libertarian Republican to remind the leading Democratic candidates of the opportunity costs of a war that most Democrats in Congress voted for. But they don't need to take Paul's word for it; last week, the majority staff of the Joint Economic Committee in Congress came up with similarly startling estimates of the long-term costs of this war.

The White House has quibbled over the methods employed by the JEC to calculate the real costs of our two foreign wars, because the Democrats in the majority dared to include in their calculations the long-term care of wounded soldiers and the interest to be paid on the debt financing the war. Of course, you need to account for the additional debt run up by an administration that, instead of raising taxes to pay for the war, cut them by relying on the Chinese Communists and other foreigners who hold so much of our debt. As concluded by the JEC report, compiled by the committee's professional staff, "almost 10 percent of total federal government interest payments in 2008 will consist of payments on the Iraq debt accumulated so far."

However, even if you take the hard figure of the $804 billion the administration demanded for the past five years, and ignore all the long-run costs like debt service, we're still not talking chump change here. For example, Bush has asked for an additional $196 billion in supplementary aid for his wars, which is $60 billion more than the total spent by the US government last year on all of America's infrastructure repairs, the National Institutes of Health, college tuition assistance and the SCHIP program to provide health insurance to kids who don't have any.

On this matter of covering the uninsured, it should be pointed out to those who say we (alone among industrialized nations) can't afford it that we could have covered all 47 million uninsured Americans over the past six years for what the Iraq war cost us. How come that choice--war in Iraq or full medical coverage for all Americans--was never presented to the American people by the Democrats and Republicans who voted for this war and continue to finance it?

Those now celebrating the supposed success of the surge might note that, as the JEC report points out, "[m]aintaining post-surge troop levels in Iraq over the next ten years would result in costs of $4.5 trillion." Until the leading Democratic candidate faces up to the irreparable harm that will be done to needed social programs over the next decades by the red-ink spending she supported, I will be cheering for the libertarian Republican. At least he won't throw more money down some foreign rat hole.