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A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
[Commentary] Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is the sleeper candidate in the race for the Republican nomination. He is far from front-runner status, but with increasing grass-roots support and a potent campaign message, he could steal the show at the Iowa caucuses and be vaulted into contention. Democrats should hope against this scenario, for if he makes it to the general election, he could be their worst nightmare. Huckabee still places in the single digits in recent polls of Iowa caucus-goers, but he’s inching up. In a June Mason-Dixon poll, he ranked fourth, garnering 7 percent, one point ahead of former front-runner Arizona Sen. John McCain, though 8 points behind former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, 10 points behind former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson and 18 points behind former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
Huckabee has said that his campaign must do well at the Ames Straw Poll on Aug. 11 for it to continue. “I don’t think I have to win the straw poll; I think I have to do well,” he recently told Iowa Independent. “If I came in at the bottom of the pack, I’d have to take a long, hard look at what we were doing.”
Huckabee is a former Southern Baptist minister, and it shows on the campaign trail. He is probably the best orator in the Republican field. He’s got plenty of charisma, though it doesn’t ooze like a slimy politician, but more like, well, a pastor.
At the recent forum sponsored by the Iowa Christian Alliance and Iowans for Tax Relief, Huckabee wowed the conservative crowd with style and substance. Transitioning smoothly from his opposition to abortion to his support for the war on terror, he said, “Where we elevate and celebrate life, they elevate and celebrate death.” Arguing in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, he said, “I've never understood why people say it’s OK to amend the Bible but not the Constitution,” generating thunderous applause.
Huckabee has little money but hopes that with a good showing at the Ames Straw Poll, he’ll become a stronger contender for the Iowa caucuses in about six months. Huckabee is counting on Iowa social conservatives, unhappy with the GOP front-runners, to give him a boost. Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa evangelical and unsuccessful 2006 lieutenant gubernatorial candidate, is chairing Huckabee’s Iowa campaign. Huckabee’s also been endorsed by the influential Home School Legal Defense Fund Association, and Michael P. Farris, chairman of the organization, has vowed to send dozens of home-schooled teenagers out to do get-out-the-vote activities for Huckabee.
One of the potential obstacles to his winning the Republican nomination is also, not coincidentally, one of his greatest advantages in a general election match-up against a Democrat. He believes that government should have a role in bettering people's lives. "One of my responsibilities as a Republican is to make sure my party doesn't forget people on the lower end,” Huckabee said recently in Coralville, Iowa. “I didn't grow up a child of privilege like some in my party. We have to govern in a way that touches people on the whole economic spectrum.”
As governor of Arkansas, he created ARKids First, which provided health insurance coverage to more than 70,000 Arkansas children. After facing down diabetes, he pushed the Healthy Arkansas initiative in 2004, which encouraged people to stop smoking, exercise more often and eat healthier food. Huckabee has said that climate change is a serious problem that humanity must address, couching the issue in language of faith. And in 2006, he signed a bill raising the minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.25 per hour.
These positions are actually right in step with the Republican base. In an influential article in the Weekly Standard called “The Party of Sam’s Club,” Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam discussed the changing nature of the GOP:
This is the Republican party of today–an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement. To borrow a phrase from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Republicans are now "the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club."
On the opposite side of the spectrum, Stanley Greenberg comes to a similar conclusion in the American Prospect:
Huge majorities want the government to be more involved in a range of issues including national security, health care, energy, and the environment. To tackle global warming, two-thirds of Americans support stronger regulation of business. When it comes to health care, the results are dramatic. By a two-to-one margin, people opt for a universal health care system rather than separate reforms dealing with problems one at a time.
But those positions are not in step with many of the elites of the Republican Party. Via Paul Curtis at The Right’s Field, it seems the Club for Growth, which sees itself as an ideological gatekeeper for conservative Republicans has attacked Huckabee repeatedly for raising taxes as governor. “This really isn’t very complicated,” said the club’s president, Pat Toomey. “Taxes were higher when he left office than when he entered. On balance, that makes him a tax hiker.”
If Huckabee can get past the big business wing of his party and ride a social conservative wave to victory in the Iowa caucuses and beyond, Democrats will face a formidable candidate who could steal much of their message and cut deeply into their natural constituency of working Americans. And if Douthat and Salam are right, then Huckabee’s politics go beyond the importance of 2008–they could secure a Republican White House for a generation.
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