Tsk, Tsk, Joe Carter
Matt Lewis at Townhall.com is engaged in a bit of a back-and-forth with Huckabee’s new Director of Research, the irascible Joe Carter. Some of his specific points beg for a rebuttal:
While I would like to respond to Carter’s assertion that “The tax burden under Romney was the spending under Rudy were much higher than under Huckabee”—I am having trouble deciphering his creative use of the English language. However, I can say that Rudy Giuliani’s tax cuts far surpassed any tax increases, while Huckabee’s record was exactly the opposite. While we give Huckabee credit for cutting taxes at the beginning of his tenure, Arkansans were faced with a net tax increase under his governorship. If that makes Giuliani the “most fiscally liberal candidate on the GOP side,” what does that make Huckabee?
In an attempt to mix up the name calling, Carter calls the Club for Growth “dishonest hacks" (remind me to include this on our next slur list). I’m still trying to figure out how the Club has been dishonest. To my knowledge, no one from the Huckabee campaign has publicly disagreed with the facts found in our white paper. While Carter may disagree with our analysis of the facts, that does not make the Club dishonest. For example, the Huckabee campaign has not contested the fact that the former governor signed a minimum wage increase and encouraged Congress to do the same; it has not rebutted the fact that Huckabee signed or supported a slew of tax increases; and it has not denied Huckabee’s call for a national smoking ban. It simply disagrees with the Club for Growth’s perception of these positions as negative. Carter is entitled to his opinions, but if he wants to throw around the word dishonest, he ought to back it up with some concrete evidence.
Speaking of dishonest, the Club for Growth PAC is still waiting to hear a response from the Huckabee campaign on why he lied about his 1999 gas tax increase repeatedly on national TV. See here.
It simply isn’t true that Rudy spent more than Dinkins. According to New York City’s Independent Budget Office, average spending under Dinkins was 4.68%. Average spending under Rudy was 2.84%.
While we enjoy a good joke as much as the next guy, the troubling thing about Huckabee’s “Club for Greed” shtick is that he acts and sounds like he believes it. He repeatedly says that he is a “different kind of Republican,” uses class-warfare rhetoric more fitting of John Edwards than a Republican candidate, and implies that the economic conservative principles embraced by the Club for Growth and others are born out of nefarious greed. If Huckabee wants to claim to be an economic conservative while attacking the entire economic conservative movement, then he needs to explain what exactly his version of economic conservatism is.
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