Wall Street Journal doesn't like Huckabee

John fund from the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page published a hit-piece on Mike Huckabee today. I'm not sure whether that says more about Huckabee or about the position of the WSJ.

Fund makes the point that the candidates are taking two different tracks to try to win the nomination. Giuliani is running as a hard right economic conservative (Fund does not mention Rudy's strong militaristic and pro-war position) but Rudy is not running away from his socially liberal views. Huckabee, on the other side, is running as a hard right social conservative but economically as a liberal-populist. Thus ends the analysis (first three paragraphs) followed by the hit piece on Huckabee.

Huckabee is described as

• not the "consistent conservative" he now claims to be.
• Betsy Hagan, Arkansas director of the conservative Eagle Forum and a key backer of his early runs for office, was once "his No. 1 fan." She was bitterly disappointed with his record.
  
• Phyllis Schlafly, president of the national Eagle Forum, is even more blunt. "He destroyed the conservative movement in Arkansas, and left the Republican Party a shambles,"
  
• Free-market advocates are skeptical. "He 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."
  
• The Club for Growth notes that only a handful of the 33 current GOP state legislators back their former governor.
  
• "He fought my efforts to reform the National Governors Association and always took fiscal positions to my left," former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, a supporter of Mitt Romney
  
• Mr. Huckabee's reluctance to surround himself with conservatives was evident as governor, when he kept many agency heads appointed by Bill Clinton.
  
• "He's just like Bill Clinton in that he practices management by news cycle," a former top Huckabee aide told me. "As with Clinton there was no long-term planning, just putting out fires on a daily basis. One thing I'll guarantee is that won't lead to competent conservative governance."
  

So Fund, writing for the economic ultra right-wing Wall Street Journal, has searched for and found every conservative he could locate who would knock Huckabee. Mike raises taxes, fails to surround himself with hardline conservatives, and is backed by only a handfull of current GOP Arkansas state legislators.

This suspicion of his economic conservative credentials and lack of hardline conservative consistency may explain his lack of fundraising abilities during this pre-primary fundraising primary. But John fund's attack piece suggests that Huckabee is gaining traction in the Republican Party in ways the economic conservatives (Club for Growth, Eagle Forum, WSJ itself) find disquieting.

The social conservatives and religious right have been making noises that if the Republican Nominee for President is insufficiently solid on such things as abortion and is not a good "Christian" as the evangelists and Biblical Inerrantists define Christian then they will bolt the party and start a third party. This article - a WSJ hit piece on the most pure of the social conservative candidates - is a message back from the economic conservatives saying that they will go after a social conservative candidate who is insufficiently "pure" as an economically conservative.

This article appears to be a public notice of the parameters the economic conservatives will accept in the negotiations to keep both the economic conservatives and the social conservatives in their alliance within the Republican Party.

The complete absence of any discussion of the war in Iraq is also notable. I'd guess that this means the WSJ will take any nominee, no matter what his position on Iraq. All that really matters to Fund and his publication is the candidate's position on taxes. This looks to me like movement away from Bush as a failed President and conservative, with his failure centered on the War in Iraq. This is my tentative opinion regarding what the absence of discussion of Iraq might mean.

Anyway, I think this WSJ article is more of a message to the Social Conservatives from the economic conservatives than it is a description of Mike Huckabee. Huckabee is just the convenient target used to carry the message.