By Ronald Brownstein, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Dec. 21, 2007

Pat Toomey, the president of the Club for Growth, a leading group of economic conservatives, doesn't mince words when it comes to Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor whose growing support among Christian conservatives has propelled him into the top tier of contenders for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

	Will small-government and national security conservatives accept a candidate who fits the GOP consensus on social issues but deviates from it on foreign policy and economic issues?

"Aside from the question of abortion and [gay] marriage, I would say Huckabee is probably to the left of virtually the entire field of Republican presidential candidates since Richard Nixon," Toomey said. "He is way outside the mainstream of Republican candidates. If he is nominated, I think it will be devastating to the [Republican] coalition."

Michael Farris, a longtime social conservative activist backing Huckabee, doesn't hide his feelings about the economic conservatives, like Toomey, who are raising escalating alarms about the former governor. "If that crowd says that 'whenever there is a social conservative who [could be] the nominee of this party, we will sabotage them,' they will eventually destroy the Republican coalition," said Farris, the co-founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association.

As those razor-sharp words show, Huckabee's emergence as a serious contender for the Republican nomination is heightening tensions between the two dominant wings of the Republican electoral alliance -- those drawn to the party primarily because of opposition to taxes and government spending, and those who ally with it mostly because of their conservative views on cultural issues such as abortion and gay marriage.

Throughout 2007, most Republicans expected that conflict to crystallize around the candidacy of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Because Giuliani supports abortion rights and opposes a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, his campaign has prompted intense discussion about whether Christian conservatives would accept a candidate who fits squarely within the party's right-leaning mainstream on foreign policy and economic issues but breaks from the conservative consensus on social issues.

Huckabee's rise has unexpectedly presented Republicans with the opposite question: Will small-government and national security conservatives accept a candidate who fits squarely within the party's right-leaning consensus on social issues but deviates from it on foreign policy and, especially, on economic issues?

Huckabee's surge in the polls has been rapid and unanticipated, but it has drawn strength from a generation-long structural change in the GOP coalition: the increasing prominence of less affluent voters who are staunchly conservative on social issues and hawkish on foreign policy, but who are somewhat more open than traditional free-market Republicans to government activism, either to regulate business or to bolster the social safety net.

"As the Republican Party has broadened its reach, it has brought in more diversity on economic issues," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, a nonpartisan organization that analyzes public opinion. "Certainly many of the social conservatives are moderate or lower-middle income folks who believe that government should do some things for them."

Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan targeted many of these same voters with similar themes during his 1992 and 1996 bids for the GOP nomination. But with a much sunnier and more inclusive disposition -- and a more conventionally accomplished résumé -- Huckabee has the potential to attract a considerably broader audience for a message that, like Buchanan's, fuses social conservatism with economic populism.

On social and cultural issues, Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, is so unwaveringly conservative that he has publicly rejected the theory of evolution. He supports a constitutional amendment to ban abortion in all 50 states, opposes embryonic stem cell research and backs another constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

But he raised eyebrows across the party this month with an article in Foreign Affairs in which he accused President Bush of an "arrogant bunker mentality" in foreign policy. More importantly, Huckabee has challenged conservative conventions on economic and regulatory issues as passionately as he has defended them on social issues.

As Arkansas governor from 1996 to 2007, Huckabee signed repeated increases in the state sales tax, as well as increases in gasoline and tobacco taxes. During his two terms, overall state spending increased at three times the rate of inflation, according to an analysis of his record by the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform.

His defenders point out that Huckabee also supported some tax cuts in Arkansas. And as a presidential candidate, Huckabee has tried to court economic conservatives by signing the ATR pledge not to raise federal income tax rates. Huckabee is also touting a consumption tax, which some conservative thinkers favor, as a replacement for the progressive income tax.

But none of this has mollified critics like Toomey. They argue that Huckabee's true fiscal attitudes are revealed by his willingness to accept tax increases in Arkansas. "We think that what people have done in office is a lot more important than what they promise they'll do in the future," Toomey said.

Besides the dispute over taxes, Huckabee has also embraced a more activist role for Washington than economic conservatives prefer on an array of other domestic issues. He supports mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (through a "cap and trade" system), and he backed the recently approved federal legislation requiring significant increases in automotive fuel efficiency. Alone among the Republican contenders, he said he would not have vetoed the legislation that Bush has now twice rejected to increase funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

Huckabee has separated himself from the field most dramatically by questioning free trade and denouncing widening income inequality -- particularly the rise in compensation for top corporate mangers -- in bitingly populist language that wouldn't sound misplaced in a John Edwards speech. "If you really want to make a true economic disaster, I think it... [would come by] giving people $200, $300 million bonuses at the same time that their workers are taking 40 percent pay cuts," he insisted earlier this month on CNBC.

Such declarations are fingernails on the blackboard for economic conservatives. But the audience inside the GOP for Huckabee's brand of class-conscious cultural orthodoxy may be widening with the growth of the party's white, working-class constituency -- a group that Atlantic editors Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat (adapting a phrase from Minnesota Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty) have christened, "Sam's Club Republicans."

Overall, more Republican voters than a generation ago call themselves conservatives, according to the authoritative biannual surveys conducted by the University of Michigan. And on many -- perhaps most -- issues there is broad consensus within the party: In a comprehensive Pew survey of underlying American attitudes last March, for instance, nearly three-fourths of Republicans agreed that the best way to ensure peace is through military strength. A similar number said they opposed gay marriage.

But on questions relating to government activism, trade and attitudes toward business, there are larger cracks in the Republican consensus. And those cracks follow the divide between the traditional upscale Republicans and the more recent arrivals from "Sam's Club." In the Pew survey, less than one-fifth of Republicans who considered themselves professionals preferred a larger government offering more services to a smaller government; but about twice as many working-class Republicans preferred a larger government. Similarly, while only about two-fifths of Republican professionals said they thought business corporations made too much profit, more than three-fifths of working-class Republicans expressed that concern. Conversely, working-class Republicans were more likely than their professional counterparts to support further limits on access to abortion.

The Club for Growth, whose political action committee has funded a succession of primary challenges since 2000 against Republicans it considers too tolerant of tax increases, is running television advertisements in Iowa and South Carolina criticizing Huckabee's fiscal record in Arkansas. (Toomey said the group has already spent "well over $300,000" and "will probably be adding to that soon.") Many analysts, such as Kohut and Republican pollster Whit Ayres, think that effort is unlikely to dislodge many of the socially conservative voters now flocking to the former governor. "I think there are more social conservatives that think like he does than think like the Club for Growth on these issues," said Farris, the home-schooling activist backing Huckabee.

Indeed, when Huckabee recently campaigned in Greenville, S.C., a hotbed of evangelical political activism, it was his social views that appeared to attract most of those who attended. His economic record wasn't as much of a red flag as his critics might hope.

Jackie Poole, a sign-maker attending the event, said she liked Huckabee mostly because "he's supporting getting God back into the country... instead of taking it away from us." She was not as concerned as the Club for Growth about the tax increases Huckabee accepted in Arkansas. "There's going to be taxes no matter what," she said. "If you have to raise taxes to build bridges, you know, so be it. We don't need to drive across unsafe bridges. If we have to raise taxes for schools... [well], if it has to be, it has to be."

Still, to seriously contest for the nomination, Huckabee will need to expand beyond social conservatives like Poole, because economic conservatives primarily motivated by opposition to taxes and spending still constitute a majority of the party, noted Ayres, who is not affiliated with any of the 2008 contenders. And the criticism from economic conservatives such as the Club for Growth -- as well as the repeated salvos from Mitt Romney on fiscal issues and immigration -- may limit Huckabee's ability to advance past his beachhead with conservative Christians. "If Huckabee finds himself in a one-on-one race that is at all typical of a [traditional] national Republican electorate, he is going to have to expand his coalition beyond social conservatives to win," Ayres said flatly.

If Huckabee does win the Republican nomination, Democrats are likely to argue that he is a populist more in word than deed, and that his principal domestic initiative -- the consumption tax -- would shift more of the tax burden onto the working families he claims to champion. But in a Republican context, Huckabee represents an unmistakable step away from the small-government orthodoxy that has dominated the party since Ronald Reagan. The next few weeks will reveal how many Republican voters are willing to walk with Huckabee down that road -- and measure how much the arrival of the "Sam's Club Republicans" has changed the GOP's balance of power.

National Journal/NBC reporter Adam Aigner-Treworgy, traveling with Mike Huckabee, contributed to this report.