« Club for Growth
April 18, 2008
Huckabee: No Hard Feelings
Mike Huckabee’s decision to sign on with an entertainment talent agency might suggest he intends to take his act to late-night television, but in the meantime, he’s shoring up his political base.
First, Huckabee’s breathlessly promoted announcement was simply the formation of a PAC—pretty standard stuff for a politician. Likewise, it’s hardly a shock to hear he’s going to be campaigning for John McCain.
But it was a big surprise to see Huckabee grant a very friendly interview to the Club for Growth, an anti-tax attack group that started off early and aggressively running TV ads against Huckabee in Iowa. The candidate bit back over the last year, scandalizing conservative fusionists by calling the group “the Club for Greed.” Now, here he is chatting about vice-presidential picks for a Club for Growth web video.
And he’s scheduled to do a fundraiser for the Family Policy Institute of Washington, a state affiliate of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. He’ll be appearing alongside Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. Dobson and Perkins were among the Religious Right “political bosses” who Huckabee felt snubbed him in favor of candidates like Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson—in fact, just a few weeks ago, Huckabee was blaming them for sinking his campaign:
Mike Huckabee can't definitively explain why he couldn't win the Republican presidential nomination, but he thinks the desire of Christian leaders to be "kingmakers," media coverage and Mother Nature all had something to do with it.
"Rank-and-file evangelicals supported me strongly, but a lot of the leadership did not," the former Arkansas governor says. "Let's face it, if you're not going to be king, the next best thing is to be the kingmaker. And if the person gets there without you, you become less relevant."
Huckabee may be looking at another presidential run in 2012, or he may try to parlay his mailing list into a career as a Religious Right “political boss” himself, but in either case, it appears he’s taking a page from McCain’s post-2000 playbook: find your enemies and suck up to them.
Posted by Ezra at 6:24 PM | Permalink
April 8, 2008
Perkins for Senate in 2010?
Matt Lewis, writing for Politico, suggests that Pat Toomey might be considering making another Senate run Pennsylvania while the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins might be considering his own run against embattled Louisiana Senator David Vitter in 2010:
Former Louisiana state Rep. Tony Perkins, president of the socially conservative Family Research Council, and former U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), president of the fiscally conservative Club for Growth, are both rumored to be considering leaving their positions to run for the U.S. Senate — an office both have unsuccessfully sought before.
Perkins would presumably seek to “primary” Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter, who was linked to the “D.C. Madam” prostitution scandal last summer. After all, who better to challenge the first-term senator than the head of the Family Research Council? “Social conservatives in Louisiana would be pleased to support a candidate like Tony Perkins, who would have just as strong or stronger of a voting record than Sen. Vitter has had in the Senate but who comes to the race without all the personal baggage,” said Gary Marx, who has served as conservative coalitions director for the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney.
And if Vitter’s personal peccadilloes aren’t enough of a contrast to satisfy fiscal conservatives, Perkins can also bring up the fact that the senator opposed the one-year ban on earmarks recently championed by presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.).
Of course, Perkins might have a hard time attacking Vitter, since has claimed that he would gladly vote for Vitter, provided he can prove he has "moved on" from his scandal and that Vitter last year earmarked $100,000 for the Louisiana Family Forum, which was founded by Perkins in 1999, for its efforts to “combat evolution.”
Posted by Kyle at 12:04 PM | Permalink
Perkins Pal Runs for Congress
Former state legislator Woody Jenkins won the Republican nomination Saturday for the special election to replace Louisiana Rep. Richard Baker, who retired this year to become a lobbyist. During Jenkins’s unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaigns in 1978, 1980, and 1996, he received his strongest support from far-right groups such as the Christian Coalition, Americans for Life League, and the Christian Action Network, and this run is no different: He’s received endorsements from James Dobson, Paul Weyrich, Tim LaHaye, and Family Research Council Action, as well as the Club for Growth’s PAC.
While it’s unusual to see FRC Action making an outright endorsement of a candidate, it should be no surprise, as FRC President Tony Perkins managed Jenkins’s 1996 Senate campaign. Many will recall that Perkins gained some notoriety for his role in buying Ku Klux Klansman David Duke’s phone bank list for Jenkins’s campaign and attempting to cover up the payment.
But what’s not commonly known is that Jenkins helped found the Council for National Policy in 1981, serving as its first executive director. “One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party or philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government,” claimed Jenkins. For the past year, at least, Republican candidates for president have been hard pressed to ignore the secretive Religious Right gathering’s finicky vetting of candidates and its brief threat to ditch the GOP entirely. Even after he won, John McCain felt he had to go back before the council and plead for their grudging support.
What can voters expect from Jenkins? The Weekly Standard wrote in 1996 that he was “best known for leading the 1990 fight to pass what would have been the nation’s most restrictive abortion law and for occasionally bringing a plastic fetus onto the floor of the legislature.”
Posted by Ezra at 8:58 AM | Permalink
February 15, 2008
Economic and Religious Right Team up Against GOP Moderate
This week, the Club for Growth declared victory as incumbent Rep. Wayne Gilchrest lost the Republican primary to the Club’s handpicked candidate. The Club’s PAC, which has carved out a niche for itself with right-wing primary challenges, spent more than $600,000 on the race, mostly with TV ads calling Gilchrest a “liberal.”
But the Club for Growth, known for its hard-line supply-side economics, wasn’t the only outside group giving a boost to challenger Andy Harris. “It is imperative that Dr. Harris win this contest!” declared Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, who trumpeted right-wing complaints about Gilchrist.
“He voted against the constitutional amendment (on) marriage; he voted to allow homosexuals to adopt children; he had been pro-abortion," Maryland state Sen. Alex Mooney told Family News in Focus.
This isn’t the first time the Club for Growth and Dobson have joined forces: the duo also backed a right-wing primary challenge in 2006 that ousted incumbent Rep. Joe Schwarz—who, like Gilchrest, had the backing of President Bush. Dobson crowed that the upset would “send a mighty signal that the days of anti-family, liberal Republicans are finally over.” Former Sen. Lincoln Chafee, another Club for Growth target, accused the economic group of having a hidden social agenda in its choice of candidates and targets.
If so, it would only mirror the Religious Right, whose definition of “values voter” expands as needed to fit the GOP’s platform. In a recent appearance on MSNBC together, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins and Club for Growth President Pat Toomey were in full agreement on the importance of the “three-legged stool.” “For [the] Republican Party to win they must have a conservative candidate who brings together the conservative coalition: fiscal conservatives, defense conservatives, and social conservatives,” said Perkins.
Indeed, while Dobson recently endorsed Mike Huckabee—the Club for Growth’s enemy number one—Perkins has maintained his ambivalence, always making note of the stool.
Posted by Ezra at 5:47 PM | Permalink
January 8, 2008
Huckabee's Populist Image Belies Bizarre Economic Plan
Mike Huckabee’s first-place finish in the Iowa Republican caucus was a victory for the Religious Right, after the combined efforts of a number of lesser-known right-wing figures eager to nominate one of their own. But while James Dobson and Richard Land issued cautious statements endorsing the victory if not the candidate, other national religious-right activists remained aloof, maintaining that Huckabee jeopardizes the vaunted right-wing coalition by alienating some of its partners, especially allies on the economic Right.
“I'm still skeptical that Mike Huckabee is the right man to speak for them because of his views on economics and foreign policy,” said Gary Bauer. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said Huckabee supporters “overlooked the fact he was not attractive to other members of the conservative coalition, and they said they don't care about us, and we don't care about them."
Indeed, these prominent religious-right activists are echoing people like Patrick Toomey of the Club for Growth, who called Huckabee the “John Edwards of the Republican Party,” FreedomWorks' Dick Armey ("Huckabee undermines the GOP's longstanding unity between its traditional and economic wings"), or American Enterprise Institute Vice President Harry Olsen. Toomey’s Club has done the most to convince Republicans of Huckabee’s alleged tax-hiking heresy, running anti-Huckabee ads heavily in Iowa since the summer.
Huckabee himself has played up this reputation as a populist, deriding the “Club for Greed” and talking about “the growing angst in the middle class.”
While many pundits seem to have accepted this presentation, it’s important to separate style from substance: When it comes to economic policy, Huckabee has arguably been running to the right of any of his major opponents.
Key to jumpstarting Huckabee’s surge in Iowa, along with conservative homeschoolers, was his early embrace of a little-known right-wing group called FairTax.org, which proposes replacing all income taxes with a 23 percent national sales tax. FairTax sent at least 20 buses full of people to the Ames straw poll in August, where Huckabee finished a surprising second-place, and the group almost went broke in the fall working the campaign.
Huckabee sells the plan with a populist flair, promising to abolish the IRS and put in place a “progressive” system that would be less for everybody while rewarding “hard work and thrift.” However, the substance doesn't quite match the rhetoric.
Economists and observers on the right and left have mocked the FairTax plan as “politically unrealistic and mathematically impossible.” The 23 percent number, for example, seems to be an obvious ruse to disguise what is in fact a 30 percent tax. (Here’s how that works: adding a $30 tax to a $100 purchase is what anyone would call a 30 percent tax – but the “FairTax” folks say that $30 is only 23 percent of the new total cost of $130.)
Even that number is not sufficient to meet current government spending, which would also be taxed under the plan: Supporters include the tax government agencies would themselves pay when computing revenue but not when calculating spending. Other estimates put the required sales tax rate to meet current spending at above 50 percent.
But beyond the legerdemain and “fantasy” numbers put out by FairTax, the plan for a national sales tax—which would ignore corporate income and capital gains as well as wages—is most vulnerable to criticism that it hits the poor and middle class hardest. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist who worked in the Reagan administration, wrote that under the FairTax plan, “there would be an enormous shift in the tax burden from the wealthy to those with lower and middle incomes.” As Money magazine explained:
Let's say a hedge fund manager has a good year and earns $1 billion. If he can somehow manage to scrape by spending, say, $100 million, the other $900 million is tax free. He'll have paid about 2% of his income in taxes that year.
Such a scheme is far more regressive than the current income tax, and no other candidate has proposed anything so radical. Nevertheless, Huckabee continues to employ the FairTax plan as part of his “populist” image, which pundits and his right-wing opponents alike—not to mention religious-right leaders—have bought into.
Posted by Ezra at 1:55 PM | Permalink
October 26, 2007
The Long Knives Come Out For Huckabee
Fresh off his resounding victory at the Values Voter Debate in Florida and his first place (depending on how you count) finish in the straw poll at the Values Voter Summit, it seemed as if Mike Huckabee’s campaign was gaining traction – for a while, at least.
After all, following the Summit, a group of right-wing leaders met to discuss their options going into the 2008 election and many appeared ready to come out in favor of Huckabee:
Phil Burress, president of the Ohio-based Citizens for Community Values and member of the executive committee of the Arlington Group, declined to talk about the meeting but said he has personally decided to support Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister. Another well-respected Christian conservative leader, Kelly Shackleford, a Texas lawyer, is also expected to come out on behalf of Mr. Huckabee in the coming days.
Since the summit, Huckabee has hit double digits in the polls for the first time, saw his fundraising skyrocket, and even picked up the endorsement of Joe Carter, who is not only Director of Web Communications for Family Research Council but also an influential blogger in his own right.
His progress appears to have prompted others on the Right, such as the Club for Growth’s Pat Toomey, to take his campaign seriously and mobilize to stop it:
Of course, there is little actual chance of Huckabee winning the presidency — at least not in 2008. Notwithstanding his improved polling in Iowa, Huckabee isn’t really running for president — not with a near empty campaign treasury. Rather, the second iteration of the Man from Hope is trying to parlay his social conservative credentials and aw-shucks congeniality into the vice-presidential nomination next year. Before conservatives jump on that train, however, they should consider the likelihood that the presence of such a big government backer on the ticket would hurt the party’s prospects more than it helps.
The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund has also come out against Huckabee and gotten others to go on the record against him as well:
But I also know he is not the "consistent conservative" he now claims to be.Nor am I alone. Betsy Hagan, Arkansas director of the conservative Eagle Forum and a key backer of his early runs for office, was once "his No. 1 fan." She was bitterly disappointed with his record. "He was pro-life and pro-gun, but otherwise a liberal," she says. "Just like Bill Clinton he will charm you, but don't be surprised if he takes a completely different turn in office."
Phyllis Schlafly, president of the national Eagle Forum, is even more blunt. "He destroyed the conservative movement in Arkansas, and left the Republican Party a shambles," she says. "Yet some of the same evangelicals who sold us on George W. Bush as a 'compassionate conservative' are now trying to sell us on Mike Huckabee."
…
Rick Scarborough, a pastor who heads Vision America, attended seminary with Mr. Huckabee and is a strong backer. But, he acknowledges, "Mike has always sought the validation of elites." When conservatives took over the Southern Baptist Convention after a bitter fight in the 1980s, Mr. Huckabee sided with the ruling moderates. Paul Pressler, a former Texas judge who led the conservative Southern Baptist revolt, told me, "I know of no conservative he appointed while he headed the Arkansas Baptist Convention."
With Huckabee starting to pick up support from grassroots conservative voters and activists, it looks as if establishment right-wing leaders are out to quash his ascension by claiming that he is not really conservative at all. And that is not only angering Huckabee, who is complaining that he feels like “a soldier who goes to war and his own army won't give him the supplies he needs to win," but is likely to further exacerbate the tensions between these leaders and those they claim to represent:
[Filipe] Dacosta said he was angry that the Christian-right leadership, particularly FRC's Perkins, Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land and American Values's Gary Bauer, had not only withheld an endorsement of Huckabee but had sent signals before the summit favoring Romney. Dacosta added, "They're trying to force it down our throats. Makes you wonder, why are they doing it? This guy is a billionaire." Dobson also has yet to endorse a candidate. Huckabee's backers are dismayed that so far he's refused to give their man his blessing.…
But the cracks in the Christian right's armor signal discontent between the privileged and the grassroots. The notion that the "grasstops" would shun one of their own because his rival-- a Mormon, no less--has more money is insulting to them. But because they've been persuaded that Democrats are anti-Christian and un-American, they'll be stuck once again with voting for GOP elites, unless Huckabee pulls off an upset.
Dacosta was ready to inflict the punishment he knows will speak to the leadership he believes has betrayed him. "As for Gary Bauer and Tony Perkins," he said, "they will not get another red cent from me."
Posted by Kyle at 4:25 PM | Permalink
September 6, 2007
CFG Fined By FEC
The Citizens Club for Growth has agreed to pay "$350,000 in civil penalties for failing to register as a political committee."
Posted by Kyle at 12:22 PM | Permalink
August 9, 2007
Idaho Congressman: Hindu Prayer, Muslim Rep Will Doom America
Echoing the sentiments of religious-right activists who last month decried a Hindu guest chaplain giving the opening prayer in the Senate, Rep. Bill Sali (R-Idaho) warned that “the protective hand of God” could be lifted. Sali also cited the threat of his Muslim colleague, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota), but unlike comments last December by Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Virginia) linking Ellison to immigration and 9/11, Sali warned that Ellison’s presence, like the Hindu prayer, would displease both America’s founders and God.
"We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes -- and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers," asserts Sali.
Sali says America was built on Christian principles that were derived from scripture. He also says the only way the United States has been allowed to exist in a world that is so hostile to Christian principles is through "the protective hand of God."
"You know, the Lord can cause the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike," says the Idaho Republican.
According to Congressman Sali, the only way the U.S. can continue to survive is under that protective hand of God. He states when a Hindu prayer is offered, "that's a different god" and that it "creates problems for the longevity of this country."
Sali, with the backing of the Club for Growth and a following of social conservatives, won a divisive Republican primary in his GOP district last year, despite warnings from fellow Republicans that Sali was “an absolute idiot.”
Protesters associated with Operation Save America/Operation Rescue disrupted the prayer by Rajan Zed on July 12, attempting to shout the Hindu chaplain down. Other religious-right activists rushed to their defense and attacked the prayer as “idolatry.” Janet Folger said the protestors “are heroes” and “may be what spares us from the judgment of God.” Jan Markell of Olive Tree Ministries warned that “When Israel went straying and worshiping other gods, very, very serious consequences came down upon her,” adding “America is at a turning point” and can expect a “major” terrorist act this summer.
And back in December, as some on the far Right were asserting that newly-elected Rep. Ellison should not be able to pose for a photo op after his swearing-in holding the Koran – or even to serve at all – Rep. Goode joined in, warning his constituents that “if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.” Goode later expanded on his commentary, explaining that “we were not attacked by a nation on 9/11; we were attacked by extremists who acted in the name of the Islamic religion.” Pat Robertson warned in March that Muslim politicians like Ellison want to “take over” and “institute Sharia.”
Posted by Ezra at 10:46 AM | Permalink
August 5, 2007
Huckabee under Fire before Ames Straw Poll
With the upcoming straw poll in Ames, Iowa a make-or-break moment for second-tier GOP presidential candidates – and for Mitt Romney, the only major candidate not to skip the event – tensions at the bottom are flaring up. The Club for Growth -- a group known for translating its strict economic conservatism into large cash expenditures in Republican primaries to weed out so-called “Republicans in Name Only” – has made its first TV ad of the 2008 campaign, spending $85,000 in the Des Moines/Ames market to accuse former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee of “a willingness to slap a tax increase on everything from groceries to nursing home beds.”
Huckabee denied the tax-and-spend charge, which is a rehash of the Club for Growth’s “white paper” against Huckabee from January.
But that’s not Huckabee’s only problem. While Mitt Romney’s campaign has had to deal with anti-Mormon sentiment among some conservative Christians, which many see as parallel to John F. Kennedy facing anti-Catholicism in 1960, one Huckabee supporter decided to turn back the clock, targeting Catholic Sen. Sam Brownback. One Rev. Tim Rude, in an e-mail sent to Iowa Evangelicals, noted that Huckabee, unlike Brownback, is “one of us”:
Huckabee is an evangelical. He has not learned how to speak to evangelicals; i.e. Bush 41 & 43. He is one of us. I know Senator Brownback converted to Roman Catholicism in 2002. Frankly, as a recovering Catholic myself, that is all I need to know about his discernment when compared to the Governor’s. I don’t if this fact is widely known among evangelicals who are supporting Brownback.
Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher, has made much of his pious past. He’s called on religious-right activists choosing candidates “to be Christian leaders, not Republican leaders,” and of the potential nomination of Rudy Giuliani, he said back in April,
I am Christian first; I am a Republican second. And so, my convictions are what led me to the Republican Party. And I am not saying that I would never vote for a person who is different from me, because obviously I have to vote for a lot of people who are different than me and have different views. But my value system is the one thing I have to hold on to. A hundred years from now, which party is in power is not going to make a whole lot of difference, but whether I was true to my moral compass means everything.
Huckabee disavowed Rude’s comments – which was good enough for the Catholic League. But given the stakes for the two long-shot candidates, both competing for the all-important narrow slice of the electorate – conservative Christian Republicans in Iowa – neither is looking to back down. Brownback’s campaign called his apology “tepid,” and Huckabee’s campaign fired back hard – telling Brownback to “stop whining and start showing some of the Christian character he seems to always find lacking in others.”
Posted by Ezra at 9:51 AM | Permalink
July 17, 2007
Club for Growth President: Movement 'All About Protecting Our Christian Heritage'
In 2004 and 2006, the Club for Growth emerged as a major factor in a number of Republican primary races, specializing in challenging incumbents from the Right. The group spent millions in direct contributions and independent advertising to nearly unseat Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter in 2004 and Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee in 2006, and they succeeded in ousting Michigan Rep. Joe Schwarz. Chafee, who narrowly survived the brutal primary challenge only to lose in the general election, accused the Club of backing a hidden social agenda, but the group insisted it was strictly business, with a public focus on advocating for policies like tax cuts on investment income.
But Club for Growth President Pat Toomey struck a different chord speaking at a recent meeting of a Christian conservative group in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he said the Club continues to “scour” for right-wing challengers:
The featured speaker was former U.S. Congressman Pat Toomey, who provided the crowd with an update on the conservative movement.
Toomey lost in the primary Senate race against U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter. He is also the president of the Washington-based conservative group The Club for Growth, which promotes economic freedom and raises funds for conservative candidates.
"It's all about protecting our Christian heritage," Toomey said. "And, a culture that is under assault."
Posted by Ezra at 5:07 PM | Permalink
Older Club for Growth posts: