Huck and Mitt Need to Go Away

I think Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are both good men, and they both need to withdraw from Republican presidential politics.

The running gun battles between the Huck and Mitt camps are not healthy for the conservative movement. Huck is a slick, smiling gut-fighter who easily lapses into thinly disguised anti-Mormon conceit and liberal tinged populism. Mitt is a wildly successful businessman who is also an ideological chameleon.

I am tired of the bickering between these two men and their fervid supporters. Like matches and gasoline, each man is good in his own way, but mixed together they cause a conflagration that can only damage the conservative movement. And the arguments that spring up around this dreadful duo traffic in religion and personality rather than substantive issues. The ongoing argument has devolved into a third-world political mudball fight where the faithful worship their political idol and smear and demean the opponent. Viva Huck! Mitt is el diablo!

We need substantive debates on core issues, not personality contests. And these two shape-shifters and their cohorts have generated light and heat and sparks but very little substance.

And for this reason I also believe we need to take a cold-eyed view of Sarah Palin. She is a woman of great accomplishment, but we need to drop the mythology and ask if she really has the foreign policy credentials to be president.

Let's be honest, president Bush had no foreign policy experience, and I think that worked against him and the nation. President-Elect Obama does not, but it remains to be seen how that will work out. If it works out well for him, then Sarah Palin can make a case for herself by pointing to President Obama's success in spite of his inexperience. She can then make a case based on judgment and her Alaska record, which I think would put her in good stead.

We need to drop the politics of personality and judge our candidates on the merits of their ideas and experience.