THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Contender?
Arkansas's former governor offers a strange brew of populism and environmentalism.
NEW YORK--"Are you with Mike?"
The question is not a political one. Your correspondent has arrived at NPR's studios in midtown Manhattan, there to squeeze in an interview with former Arkansas governor and current presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Mr. Huckabee is in the studio, but he arrived alone, and the slightly flummoxed receptionist asks everyone who comes through the door if he's one of Mike's people. None of them are.
Mr. Huckabee arrived late for the radio taping--he couldn't find a taxi at Penn Station--so I settle into a chair to wait for the candidate to emerge.
A week ago, Mike Huckabee was having trouble getting potential donors to return his calls. But after coming in a surprise second in the Iowa straw poll last weekend, the former Arkansas governor is on a media and fund-raising blitz. The man who greets me, with a firm handshake and a warm smile, is physically unassuming and seems slightly too small for the suit he's wearing--which he may be, having famously lost more than 100 pounds after being diagnosed with Type II diabetes a few years back.
Mr. Huckabee settles into a chair in NPR's 19th-floor conference room as I ask him why he's running for president. He offers some preliminaries about his executive experience in Arkansas and his ability in that state to work across the aisle to get things done with a Democratic state Assembly. Then he goes for the heart of the matter as he sees it:
"If the Republicans have a chance next year," Mr. Huckabee says, "the criteria are: No. 1, someone who can communicate our message to the people of our country and win them back, because we've lost a lot of them.
"No. 2, it's someone who has consistency on the principles and the core values that have caused people to be Republican. That includes the sanctity of life, it includes fiscal conservativism. It certainly includes an adherence to the traditional concept of marriage. It means respect for the Second Amendment. Those are issues that caused a lot of middle America and the South to go Republican." In other words, in line with the media sound bite about Mr. Huckabee, he represents the Republican wing of the Republican Party, the so-called social conservatives that the front-runners are said to have a hard time rallying to their cause.
But Mr. Huckabee doesn't stop there. Instead, he outlines, in broad strokes, a quite different, and somewhat surprising, vision of the Republican Party of the future. Rallying the base to the old standard, Mr. Huckabee says, isn't enough anymore. "A new Republican generation has also got to speak to issues of the environment, education, health care." We'll get back to that. But now Mr. Huckabee is on a roll, and he shifts seamlessly into a critique of his party that seems, oddly, to accept much of his political opposition's criticism of the GOP, and the Bush administration in particular:
"We have to show that we are also problem-solvers, not just ideologues. People are not going to tolerate a government that just is led by people who just believe something. They want a government that is led by people who can do something. And all the beliefs in the world don't change the dynamics if we're unable to function and function effectively." This is Mr. Huckabee-as-triangulator, as pragmatist.
One central theme of Mr. Huckabee's campaign that he hasn't mentioned yet is his support for the Fair Tax, a proposal to replace the federal income tax with a sales tax of either 23% or 30%, depending on how you count. So I ask him if he really expects the repeal of the 16th Amendment, the one that granted the federal government the authority to levy income taxes in the first place. "I hope we would [repeal it]. That's the whole point." But hope, of course, is not a plan. Does he have one? "I'd go directly to the people, sell it to them, and then ask them to sell it to Congress."
So much for taxes. Since he brought up the environment, what is his view on climate change? "My view is that we have allowed it to become a political issue rather than an issue about being responsible inhabitants of earth. . . . The one thing that's, to me, indisputable, is that we have a responsibility to be better stewards of the environment. So why we have any problems is to me of less importance than that we clearly need cleaner air, clean water, good soil. Anything we do that does in fact curb and contain CO2 emissions is a good thing. Because it simply means that there's a cleaner, fresher, more sustainable environment."
So Mr. Huckabee is in favor of curbing carbon-dioxide emissions. Does he have a preferred policy tool to accomplish the goal? "My first thought is that a tax is not the ideal way to try to change behaviors." No carbon tax, then. What about a cap-and-trade system, in which industries are given emissions credits that they can either use or sell? "I sometimes think that this whole idea of carbon credits, it seems to me a bit like buying indulgences from the ancient church. I find that just almost bizarre--that that's the answer, that I can waste all the energy I want and then justify it by writing a check and saying, 'Oh, I bought up some credits.' "
With a carbon tax off the table and cap-and-trade theologically unsound, what's left? "I think every citizen can take some steps. I drive a flex-fuel car. We've replaced most of our light fixtures with fluorescents. . . . I didn't have to do that. The government didn't tell me to do that. It just seems to me a better use of energy and my money." That may be virtuous, but it falls somewhat short of an environmental platform for the new Republican generation. So I ask the former governor whether he approves of the current legislative fad of requiring more ethanol in our gasoline. "I'm from an agricultural state, so I tend to like biofuels and think that they're a very important part of the future of energy."
But the production of ethanol for fuel is itself energy-intensive; at best it offers modest improvements to our current energy dependence. Right?
"It's not as efficient [as gas] right now. But as the technology evolves, it's already far more efficient than it was a few years ago. But I think the answer's going to be a combination of many sources: solar; nuclear; hydrogen, hydrogen cells, which are different than ammonia-based hydrogen; I think wind."
That may be what Mr. Huckabee thinks. But what should the government be doing, if anything, to bring this future about? "The best thing the government could do," Mr. Huckabee replies, "is eliminate any type of penalties on productivity and innovation. One of the reasons that I support the Fair Tax is that it turns all sectors of the economy loose." With Mr. Huckabee, I was beginning to suspect, most roads lead to the Fair Tax.
But he'd mentioned the economy, so I asked what he made of the recent turmoil in the markets. The answer surprised with its populist fervor. "You know, a lot of the folks that are worried now are experiencing maybe a little bit of what the average American worries about every day when they go to work and they're not sure whether any of these hedge-fund managers and their $100 million bonuses are going to sell off the jobs of the people out there in middle America to China, and they're going to lose their paychecks and their pensions."
Is our trade deficit with China something we should be worried about then? "I think we've got to be worried about the trade deficit." Why? "If they were to devalue the dollar through their actions, it would have a dramatically negative impact on our economy." I want to point out that devaluing the dollar relative to the Chinese yuan is precisely what those decrying the trade deficit would like to see happen, but he presses on: "I've also said we don't have free trade if you don't have fair trade and it's not fair trade if they're not abiding by the same rules and regulations that we are."
Fair trade is a hobbyhorse of the left more often than the right, not least because unions view imposing our labor and environmental standards on poor countries as a way of making them less cost-competitive. But Mr. Huckabee isn't done. "We can't even trust toothpaste [from China]. We have contaminated food and now contaminated toys that are coming here because they're so just adamant about making profits and producing enormous levels of goods and getting them into our marketplace that they haven't been as careful, making sure those products have the same level of safety that they would if they were manufactured here."
We should all be able to trust our toothpaste and our baby toys, to be sure. To that end, Senator Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) wants to inspect every container from China for lead-painted children's toys. Is this the sort of thing Mr. Huckabee has in mind?
"I think the Dick Durbin idea is a little bit extreme . . . but there needs to be a greater level of scrutiny." That sounds safe enough, if somewhat vague, but suddenly Mr. Huckabee veers off-target. "I think we ought to know where our food comes from. I'm particularly concerned about the growing incidence of imported food. And part of it is I believe there are three things a country has got to do to be free: It's got to feed itself; it has to be able to fuel itself and it's got to be able to fight for itself. And if it can't do those things, then it's only as free as the nations who provide those things will allow it to be. So if we're dependent on anyone, whether it's the Chinese or the Europeans, for our food, the day they decide to cut off our food supply is the day we cease to have the freedom we currently enjoy."
Food independence was, it is true, long considered a strategic asset, but it seems a quaint goal, at best, in a globalizing world. And our current fixation on plowing under food crops to grow "biofuels" is already driving up food prices in this country. How, then, do we achieve energy and food independence simultaneously? Is it even possible?
Not at the moment, Mr. Huckabee says. "But I believe we can get there." How? "The same way that we developed an atom bomb in really a relatively small period of three years, when science was not nearly as advanced as it is now. The same way we went to the moon eight years from the time John F. Kennedy said we would go."
Is the candidate proposing a federally funded Manhattan Project to achieve food and energy independence from the world? "It doesn't even have to be federally funded as much as it has to be a federally turned-loose innovation in the private sector. Imagine the potential profits out there for those who can develop the clean, sustainable and replaceable domestically produced energy sources." That is code, I take it, for the Fair Tax again.
Until recently, Mr. Huckabee has been mostly an unknown quantity, despite his months-long presence in the race. His second-place finish in Iowa last weekend has brought him a new degree of media attention and scrutiny. The question for Republicans and for his campaign is, now that Mr. Huckabee is getting a closer look, will GOP voters like what they see?
Mr. Carney is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal.
