Mike Huckabee
The former Arkansas governor and Christian preacher remains relevant because religionists dominate the Republican Party. Huckabee swept the South on Super Tuesday, sneaking a dubious win in West Virginia by colluding with fellow religionist—make no mistake—Arizona Sen. John McCain and Huckabee’s is the true voice of the Grand Old Party (GOP). In the weeks ahead, he stands to gain, not lose, power. The religionist-driven Huckaboom has yet to fully reverberate.
Mitt Romney
The former Massachusetts governor is the most Reaganesque in terms of personality but his pragmatism—he enacted government-controlled medicine as governor—foils his credibility as the antidote to front-runner Sen. John McCain. There’s no sense that Romney stands for anything but folksy traditionalism (all three GOP candidates traffic in this hucksterism). Though Romney actually won seven states on Super Tuesday, including Colorado and Minnesota, his delegate tally is relatively low and it’s best for him to withdraw. Let Huckabee be the option to McCain; this will push McCain to be true to his religious roots and clarify a badly needed general election choice between the Democratic presidential nominee and another religious Republican who favors keeping our troops engaged in an endless mission of self-sacrifice.
John McCain
The Vietnam War veteran and Arizona senator is absolutely 100 percent a religionist. He opposes individual rights—he fathered the McCain-Feingold restrictions on free speech and he favors regulating video games and the Internet—and he’s against capitalism and McCain supports the Bush administration’s disastrous foreign policy. By my estimate, conservatives such as Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh who have denounced McCain amount to a personality conflict that merely reflects a philosophical sameness between the religious right and the religious left. Indeed, Coulter reportedly says she will vote for Clinton over McCain. I interviewed Sen. McCain in San Francisco during the 2000 presidential campaign (I plan to post a longer transcript than was published in newspapers during the campaign) and there is no doubt that Sen. McCain is a real conservative.
Hillary Clinton
Like her husband, she will do anything to win an election. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is a pragmatist whose ideas are the same as the Republicans, differing only in degree, and her religious positions—banning divorce for couples with children, regulating video games and the Internet—should continue to attract religious voters. If Clinton doesn’t put a lock on the nomination before this summer, watch for her to manipulate the super-delegates at the party’s convention. She’s a ruthless candidate. I’m not convinced that her election will result in legislative gridlock, which would be good.
Barack Obama
I hold that Sen. Barack Obama is the choice for those opposed to the Bush administration’s military intervention in Iraq. The Democrat’s candidacy transcends usual political divisions; he’s promoted and perceived as the candidate that rejects the status quo and I think the perception may be warranted. Since he announced his campaign in Springfield, Illinois, Obama has opposed Iraq policy and made it a defining issue of his candidacy. An Obama general election victory will be a mandate to change America’s foreign policy first and foremost and a repudiation of the Bush/Clinton political philosophy, a mongrel mixture of Judeo-Christian pragmatic socialism. Obama won an impressive 13 states (a win in New Mexico, where he currently leads, would make it 14) on Super Tuesday. According to MSNBC, he has a slight lead in the delegate count. A McCain vs. Obama contest could present a clear philosophical choice to American voters. It’s a choice between more of the same religious socialism at home and abroad and an immediate change in U.S. foreign policy—a pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, which will be the public’s barometer for measuring an Obama presidency’s success. At worst, an Obama victory stops Republicans from implementing new schemes for self-sacrifice and, at best, it does that and effectively guts the Republican Party.
