Huckabee in 08 Race is riding low on Resources

"We're there every day," Huckabee told MSNBC on Wednesday. "There are some news reports that are totally false -- I don't know who's fueling them -- that say that we are pulling out of Florida. And that's total nonsense."

Despite his lack of resources, Huckabee said he is ready to compete in Florida.

Huckabee's inability to turn his under-financed Iowa campaign, backed by a motivated network of evangelicals and home-schoolers, into a broad-based groundswell of support means he is short of campaign cash as he heads into the Florida Republican Primary January 29.

Mike Huckabee is working hard to keep his "scrappy little army" on the march, but with a disappointing second-place finish in South Carolina and in the middle of a resource-draining fight in Florida, the former Arkansas governor is having difficulties keeping his troops moving forward.

"And I think it's just one of those things that we're having to battle back, because we think Florida is in play," Huckabee said. "But we also know there are a whole lot of states out there."

On the campaign trail, Huckabee said he was comfortable with his position.

"Nobody thought we would even be in the game," Huckabee said Tuesday during an anti-abortion rally in Atlanta, Georgia. "People are talking about us in every national poll at either number one or number two. I'd call that a pretty good momentum for us.

"Our scrappy little army's doing pretty well out there on the battlefield," he added.

The signs the Huckabee campaign is starting to hurt for resources, however, are beginning to mount.

On Monday, the campaign announced it had grounded a chartered airplane it had provided to members of the press covering him, and Tuesday, Huckabee's campaign chairman Ed Rollins said Huckabee's top advisers are either working without pay or have left the campaign, according to The Associated Press.

"Most people are staying on," Rollins told the AP, but he said "a number of people, including myself," are forgoing their salaries to allow the campaign to buy television advertising.

Huckabee said the cutbacks just mean he is being prudent financially.

"The reason we cut some cost is because we've always operated in the black, we don't borrow money, unlike some of the other candidates who can write a big fat personal check and pay for everything -- I can't," Huckabee said Tuesday. "So what we recognized was that our primary goal right now is to get nimble, to get quick, to get where we can get from place to place as quickly as possible."

"I think a lot of folks would like to see the next president treat the taxpayers' money as frugally as we're treating campaign money," he said.

The departure of former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson from the Republican presidential race Tuesday may provide new momentum to Huckabee, but there is no guarantee.

With Thompson out, Huckabee is the only Southerner among the top-tier Republican candidates, but the social conservatives who were drawn to Thompson's advocacy of "traditional" social values are just as likely to back former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who has diligently courted social conservatives, as Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher.

"Fred Thompson really made an appeal to social conservatives, and those folks might naturally like Mike Huckabee," said Gloria Borger, CNN senior political analyst. "But Huckabee's campaign is running on fumes right now, and conservatives know it."

Thompson's decision to leave the race after his third place showing in Saturday's Republican primary in South Carolina may have been too late -- at least for Huckabee. Huckabee's loss to McCain, a senator from Arizona, in South Carolina was due to the social conservative vote being split between him and Thompson.

"It would have been helpful if he had done this before. Now if the rest of them will drop out, we'll really be happy," Huckabee joked Tuesday.

"I'm in much better shape than some of the candidates who've spent tens of millions of dollars, and they're way behind us," Huckabee said. "I'd much rather be where I am with the amount of resources we've had than where some of these guys are with the kind of resources they've spent."

While Huckabee supporters hope his message, which mixes conservative social values with economic populism, will spawn another surprise in Florida, the best bet for Huckabee may be for the Republican race to stay jumbled after the Florida primary, when the race moves to the the Super Tuesday contests that include less expensive Southern states such as Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and his home state of Arkansas.

Romney in 08: Running on Family

Maybe Mitt, like GW. Bush, is just a big Daddy's Boy. He's run his campaign, much as Bush has run his presidency, as though the only thing he had to learn from his father were negative lessons. GW. thought his father hadn't pushed hard enough on Iraq and didn't get mean enough to win re-election and a little off base to raise taxes. He was determined to not make those mistakes. Mitt saw his father labeled as a weirdo when he sought the '68 nomination and, at a time when he was a favorite for the nomination, told a Television station, "When I came back from Vietnam, I'd just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get," and that he no longer supported the war.

In his surpassingly disingenuous campaign for president, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has borne only the most superficial resemblance to his father, the late and former governor of Michigan, but starkly different political trajectories. Although he didn't actually march with Martin Luther King, George Romney was the kind of old-style Republican who strongly backed civil rights, became an opponent of Vietnam, and got axed as Nixon's HUD Secretary.

Mitt's campaign has run in the opposite direction: hard right. But until Michigan, his archconservative makeover -- from the fellow who promised to out-gay Teddy Kennedy to the terror-warrior growling about doubling the size of Guantánamo -- hadn't been convincing enough to help him carry a primary. But Romney managed to convert his familiar name into a victory tonight that (at least temporarily) saved his candidacy -- and plunged the already muddled GOP race into a kind of beautiful chaos.

Beautiful, that is, for Democrats.

The oddest thing about Romney's win is that it came in a state in economic crisis -- a place that you'd have expected to overwhelmingly reject a man who made millions as a downsizing consultant. You'd also have expected former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who pushed his economic populism here harder than his Christian Dominionism, to fare better. But there is no explaining Republican voters this year. Not even to themselves.

Huckabee's "Christian Leader" campaign in Iowa, while it worked for the unusually conservative evangelical Republicans there, undoubtedly made most of the independents and evangelical Democrats who might have listened to his economic message in Michigan tune him out for good. And when he starts talking out of the other side of his mouth -- like John Edwards holding forth on "the Two Americas" -- as he did in Michigan, Huckabee clearly confuses a lot of evangelical Republicans as well. He's echoing what many of them have told pollsters for years -- that they're a lot less conservative on economic issues than on the moral wedges -- but it's still a drastically new message, and thus a bit suspicious-sounding. Huckabee's more pragmatic problem in Michigan, of course, was that he couldn't match Romney's months of organizing and advertising, or John McCain's familiarity with the folk he wooed successfully in 2000.

Huckabee in 08: Immigration Standards

"There's a couple of things we're going to do differently," Huckabee told about 300 supporters in Rock Hill, shortly after arriving in the state from Michigan. "I say we ought to put a hiatus on people who come in here ... if they come from countries that sponsor and harbor terrorists."
said Huckabee.
"Every one of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 came here legally. Our government welcomed them in," Huckabee said.
"Let's say, until you get your act in order, and we get our act in order, we're not going to just let you keep coming and threaten the future and safety of America."
Huckabee didn't mention the proposal at his second stop, a rally of about 250 in Sumter. Afterward, his new senior adviser, Jim Pinkerton, backed away from the proposal, saying that Huckabee really meant that wants a "thorough review" of immigration policies.
"It was crazy that of the 9/11 hijackers, they had 63 pieces of fake identification between them, and we're not going to let that happen," Pinkerton said. "Whatever it takes to cease and desist that, he'll do it. "
Last month, Huckabee proposed to seal the Mexican border, hire more agents to patrol it and make illegal immigrants go home before they could apply to return to this country.

Obama in 08: Culture in Washington Must Change

Barack Obama delivered the following remarks on the Senate floor in support of the Honest Government and Leadership Act. This legislation would provide increased transparency and accountability, reduce the influence of special interests, and bring about the concrete changes we need in Washington. Obama joined with Senator Russ Feingold to introduce Lobbying and Ethics Reform Act.

“First, let me commend Senator Reid for his leadership on this bill and especially my good friend Senator Feingold, who I have worked closely with on this issue over the past year and a half.”

“The bill that’s before us today could not be more urgently needed. For too long, the American people have seen lobbyists treat the legislative process like a game, using targeted contributions to maximize their leverage. For too long, people have felt like their voice and their interests have been drowning in a sea of lobbyist money in Washington.”

“This is not the first time we have faced a crisis of confidence in government. Around the turn of the last century, wealth was becoming more concentrated in the hands of a few robber barons, railroad tycoons and oil magnates. It was an era known as the Gilded Age, and it was made possible by a government that played along.”

“But when President Theodore Roosevelt took office, he wouldn’t play along. He devoted his presidency to busting trusts, breaking up monopolies, and doing his best to give the American people a shot at the American dream once more.”

“America needs this kind of leadership more than ever. We need leadership that sees government not as a tool to enrich well-connected friends and high-priced lobbyists, but as the defender of fairness and opportunity for every American.”

“We cannot settle for a second Gilded Age in America. And yet we find ourselves once more in the midst of a new economy where more wealth is in danger of falling into fewer hands; where CEO pay grows from year to year as the average worker’s pay remains stagnant; where Americans are struggling like never before to pay their medical bills, or their kids’ tuition, or high gas prices, all while the profits of the drug and insurance and oil industries have never been higher.”

“And once again, we are faced with a politics that makes all of this possible. In recent years, the doors of Congress and the White House have been thrown wide open to an army of Washington lobbyists who have turned our government into a game only they can afford to play. Year after year after year, they stand in the way of our progress as a country. They stop us from addressing the issues that matter most to our people.”

“Take health care. The drug and insurance industries spent $1 billion in lobbying over the last decade. They got what they paid for when their friends in Congress broke the rules and twisted arms to push through a prescription drug bill that actually made it illegal for our own government to negotiate with the pharmaceutical companies for cheaper drug prices.”

“And because reform has been blocked up to now, there are parents and grandparents in this country who are walking into a drugstore and wondering how their Social Security check is going to cover a prescription that’s more expensive than it was a month ago; those who are being forced to choose between their medicine and their groceries because they can no longer afford both.”

“Let me be clear, I do not begrudge businesses for trying to make a profit, and I do not begrudge them for hiring lobbyists to plead their case before Congress. It is protected political speech, and we appreciate that there are many lobbyists who represent their clients well and fairly. But it’s time we had a Congress that tells the drug companies and the oil companies and the insurance industry that while they may get a seat at the table in Washington, they don’t get to buy every chair.”

“We need to put an end to the prevailing culture in this town. And that’s what we’ve been trying to do for the past couple of years. Last year, Congress came up with a watered-down version of reform. Last year, I and Senator Feingold and Senator McCain, voted against it because we thought we could do better. So in January, I came back with Senator Feingold and we set a high bar for reform. And I’m pleased to report that the bill before us today comes very close to what we proposed.”

“By passing this bill, we will ban gifts and meals and end subsidized travel on corporate jets. We will close the revolving door between Pennsylvania Avenue and K Street. And we will make sure that the American people could see all the pet projects that lawmakers are trying to pass before they are actually voted on.”

“And we’ll do something more. Over the objections of powerful voices in both parties, we’ll ensure that our laws shine a bright light on how lobbyists help fill the campaign coffers of members of Congress by bundling contributions from others. Because in an era in which soft money is prohibited, the real measure of a lobbyist’s influence isn’t how much money he’s contributed, it’s how much he’s raised from others.”

“For too long, this practice has been hidden from public view. But today, we can change that. I’m pleased that the amendment I’ve offered on bundling is part of this bill, and I want to thank Rep. Chris Van Hollen who has fought so hard to get this provision included in the House bill. As the Washington Post described the bundling provision earlier this year: ‘No single change would add more to public understanding of how money really operates in Washington.’”

“So there’s a lot of good in this bill, and I truly hope and believe that it will change the way we do business in Washington. Let’s not forget that there’s more we need to do.”

“One of the things I’ve argued is the necessity of an independent entity to enforce ethics rules in Congress. Because no matter how well we police our own conduct, so long as we’re our own prosecutor, judge, and jury, the public will never have complete trust in our decisions. So far, that’s a fight I’ve lost, but I’ll continue to support independent enforcement because I believe it’s in our nation’s best interests.”

“I also believe that if we’re serious about change, we need to have a real discussion about public financing for congressional elections. Because even if we can stop lobbyists from buying us lunch or taking us out on junkets, they’ll still be able to attend our fundraisers – and that’s access the average American doesn’t have.”

“In our democracy, the price of access and influence should be nothing more than your voice and your vote. That should be enough for health care reform. That should be enough for a real energy policy. That should be enough to ensure that our government is still the defender of fairness and opportunity for every American.”

“It’s time to show the American people that we have the courage to change the prevailing culture in this city. It’s time to give people confidence in their government again. And we have the chance to start doing that with this bill. So I proudly support this legislation.”

More Information Can be found at Obama in 08: Senator of Illinois