As I've mentioned before, in his more coherent moments, Mike Huckabee appears to be gesturing in the direction of a sort of American version of the Christian Democratic politics that are common on the European right, but it's very hard to imagine that succeeding unless Huckabee can win the support of observant Catholics. This sort of thing is unlikely to help him in that quest.
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Huckabee and Catholics
13 Jan 2008 06:43 pm
Comments (27)
For instance, if an endorsement by Tim LaHaye is really going to scare Catholics from voting for you, than there is no way there's ever going to be a solid Catholic-Protestant political alliance in this country.
Atrios talks about it a lot, but Huckabee turns social-conservative politics into theological politics, and that makes life messy. Yer stereotypical Catholic Republican -- nth-gen, white, older, with an 'O' at one end of the last name -- can cope with a coalition that is all about turning its nose up at abortion and the gays. But you can't imagine a blowhard like Bill Donohue, with his astroturf Catholic League, being too happy with a Huckabee nomination.
(If you're going to talk about Christian Democratic politics, it's worth remembering that the CDU and CSU in Germany are separate parties, with the more socially-conservative CSU operating in the mostly-Catholic Bavaria.)
Huckabee really really likes low level corruption.
He's such a penny-ante grafter by comparison with the other candidates, and that seems murkier, paradoxically, than something like Rudy's business dealings.
As a Catholic Supporter of Huckabee I have tired to refute this nonsense.
McCain Embraces Anti -Catholic Hagee Horrors!!!!
http://opinionatedcatholic.blogspot.com/2008/01/mccain-embraces-anti-catholic-hagee.html
It is amazing the pandoras box oppenets of Huckabee open up and not realize it can bite them in the you know what. DO these pople think of using google?
Oh as to Tim LaHaye. I would love if someone would research all the boards he is on an the think tanks and non profit political groups that all sell their mailing list to each other and make a ton of money off people donating to cause (x). You will find he and his wife are all on boards and groups with Catholic Republicans and Republicans of all stripes.
I suppose the political non profit Charity groups will never be looked at because the left has got to them to.
This is the essential problem with Huckabee's campaign: If a candidate discusses intertwining religion and government in all but the most general terms, voters are going to figure out he's discussing his religion, not the voter's religion. Voters, insofar as they want religion intertwined with politics at all, want their religion thus intertwined, not someone else's.
For instance, if an endorsement by Tim LaHaye is really going to scare Catholics from voting for you, than there is no way there's ever going to be a solid Catholic-Protestant political alliance in this country.
Ecumenical Catholics and ecumenical Protestants can and do work well together, but a significant part of the Protestant religious right is viciously anti-Catholic (and anti-Mormon). This hurt the careers both of Pat Buchanan and of Bill Bennett.
Remember, those people are nuts. They predict the future from the Apocalypse of John. If you play with them you'll get burned, sooner or later.
and not realize it can bite them in the you know what.
No, what? Either say it or don't, just don't try to be so fuckin' coy.
JH, I don't really see what the Left has to do with the long, long, long history of anti-Catholicism prevalent among Huckabee's correligionists and supporters (Caveat: at least, his supporters based on the organizations to which he speaks).
Hell, one of the main *founding* groups of the Republican Party (sad to say, even Lincoln relied on these guys) was the Know Nothing Party (later, American Party), which was a viscerally anti-Catholic group. And unlike, say, the Democrats' relationship with African Americans, the largest single bloc of the Republican Party - Protestant Evangelicals - still have massive problems with Catholics.
However, since theology is rarely discussed in the MSM, and since the GOP has found that recruiting Catholics via similar positions on social issues is possible, the vicious relationship between the two groups has been pushed out of view.
Meanwhile, my Grandfather, a very, very, very conservative, wealthy Catholic Ukrainian immigrant (technically native-born), is going to vote for a Democrat rather than Huckabee. This man voted for Bush twice. He still remembers how things used to be, and what's more, he's very aware of what a lot of megachurches say now. I don't think he's entirely unrepresentative of a lot of elderly white ethnics, and I think that given the elderly population's propensity to vote, this is a very dangerous thing for Huck.
Huckabee received a religious question during the last debate and gave a terrific answer that could have appealed to religious conservatives and secular liberals. The man does have some political talent.
Religious identification as a dividing line for political preference seems more overrated all the time (just like religious differences often mean little when one is confronted with sexual attraction).
"Religious identification as a dividing line for political preference seems more overrated all the time"
The posted email and discussion would seem to refute that notion.
"just like religious differences often mean little when one is confronted with sexual attraction)."
You can't conflate religious and political connections with religious and sexual connections. They're two entirely different areas of conflict.
Religion and politics have to do with expressions of primate fear of others. Sex has to do with replacing fear of others with desire for others. So in fact, religion and politics are invariably at odds with sex at a basic level.
So it's quite easy to have politics and religion connected and dividing lines based on them. It's much harder to get either religion or politics as a dividing line with regard to sex. (See Matalin, Mary/Carville, James - or for that matter, Craig, Larry.)
Well, I'd say that anonymous anti-Huckabee email seems like pretty thin stuff...
Now Tim LaHaye's that "excitable" fellow who sold something like fifty million(!) copies of all those books about the Anti-Christ becoming head of the UN and triggering the Apocalypse, but isn't he pretty close to *all* the Christian Right leaders in the Republican Party, not just Huckabee in particular? And doesn't his wife run Concerned Women for America, a big rightwing activist organization?
Similarly, isn't Hagee that lunatic Christian Zionist leader who's very close to all the big neocons and Bush also?
That email's pretty silly. It's a little like denouncing Huckabee for being endorsed by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and providing a long list of the strange/silly things Robertson and Falwell have said over the years. Conservative Republicans are *always* trying to get the endorsement of those people---Huckabee isn't anything unusual.
The close analogy would be for e.g. the Clinton campaign to denounce Edwards for gaining the endorsement of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, and including a long list of their "political baggage"...
I'd be pretty surprised if this sort of thing would play within a Republican primary, as opposed to a general election campaign.
Can't you people see what's happening here? The neo-cons are terrified that the Catholics and Evangelicals will vote as a bloc for a sincere Christian pro-lifer. They want a proven Israeli firster like McCain or Guiliani who won't bring all the Christian stuff to the White House. Don't fall for it.
http://www.catholic.org/printer_friendly.php?id=26312§ion=Cathcom
It isn't just observant Catholics that are potentially put off by this kind of stuff (and I have no personal knowledge how accurate it is, and strongly suspect it is at least to some degree unfair). It's anyone with a positive, or even ambiguous (as in loved the nuns in grade school, hate the bishops) Catholic identity.
It's very similar to the situation with Jews -- you needn't be an observant Jew to be offended by anti-Semitism, or open to influence by accusations of anti-Semitism. In fact I think the same applies to the LDS.
Speaking of latent anti-Catholic bigotry, Hillary drummed up an old chestnut in her interview with Russert when she was trying to say she did not have sex with the Iraq vote.
She sneared..."Let’s not get “Jesuitical” about what the vote was about."
Hmmm. An old slur used to impune the motives of Catholics.
Matt, next time you post on Huckabee and Catholics, would you mind citing some evidence that actual Catholics are hostile to Mike Huckabee?
Or that they have any feelings towards him one way or another?
What you've cited is spam and likely ends up deleted more often than read, and ignored more often than believed.
This is worse than that silly map of Iowa you linked to last week.
"Let’s not get “Jesuitical” about what the vote was about."
Hmmm. An old slur used to impune the motives of Catholics.
Interesting since a Jesuit asked Bill to join up when he was at Gtown. The phil profs there thought Bill was pretty Jesuitical.
I agree with Gene - one of the few ways to get lapsed Catholics to side with the Church is to spout some anti-Catholic bigotry.
Then again, losing votes for anti-Catholic rhetoric is a relatively new phenomenon especially in the Bible Belt.
http://faculty.francis.edu/aremillard/Pilot.htm
"Interesting since a Jesuit asked Bill to join up when he was at Gtown. The phil profs there thought Bill was pretty Jesuitical"
I believe the term was coined before they were banned in mid 1700s:
The Jesuits have frequently been described by their enemies (both Catholic and Protestant) as engaged in various conspiracies. The Monita secreta, published 1614 in Kraków, allegedly written by Claudio Acquaviva, in reality by Jerome Zahorowski, were fabricated to expose such a conspiracy.[citation needed] They have also been accused of using casuistry to obtain justifications for the unjustifiable. In English, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, "Jesuitical" has acquired a secondary meaning of "equivocating".
I just want to understand your argument here: you think that Hillary is accusing Obama of being a Catholic?
Meanwhile, my Grandfather, a very, very, very conservative, wealthy Catholic Ukrainian immigrant (technically native-born), is going to vote for a Democrat rather than Huckabee. This man voted for Bush twice. He still remembers how things used to be, and what's more, he's very aware of what a lot of megachurches say now. I don't think he's entirely unrepresentative of a lot of elderly white ethnics, and I think that given the elderly population's propensity to vote, this is a very dangerous thing for Huck.
Posted by Greg
My Mom & Dad are conservative and Catholic. They want Roe ended and returned to the States to decide abortion matters. They support staying in Iraq but hold Bush accountable for grave mistakes that cost lives. They don't give a damn about due process and civil rights for radical Muslim terrorists who they think deserve a short military trial and an even shorter rope.
But they will vote for Obama or Hillary! over Huckabee. They lived in the Deep South for 3 years and know the Mike Huckabees very well, though they have never met him and saw Romney getting the same sort of sly dissing they got as "Catholic outsiders" blessed with being assigned on a long engineering project down there.
My own reasons for no Huck are:
1. He went on record with Hagee and called for "Transfer" of all the "so called Palestinians" to abundant Arab lands elsewhere, troops assigned to help Israel defeat Hamas and Hezbollah so "Transfer" could start, and for the USA to officially recognize Israel moving their capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
2. Pretty corruption. I'm like most people that sees a power lawyer wife of a Senator nepotically parlay that clout into a million dollar lobbying job for companies his Committee affects, or Feinstein kicking 100s of millions in defense spending to her billionaire husband and intellectually understand that is major corruption but still get more emtioanally pissed when it is the frequent, venal stuff. A case of ribeyes left at the Gov's mansion gates in return for a road contract. Kids flying to Jackson Hole on a private corporate jet after Mommy got appointed to their Board through Daddy Gov. Wish list registries of "goodwill gifts" as the 1st Couple of Arkansas moved into their new home.
3. Illegal immigration Amnesty.
4. High spending and tax increases.
They want a proven Israeli firster like McCain or Guiliani who won't bring all the Christian stuff to the White House.
I'm not convinced by this, but it's an interesting point to examine. One of Walt & Mearsheimer's arguments was that there was at least a loose connection between yer PNAC neocons and yer Christian Zionists, but this sticks a crowbar in the crack between those for whom 'Israel' the American political concept (as opposed to the nation) means 'pro-US bulwark in an Arab/Muslim region' and those for whom it means 'where Jesus is coming back, once the Dome of the Rock is demolished and a red heifer is sacrificed on the Temple Mount'.
Gene's right, though. For those who think that Huckster is down with the Papists, let's see where he campaigns in SC. My guess is that he'll consider GSP and environs more amenable than Charleston: he was at the First Baptist Church, Spartanburg today, among friendly southern folks who'll ask, in all seriousness, 'are you a Christian or a Catholic?'
Chris, I agree with you except for a slight disagreement on the last point.
In principle, a consumption tax could allow us to lower income tax rates and also make saving more attractive. However, it's pretty clear that Huckabee has no clue about any of this, leading me to fear we'll get stuck with a national income tax and a national sales tax. At least the Europeans and Japanese get something in return for that.
Also, your point about Hagee and Palestine is well taken. I am a Zionist, but it's getting increasingly difficult to explain to my (entirely Likudnik) Israeli friends just what allying with the Christian Right means. For Israel's sake, I dread what will happen if they keep thinking the Fundies are good partners.
As I've mentioned before...Mike Huckabee appears to be gesturing in the direction of a sort of American version of the Christian Democratic politics that are common on the European right
1. That was NRO's Andrew Stuttaford's hypothesis, not yours. It's dishonest to pretend you came up with that yourself.
2. The Christian Democrat parties consider themselves centrists and have next to nothing in common with the Classically Liberal European Right.
The European right is not only classical liberal. In Europe here are probably more Christian Democrats (used as the generic term it is, rather than as the name of a specific party somewhere) than there are classical liberals. By European standards most of them are right wing, though many would be centrists or even liberals in the U.S.
Catholic and Lutheran Americans in the Midwest (Wisconsin and Minnesota especially, where they dominate) are a bit Christian-Democratish, and they can swing wildly from the American left (Eugene McCarthy) to the American right (Joe McCarthy). Eugene McCarthy actually participated in international Christian Democratic groups. He wasn't really very left-wing at all.
This thing seems more like a smear campaign ala John McCain in South Carolina. I think he pulls from a much larger base than the 23% who answer born again. I think his base that he appeals to is more like any Christian who goes to church occasionally. That's a much larger %.
I think he pulls from a much larger base than the 23% who answer born again.
I don't doubt it. But South Carolina has long-standing sectarian divisions that are hard to avoid if you're running a campaign with Jesus on your sleeve. Huckabee's looking to lock down the whiter, more Baptist upstate, but he's dealing with an electorate around Charleston that includes people predisposed to think the worst of Baptist preachers who make appearances with Hagee and others.
South Carolina 2008 has the air of 1884 Blaine vs
Cleaveland. We just need the Rum, Romanism and Rebellion speech. Almost anything said will take
on an ethnic, religious context. The nerves are just as raw.
I have an on-going disagreement with my wife over
the 'no unity - no power' thesis. In terms of traditional politcs, she is right. There is a new
phenomenon at work - internet democracy. My
idea is that that old ethnic, religion and other
coalitions matter less and less because the
ability to mass bombard the political classes more successfully than ever.
The immigration debate revealed the true strength
of internet democracy.
Comments closed January 27, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
To be clear, the flier posted by Armbinder is trash, and a hodgepodge of guilt by association with people who have said controversial things, especially if you cherry pick their speeches.
For instance, if an endorsement by Tim LaHaye is really going to scare Catholics from voting for you, than there is no way there's ever going to be a solid Catholic-Protestant political alliance in this country. LaHaye is absolutely huge in the right wing protestant community. Etc.
Slightly more notable is that Huckabee took 5 figure amounts to give speeches at controversial groups. But I think that is more of a larger problem of, Huckabee really really likes low level corruption.
Posted by Tony V | January 13, 2008 6:54 PM