Today's Video on WSJ.com: OpinionJournal.com's James Taranto says he's troubled by Mike Huckabee's foreign-policy inexperience and sectarian religious appeal.
In today's Political Diary:
- Note to Readers
- The Tancredo Factor
- Huckabee's Crossover Appeal
- Bush on a Roll
- White House Targets Pork
- Blame It on Bill (Quote of the Day I)
- Is Rudy the New Romney? (Quote of the Day II)
- Ron Paul and the Perils of Success
- Obama's New Favorite Republican
Mr. Tancredo was tempted to join Iowa Rep. Steve King, his close friend and ally on immigration matters, in endorsing Fred Thompson. Indeed, the American Spectator reports that several months ago "Tancredo was prepared to endorse Thompson if he came out in support of Tancredo's specific anti-illegal-immigration policy proposals. But Thompson was not yet in the presidential race, and Tancredo instead decided to push forward with his own campaign."
Two factors intervened yesterday to prevent the former Tennessee Senator from getting the nod. First, Mr. Thompson is still struggling to ignite his candidacy in Iowa, is low on funds and has little chance of winning the GOP caucuses. Mr. Romney, on the other hand, is pouring millions of campaign dollars into the state and could still regain his lead over Mr. Huckabee. Secondly, senior Tancredo adviser Bay Buchanan, the sister of Pat Buchanan, launched a full-court press for a Romney endorsement.
Mr. Romney made noises as recently as last year that he favored the kind of comprehensive immigration reform that Mr. Tancredo loathes. But Ms. Buchanan, who is a convert to Mr. Romney's Mormon faith, argued that the former Massachusetts governor's current views made him the most viable vehicle for the Tancredo agenda on immigration. "We're all scratching our heads a little on this one," an adviser to Mr. Tancredo told the Spectator. "It isn't the [endorsement choice] we would have had him make, but Bay is extremely influential with him and clearly her advice carried more sway than our opinion did."
It seems Mr. Strickland, who typically racked up a 95% rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action during his 16 years in Congress, has discovered a kindred spirit in Mr. Huckabee. He told the Cincinnati Enquirer last Sunday that Mr. Huckabee is a "combination of conservative views in some ways, but very, almost liberal views in other ways." Mr. Strickland concluded: "Of all the Republican candidates, Mr. Huckabee would be my personal choice."
While Mr. Strickland didn't specifically mention education as an area where he shares agreement with Mr. Huckabee's "almost liberal views," it's notable that the former Arkansas governor was endorsed for the GOP nomination this month by the New Hampshire affiliate of the National Education Association. Mr. Huckabee has sent mixed signals on support for school choice, but the president of the NEA in New Hampshire cited opposition to school vouchers that Mr. Huckabee apparently expressed in his meeting with the union as a key reason for the endorsement.
As for Mr. Strickland, he has become one of the most vociferous opponents of school choice anywhere in the country. Earlier this year, he attempted to end Ohio's statewide school choice experiment with a line-item veto, called for a moratorium on new charter schools, and said he would like to ban for-profit companies from operating schools in Ohio. It's frequently said politics makes strange bedfellows, but in the case of Ohio's Democratic governor lavishing praise on Republican Mike Huckabee, it appears to be a case of two peas in a pod.
Just as Newt Gingrich was the best thing that ever happened to Bill Clinton, so Nancy Pelosi has become a great political asset to George W. Bush. Mr. Bush is on a roll legislatively and even his poll numbers are inching up while Congress's have sunk into the teens. There's nothing like having a foil in Congress to rehabilitate a president. Just ask Harry Truman.
This time last year it would have been inconceivable that Mr. Bush would have a successful 2007, or that Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congress would have fewer than one-in-four voters approving their performance. I've made a list of Mr. Bush's policy victories over the Democrats:
1) S-CHIP -- Mr. Bush vetoed the Democrats' bill expanding middle-class health care subsidies and Democrats were unable to override that veto.
2) Alternative Minimum Tax -- Democrats passed AMT reform without the offsetting tax hikes they had threatened.
3) Energy bill -- What was a monster at the beginning of the year is now just a fairly harmless CAFE standards bill. Environmentalists are fuming.
4) Hate Crimes Legislation -- Mr. Bush blocked it. The Congressional Black Caucus is furious.
5) War funding -- Mr. Bush prevailed without any pull-out date. At the start of the year this looked impossible.
6) The Budget -- Mr. Bush mostly prevailed on domestic spending totals.
7) No new taxes -- all of the Democratic tax proposals were killed, including tobacco taxes, hedge fund taxes and energy company taxes.
It pretty much looks like the White House ran the table. Merry Christmas, Madam Speaker.
After expressing disappointment at the thousands of earmarks stuffed into the foot-tall Omnibus spending bill passed by Congress, Mr. Bush told reporters: "I am instructing the budget director to review options for dealing with the wasteful spending in the omnibus bill."
The president gave no details, but South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, a vocal critic of earmarks, has an idea what the president may have in mind. He has long cited a Congressional Research Service opinion that 90% of earmarks are suspect because they were slipped into committee reports and not written into law. "These non-legislated earmarks are not legally binding," Mr. DeMint says. "President Bush could ignore them. He doesn't need a line-item veto." The Club for Growth reports that Mr. Bush might be planning an executive order that would tell federal agencies simply to ignore Congress' earmarks if they aren't written into law and spend the money on higher priorities.
Such a bold move would result in a dramatic boost in President Bush's credibility on the budget. The federal government is now an astounding 185 times as big in real terms as it was a century ago. A general sense that Republicans have forgotten why they were sent to Washington is a big reason why the GOP lost control of Congress last year. The road to redemption has to include a crackdown on earmarks, which Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn calls "the gateway drug to higher spending in many other areas."
"Supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy are privately blaming aggressive campaigning by Bill Clinton for her recent decline in Iowa's pre-caucus polls. In their opinion, the former president's strong defense of his wife pushes the contest for the Democratic nomination toward what Hillary Clinton wanted to avoid: a referendum on the Clinton administration, making her a symbol of the past rather than an agent of change" -- syndicated columnist Robert Novak.
"[Rudy] Giuliani's policy positions shouldn't be as troublesome for him in New Hampshire, which is more secular and socially moderate than Iowa and South Carolina. But it's personal issues, not policies, that are dragging him down. When pollsters asked New Hampshire Republicans in the December survey which candidate was the most believable or the 'most likely to keep the same positions on important issues,' Giuliani trailed both Romney and McCain. On the question of which candidate respondents saw as 'least likely to act like a typical politician,' Giuliani came in last, at just 9 percent (Romney and McCain were tied at 18 percent). Voters may agree with what Giuliani has to say, but they just don't know if they can trust what he's saying" -- Amy Walter, writing at NationalJournal.com on the mystery of Rudy Giuliani's poor polls in New Hampshire.
But just how seriously? Out of the 56,000 who donated to the Paul campaign on Sunday, 25,000 were first-time donors. And the fundraising itself isn't centrally directed by the campaign but ginned up on-the-fly by enthusiasts unaffiliated with the campaign. Sunday's success came when a Paul fan launched an Internet appeal tied to the date of the Boston Tea Party. Last month, the fund-raising theme was Guy Fawkes Day, named after a Brit who conspired to blow up Parliament some 400 years ago.
We'll soon find out if Mr. Paul can translate his fundraising success into people pulling a lever in a voting booth. There's never been a libertarian who was better funded or in a better position to put his ideas out there. But that raises another question: What if his campaign continues to receive millions of dollars even if the candidate fails to remain a plausible force in the GOP primary? When asked, Mr. Paul downplays any chance of a third-party run in the general election. But he needs a legal and honorable way to spend these millions, so he may find his fans have all but taken the decision out of his hands.
But now Mr. Obama has added a new name to the mix: none other than California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who will be forced to leave office due to term limits in 2010, midway through the next presidential term.
At a town hall meeting in Manchester, N.H. this week, Mr. Obama lavished praise on the California governor: "What [he's] doing on climate change in California is very important and significant. There are things I don't agree with him on, but he's taken leadership on a very difficult issue and we haven't seen that kind of leadership in Washington."
It also doesn't hurt that Mr. Schwarzenegger has embraced a universal health care plan that is much more weighted towards government intervention than that of any other major Republican.
But Mr. Obama draws the line at one Republican he thinks wouldn't fit in his cabinet. ABC News reports that in answering a question on immigration policy, Mr. Obama took time to poke fun at Mitt Romney, the current GOP frontrunner in New Hampshire polls. Mr. Obama began by claiming it would be physically impossible to round up all of the country's illegal aliens, even if the country wanted to. He then made a reference to Mr. Romney's hiring of a lawn-care company that was found to have employed undocumented workers.
"We'd clear out some of the prisons to make room for somebody who's a housekeeper at Mitt Romney's house," he jabbed. "[Mr. Romney is] an example of somebody who, 'Oh, we gotta be real tough. But my lawn, you know, is important.'"
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