Frum Replies to Huckabee
Earlier today, I sent Gov. Huckabee an email offering some reactions to his rebuttal of my piece about him in The Week.
Earlier today, I sent Gov. Huckabee an email offering some reactions to his rebuttal of my piece about him in The Week. After thanking the governor for responding, I offered these three rejoinders to his criticisms.
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The questions I raised are not the invention of one person alone. They are questions that you will encounter if you decide to return to presidential politics. And here are some thoughts in response:
1) I have not read the Linder bill, but yes I did read the Boortz & Linder book. I share your interest in a tax based on consumption - but as you have heard from many more qualified experts than me, a retail sales tax is the worst of all possible forms of consumption. More relevantly: as a political matter, the reason the Fair Tax excites Republican primary voters is that it rests on a promise to abolish the IRS. This is a false promise. Of all forms of tax, sales taxes are the most easily evaded. At very high levels - the 25% or so that Linder and Boortz contemplate - the temptations to cheat will be severe. We'll need an agency much MORE intrusive than the IRS to police the Fair Tax.
But the more important question is this: If you do wish to transition to a consumption tax, why support the worst designed version of such a tax?
A Value-Added Tax is much more self-enforcing than a retail sales tax, since everybody in the chain of production has incentives to report accurately. The progressive consumption tax advocated by the late David Bradford among others has two great virtues - an easy transition from the present system plus it spares middle-income people from the crushing tax increases that would be imposed on them by the Fair Tax or most versions of the VAT.
2) The feeling that you framed your appeal in sectarian ways is not something I pulled out of my own pin-shaped head. I have heard this comment from dozens of active Republican Catholics - and from every single Mormon I know. As I said above, I appreciate that you too are a victim of stereotyping, and that people may be hyper-actively ready to interpret any chance remark of yours, no matter how innocently intended, as a disparagement. But as they say: It is what it is. People are ready to do so, and the remark you made to the NY Times about Mormon theology had an impact far beyond the Mormon world.
As a Jew, I see this from the other side. You have gone not the extra mile, but the whole extra trip to convey your respect for the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. We notice!
You may have heard this story before but it's relevant here:
Postmaster general and DNC chairman James Farley had given a speech to Democrats in Michigan in advance of the 1936 election. In the speech he referred to Roosevelt’s opponent, Alf Landon, as governor of a “typical Prairie state.”
Roosevelt wrote Farley a note of correction: “Never use the word ‘typical.’ If the sentence had read, ‘One of those splendid Prairie states, no one could have picked up on it. But the word ‘typical’ coming from a New Yorker is meat for the opposition.”
3) On the social issues ... You have your conscientious beliefs. They are essential to who you are, and nobody would expect you to alter them or esteem you if you did. But as you consider how to present them, I hope you will be careful of the bad data that is sometimes offered to those on the social conservative side.
Those polls in which people describe themselves as "prolife" or "prochoice" are useless unless you know what your respondents MEAN by those terms. You may discover - I bet you will discover - that they don't mean what you suppose them to mean.
Nor would I assume that women who describe themselves as “prolife” therefore favor politicians pressing prolife legislation upon them.
As for same-sex marriage: Yes, the electorate has voted against it. Today's electorate. But every month, opponents of same-sex marriage die and more supporters of same-sex marriage reach voting age. I don't think we're looking at an age effect, where people become more conservative as they grow older. It looks much more like a cohort effect, where the generations born after 1965 just see the world differently from those born before.
And again: the fact that a majority continues to oppose SSM does not tell us what they think about the relative priority that should be given to this issue. Another joke from the Roosevelt era: A communist-dominated union has ordered up a big march. The marchers are met by a counter-demonstration by their arch-rival union. Violence erupts. The police arrive to arrest the troublemakers. One of the arrested counter-demonstraters protests, "Hey - I'm anti-communist!" The policeman answers: "I don't care what kind of a communist you are, you are going downtown." On SSM likewise, recession-troubled voters may object to anybody talking about these issues at all, regardless of point of view.
Our weakness as a party is not our failure to hold the most conservative voters in the most unmetropolitan parts of America. We're doing just fine there! What's hurting the GOP has been the decline of our support since 1988 among the college-educated and especially college-educated women. Consider: Back in 1988, the elder Bush beat Michael Dukakis among whites with a college degree by more than 20 points. That margin has dropped in every presidential election since. In 2008, McCain beat Obama among college-educated whites by only 2 points. Outside the South, McCain lost college-educated whites altogether. They are not a small group either: 20% of the electorate back in 1988, 30% now.
These upper-educated voters increasingly see homosexuality as a non-issue, even a protected category like race. The wrong approach to that issue means bidding farewell to that important group.