Mike Huckabee. It would hard to be a bigger big-government conservative than the former Arkansas governor. This is, after all, a candidate who devoted an entire section of his book to denouncing economic conservatives and libertarians. He calls the anti-tax Club for Growth the “club for greed.” He supports a national smoking ban. Because he believes that “art and music are as important as math and science” in public schools, he wants these programs funded federally. He supports increased agricultural subsidies generally and ethanol subsidies specifically. While opposing Obamacare, he supported expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and he has been skeptical of most conservative proposals for entitlement reform. His record of tax and spending increases as governor of Arkansas was so bad it earned him an F on the Cato Institute’s governors report card.
Newt Gingrich. Okay, maybe there is a bigger-government conservative than Huckabee. Gingrich was most recently seen in Iowa, where he denounced anyone who opposed ethanol subsidies. On health care, Gingrich has backed an individual mandate, and while Romney can at least claim that his mandate was at the state level, Gingrich supported a federal one. He was also a prominent proponent of George Bush’s Medicare prescription-drug benefit. He has pushed for greater federal involvement in education, once suggesting that the federal government should provide students with a trip to Disneyland in exchange for good grades. And who can forget Gingrich’s tree-hugging summit in New Hampshire with Al Gore? Tea partiers may well question Gingrich’s endorsement of Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave — as speaker he made it mandatory reading for House Republicans — a book that says the U.S. Constitution “is increasingly obsolete, and hence increasingly, if inadvertently, oppressive and dangerous to our welfare.”
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