Talker Mike Gallagher gets Mike Huckabee Wrong

In his townhall.com blog today, in a piece called “Iowa is no Florida” talk show host Mike Gallagher criticizes all the vitriolic huckicide bombers (as I call them) for trashing Mike Huckabee.

But then he totally turns Huckabee’s message upside down himself, based on Huck’s appearance the other night on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

On the show (and you can link to the YouTube video of it via mikehuckabee.com), Mike Huckabee spoke of why he got into politics, having considered being a clergyman being “in the stands”, rather than on the playing field.

Gallagher jumps all over this metaphor, attributing to Huckabee the belief that government is the solution to peoples’ problems. Gallagher actually called Huckabee a “big government liberal.”

I guess Gallagher must have turned the show off early. He must have, in order to miss the absolutely unmistakable Huckabee message that government is the problem—not the solution (like Ronald Reagan used to say).

A bit later in the show, Huckabee gave the example of a voter he had met in New Hampshire; a factory worker who had signed on for an extra shift to help his daughter through graduate school at Cornell. The voter complained that working the extra shift put him in a higher tax bracket, so that most of that extra money went to the IRS. Huckabee then suggested that the man would make out better financially by quitting both shifts—stop working altogether—so that his daughter could qualify for government assistance for graduate school. Huckabee then rightly concluded that this was “nutty”.

Next, Huckabee talked about how difficult it is now for a man starting a small business, having to worry about his biggest competitor not being a rival business, but the government!

And let’s not forget that Mike Huckabee is the only one of the top five candidates who supports the Fair Tax: That is, replacing the income tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, etc, with a single consumption tax on retail sales. And because the tax would only be on what you spend—not on what you earn—the government would no longer have any business knowing what you make, from whom and for what. Now, getting rid of the IRS—part and parcel of the Fair Tax plan—is about THE most effective way of getting big government out of our lives. (And by the way, Mike Huckabee found the time in his Tonight Show appearance to talk about that, too. And what applause from the audience at the idea of eliminating the IRS!)

So here’s a question for you, Mike Gallagher: How come all those other leading GOP candidates, who all like to call themselves real fiscal conservatives, are in favor of keeping the IRS intact?

No doubt about it: Mike Huckabee is a small government, low tax conservative. Just go back and watch the whole 13-minute tonight show segment, Mike Gallagher.

And when you’ve finished that, spend another half hour and watch Mike Huckabee’s appearance on Meet the Press, where he is relentlessly grilled by Tim Russert.