Capers With Carroll

It is housekeeping day here at Capers, having been out of town for four out of the last five weekends and a full half of the weekends since my last post (Aug. 28). I have not gone ten postless weeks for lack of something to say. These were the ten final weeks of the most interesting (albeit frustrating) election of my lifetime. As theater I give it five stars. The same ten weeks also saw an economic ("collapse?" "adjustment?" Choose one.) that I have been expecting since the late 1970s.

However, in August I began a new and strenuous teaching assignment. There’s something about teaching middle school, having to be constantly up for a straight eight hours, that leads to collapse when the kids go home. It’s hard to get much done in the evenings, even to grade papers. I’m also studying for an upcoming exit exam for my master’s program. Then, in October, I married off two of my sons. One of those weddings took us to China for seven days. (More on the weddings when I can sit here a little longer.)

So today I am tidying up. Wednesday I removed the McCain/Palin and “Vote Pro-Life” posters from my front yard. Vandals had relieved me of some of my task. I understand a local high school teacher gave extra credit points as a bounty for students to bring in the campaign posters of those on the Left’s blacklist. Had I done the same for my side, I would have been suspended without pay. What are we teaching our children?

Today, I am taking down the McCain poster (I never had time to change it to McCain Palin after the convention) that I’ve had in my sidebar since the California primary (where it replaced the Huckabee poster I hung up in January). It’s part of making my transition from McCain Partisan to Obama’s Loyal Opposition. He will be my president, and I want him to be successful. A failure for any president is also a failure for the whole country. I am committed to speak ill only of his policies, and not his person. I am committed to representing him in the best light possible to my middle school students. I am committed to pray that God will grant him wisdom and stamina. However, where he has made unfortunate promises to interest groups, I will pray that he has the fortitude to stand up to them and explain that their desires are not in the best interests of the country.

I must admit, I am only a short way into the grieving process. Obama’s election has been bitter for me to accept. Every vote I have cast since 1980 has been animated by my opposition to legalized abortion. Yet this election moves America’s most extreme pro-abortion voting record from the Senate to the White House. I fear the incremental Pro-life gains accomplished in 28 years and in all 50 states will be entirely lost even before the next mid-term elections. Obama has promised to do just that. I fear the coming Supreme Court will deliver disaster upon disaster throughout the rest of my life. Conditions will require a whole new level of commitment from those of us in the Pro-Life Movement. And yet, our own internal ethic refuses to allow us the kind of reactions displayed now by those who stole my lawn signs and who will seek once again to overturn a clear vote by the people. Somehow, when the same left-leaning voters who gave Obama a 60.9% statewide majority also vote to join the unanimous chorus of all 30 states whose citizens have ever voted on a definition of marriage, those in the streets try to insist that it is the majority which is out step with the mainstream. Go figure.

So I am mowing the lawn, sweeping out the pool, sorting the laundry, and getting ready to cull from among the 700 photographs I took in China.

If you watch carefully, a few of the keepers might even show up here

The Faith of Barack Obama
By Stephen Mansfield
192 pages
Thomas Nelson (August 5, 2008)
ISBN-10: 1595552502
List Price $19.99

“And you know something is happening
but you don't know what it is
do you, Mr. Jones?” Bob Dylan (1965)

When Bob Dylan first sang “Ballad of a Thin Man,” I was fourteen and attending a Methodist church in California, not unlike the Methodist church sixteen-year-old Hillary Rodham was attending in Chicago. Barack Obama was four, growing up with an atheist single-mother in Hawaii. During the years I spent at UCLA and Hillary divided between Wellesley and Yale, Obama lived in Indonesia, attending the mosque with his folk-Muslim step-father. So, by all odds, which of the three should be the Democratic nominee for president tonight?

Win or lose in November, Barack Obama has already become the most interesting biography of 2008, and (more-so than for the great majority of politicians) it is a faith-centered biography. I will admit, Obama’s faith provides me with a Mr. Jones moment, but though I may not like it, I want very much to understand it. When publisher Thomas Nelson offered free copies to bloggers who would read and review the book, I jumped at the opportunity.

With The Faith of Barack Obama, Stephen Mansfield has given us a quick introduction to the man, his faith, and the religious contexts of American politics in 2008. It is 30 pages shorter than the similar book he wrote about the faith of George W. Bush, but that book came after Bush had already served one term as president. This book made it into print during the short interval between the end of the primary season and this month’s convention. For that reason it sometimes reads like a long magazine article. Mansfield bases his study on Obama’s books and speeches; interviews with Obama staff, associates, and academics who have studied the senator; and published articles about Obama. But apparently Mansfield never had an opportunity to sit down with the candidate. As such, the book complements but does not replace such events as the interview at Saddleback Church, which occurred too late to be included in the book.

A look at Mansfield’s other work suggests he was much more at home writing about Bush than Obama, but he does a remarkable job of setting aside his personal preferences and doing justice to the Democratic candidate. He takes the time to address blogosphere myths and deflate them. The faith of Barack Obama is Christian, not Muslim. Mansfield argues it was never even sufficiently Muslim that any Muslim could now argue that Obama was an apostate. While I accept his argument on that, it is worth noting that in most of the Muslim world, having once been registered as a Muslim, it is illegal to change a registration and become Christian in the eyes of the law. In the unlikely event that Obama returned to take up residence in Indonesia, he would not be able to reregister as a Christian. However, what is more disturbing to an Evangelical like myself (and Mansfield simply lays out the facts, without making any judgment) is that Obama’s faith journey has brought him to universalism, a belief that while he has chosen Christianity for himself, other paths work just as well for other people. What did not come out of the Saddleback interview, where (to a Christian audience) Obama gave an Evangelical explanation of his personal salvation, is that he is just as comfortable with a Muslim or Buddhist explanation for someone else.

Mansfield gives considerable attention to Obama’s relationship to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and to the larger currents of Afro-American theology as they’ve developed over the last forty years. Again, Mansfield lays out the facts without judgment, and that theology is no more twisted than an equivalent slice of White God-and-County Evangelicalism, but there is much to make me grimace there, as well. If this is God’s corrective, then my reaction is not unlike the prophet Habakkuk, who when he complained that God was standing idle in the face of egregious Hebrew sin was sent reeling by God’s answer that He was preparing to bring the Babylonians against Israel. The ways of God are not the ways of man.

A shorter section of the book attempts to define the currents in contemporary American Christianity by identifying one each with Obama, Hillary, John McCain, and George Bush (I would have thought to use Mike Huckabee). This section is interesting, but less convincing. For Obama, the salient point it develops is that the Democratic candidate sees government as an agent of God, capable of implementing God’s righteous on earth. For the Democratic Party—which for thirty years has seemed to consider God an enemy—this may be a major innovation. In a previous post, I noted how Obama reminds me of Woodrow Wilson, who likewise saw government as a civil Christianity. I believe much good came out of Wilson’s administration, but also much that we would live to regret. Perhaps that can be said of any administration, short of Christ’s millennial reign.

I sensed Mansfield’s concluding chapter drifting. I suspect I would have done the same. For one thing, we are still so much in the thick of the moment. For another, any Evangelical trying to look at Obama without being judgmental must expend enormous energy sitting on his own hands.

America has made a cottage industry of dissecting the religious faiths of Dead White Presidents. Mansfield is breaking welcome ground with an attempt to describe the living faith of an American who might be our next leader. I will not vote for Obama, but I now understand him better. There is much about him to respect, as well as much to make me think he is the oncoming Babylonian judgment of God. Only a small portion of that feeling comes from reading Mansfield’s book, but it’s a portion I’m glad I have.

Previous Post: Ruminations of Ingrid, Berlin, and Obama

For me, a frantic August is approaching its close (after a thirteen year hiatus I am back to teaching 8th grade U.S. History), but I am still chewing over two sets of images from July.

The first set grew out of the liberation of Ingrid Betancourt and for a glimmer of hope that Colombia’s forty-year civil war might soon come to a peaceful end. By coincidence, at the moment news hit the streets of the Colombian Army’s audacious scam on Betancourt’s FARC captors, my Colombian-born son was back in Bogotá, the first visit there by any member of my family for the same thirteen-years mentioned above. My son had taken his girlfriend to Colombia, and to a mountaintop overlooking Bogotá, to propose marriage. (She accepted!)

On the night my son was born, just as the obstetrician made the decision to deliver the baby by cesarean, an ambulance rushed in with a senator who had lost much of his face to an assassination attempt. While medical personnel turned their attention to the senator*, my wife waited on a gurney somewhere in the inner sanctum of the hospital and I roamed halls full of live TV reporting. An angry crowd filled the parking lot, shouting imprecations against the perpetrators. I spent the wee hours of the morning pondering what the future might hold for my son, for Colombia, and for a world polarized (at that time) into free democracies and Marxist totalitarian regimes. That the wounded senator was also a leader of the Colombian Communist Party did not override the human bond. I wrote a note of sympathy and handed it to the senator’s wife. In my mind, we were all in this together.

The second set of images centers around Barack Obama’s speech in front of Berlin’s Tiergarten Siegessäule, and the 200,000 Berliners who turned out to provide him with rock star adulation.

The Siegessäule, or “Victory Column,”
surrounded by scaffolding during my
second trip to Berlin, in 1976.

All by themselves, Berlin and the Tiergarten bring back powerful personal memories. In 1972, I made my first trip to Berlin, then a divided city. On a foggy October night, I walked several miles along the western side of the Wall, suddenly coming upon the burnt-out hull of the Reichstag building, still boarded up from the 1933 fire that Adolf Hitler used as an excuse to shut down Germany’s parliament and place the blame on the Communists. The next day I climbed a tower near where, nine years before my visit, John F. Kennedy declared Berlin to be the definitive case study of the differences between Communism and the Free World. Ecstatic crowds showered Kennedy's entourage with flowers, rice and torn paper. Almost like adulation for a rock star.



From the tower, I spent several hours studying No-Man’s Land and pondering the nature of the world in which we lived. Then I snuck into a Tiergarten thicket and rolled out my sleeping bag for the night.

Fifteen years later, Ronald Reagan would come to the same spot to challenge Mikhail Gorbachev to tear the wall down. Of course, on the eve of Reagan’s visit 25,000 Germans rioted in anger.

It seems to me Berliners have a very poor record for recognizing the U.S. presidents who served even Germany's best interests. The Wall had gone up thirty-nine days after the newly inaugurated JFK’s first meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. In Vienna, the Soviet dictator gave JFK a tongue-lashing for which he had no comeback, leading Khrushchev to size-up Kennedy as inexperienced and naïve. Khrushchev decided he could get away with both building the Wall and planting missiles in Cuba. Kennedy performed well in answering those challenges, but a better job in Vienna might have preempted them altogether. Ultimately, the Wall only came down some two years after Reagan gave his challenge, and it fell due to conditions Reagan was one of the few to foresee.

In 2000, I went back to Berlin. I wanted to show my children where the Wall had once stood. I happened to be standing near the Brandenburg Gate at the moment French President Jacques Chirac arrived to visit German Chancelor Gerhard Schröder, to join him in walking under the Brandenburg Gate, and into the Reichstag building, where he addressed Germany's parliament. Symbolically, it not only brought the Cold War to its final punctuation, but it completed a normalization of French-German relations that erased Hitler and all the memories that his name brings to mind.



Others have pointed out the parallels between Kennedy’s eagerness to meet with Khrushchev and Obama’s offer to meet with leaders like Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It’s true, I don’t see John McCain making the same mistake. However, the parallels I see match Obama more with President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, a progressive and a university president, leapt to the presidency after two years as governor of New Jersey. As an academic, he’d written the standard college text on the workings of Congress. As war broke out in Europe, he ran for reelection as a peace candidate, even as he understood there would be war. He led us into that war, calling it “The War to End All Wars.” Then, with the war won, he toured Europe to rock-star adulation. He carried with him a remarkable set of progressive ideals, but in the hard bargaining at Versailles, he could not sell them, even to the friends who owed us the most. He won the war and lost the peace. With all that European adulation, he could not draw the European leadership into decisions for their own best interests, and for all his knowledge of Congress, he could not talk them into buying the meager treaty he could bring home. One has to admire his attempt, but his failure guaranteed the outbreak of World War II. At Versailles, he may also have set the stage for my generation’s war in Vietnam by snubbing Ho Chi Minh and that nation’s aspirations for independence.

There is a fascinating moment in Ingrid Betancourt’s interview with Al Jazeera in which she describes the campaign for the Colombian presidency that she was waging at the time she was kidnapped. She believed as president she could negotiate with the FARC. Betancourt stops and asks the Al Jazeera interviewer for the English equivalent of the French word ingénue. “Naïve,” she is told. “Yes, I was naïve,” she answers. In fact, she was glad hard-liner Alvaro Uribe was elected. He had served the country well in standing up to FARC. In a different interview right after her release, she reported that FARC had counted on the Colombian electorate alternating between hard-line and “Peace” presidents. FARC's leadership assumed they could hunker down during the hard-line administrations and recover and thrive while stringing along the presidents who were willing to negotiate. What they had not counted on, and could not recover from, was the constitutional change that allowed Uribe a second term.

This is my worry about Barack Obama: Momentum has shifted in our favor in Iraq, but we have paid too high a price to win the war and then lose the peace. We have also forced Al Qaida to hunker down, but it is naïve to think that like the FARC, they haven’t planned a rebound as soon as the U.S. elects a “Peace” president. On Colombia, Obama and congressional Democrats seem even more eager to let the FARC enjoy enough of a breather to get up from the mat.

I will have more thoughts on Barack Obama in my next post.

*(The Colombian senator was Hernando Hurtado, targeted by a dissident member of FARC. Mrs. Hurtado could not risk a paper trail leading back to a North American serving with an Evangelical mission, but somewhere I still have an oblique and unsigned telegram of appreciation.)

I continue to marvel at this, the most interesting election cycle in my half-century of personal memory. Turn-outs continue heavy in both parties. If Democracy’s most dangerous enemy is apathy, then our Democracy is healthier today than at anytime I can remember.

The earlier California primary, as part of Super Tuesday, no doubt helped increase turnout here. For at least the last five or six cycles, the candidates had already been crowned by the time California voted. I’ve always voted anyway, but it’s more tempting to be ornery with one’s vote when the contest has already been settled. I don’t think a national primary is the answer. Success for a candidate like Mike Huckabee (or on the other side, a Bill Richardson or Dennis Kucinich, if one of them had lit a fire) is only possible when the opening rounds of the cycle can be contested without the massive amounts of money that would be required for a national campaign. I like the first primaries to be in very small states—not necessarily Iowa and New Hampshire—but states where a lesser-known and poorly funded candidate can invest time and meet thousands of voters in less scripted environments.

Money will always be a factor in politics, as will media favoritism. Somehow, our system must include Iowa/New Hampshire style contests early in the cycle, where real voters can sit down and study the candidates up close. Perhaps this responsibility should be distributed by lottery to other small, compact states.

This year, more states have moved away from winner-take-all primaries and to proportional awarding of delegates. That improves the chances of the people’s preferences actually being heard.

If there’s another change I’d like to see, I’m not convinced that a caucus system serves as well as a secret ballot, and I know our current ballots don’t serve as well as an Australian-style ballot. Let’s say, for example, I’m a California Republican and of the original handful of candidates, the field has been narrowed to four (Huckabee, McCain, Romney, and Paul). On an Australian ballot, I can indicate that my 1st choice is Huckabee, 2nd is McCain, and 3rd I might even have put Sam Brownback, who had already dropped out, but who earned my support through long years of leading the campaign against legalized abortion. In counting those votes, in my congressional district, it would be recorded that 16.3 % of the voters made Huckabee their first choice. However, since that ranked him in third place, each of those ballots would then be retabulated according to the voters’ second choices. In my case, I had already guessed that Huckabee was not a contender in my district. Therefore, I voted for my 2nd choice as my only choice. In the end, my district was still one of only two that Romney took from McCain (36.1 % to 35.7 %, a mere 216 votes), but McCain did well enough elsewhere to become the presumptive candidate, and Huckabee did well enough to be the last challenger standing. (Ironically, having run a low budget campaign from the beginning, Huckabee was ready to carry on when the burn-rate got too expensive for the high-budget campaigns.)

So I’m feeling pretty good about our Democracy these days. At this time last year, the money and the media were telling us that Clinton and Giuliani would have it all sewed up by this time, unless Romney’s personal fortune gave him traction against Giuliani. However, the voters in each party have decided to take things into their own hands. I can understand the states with later primaries feeling resentful that the decisions may have been made before they get to vote (though the Clinton/Obama race looks like it will go to the wire). As a Californian, I’ve felt that way often. Perhaps we need a lottery system that apportions the fifty-some primaries at two-to-ten per week over a ten-week period of time.

I am also feeling very good about my choices for November. At this point, I would like to see a McCain/Huckabee ticket. It can even be in that order. Good men, both of them.

First a little humor:
This morning I stumbled upon a site which combines a Latino viewpoint with a little whimsical irreverence. For example European Non-Girly Man In Charge Of Huge, Basically Mexican Hacienda Sin Bandera State Expected To Endorse Panamanian For Casa Blanca That, of course, refers to our Austrian-born Governator who recently came out for McCain (born while his father was a U.S. navy officer stationed in Panama) over Romney (whose father was born in Mexico of Mormon missionary parents). Or this one in a similar vein: Cubans Choose Panamanian Over Mexican American to be Next President Outlived by Fidel Castro

Yesterday I saw my first yard poster (Romney). As far as I’ve been able to see, my Huckabee bumper sticker (that I mailed away for, Jan 18th) is the only bumper sticker in Tulare or Fresno Counties, for any candidate, in either party. I don’t watch television, so maybe that’s where all the action is.

On January 19th, I signed up as the 8th member of the Tulare County for Mike Huckabee Meetup. I am still the newest member. No meetings are scheduled. On the Huckabee national website, the pre-Super Tuesday action all seems to be in Georgia, with maybe some spillover into Tennessee or Alabama. In news stories, the spin seems to be that by staying in the race, Huckabee is stealing away the conservative votes that rightfully belong to Romney.

Well, no. I was grateful to the voters of Florida for eliminating Giuliani, who had been my worst case scenario for most of last year, but that pops up Romney as next on my list. I’m not one of these people who hammer a politician for changing an occasional position (for example, slamming McCain because he now supports keeping a tax cut that he voted against six years ago). Goodness, do we want a leader who’s not allowed to rethink anything? On the other hand, Romney wants us to believe he rethought everything—that the only thing he retains from the first 25 years of his adulthood is his ability to handle money. On everything else, he’s done 180º.

I could still change, but if Huckabee isn’t contesting California, this social conservative is voting for McCain.

I am still thinking through the proposal—recently endorsed by Gov. Huckabee—to require (within 120 days)all (say, 12 to 16 million) illegal aliens to return to their country of origin and go to the back of the line to await immigration and green cards. (Total disclosure: one Brazilian son-in-law and one Chinese soon-to-be daughter-in-law could eventually be waiting in those same lines.) Unfortunately, it throws into doubt my whole opinion of Huckabee, and has me taking a more careful look at John McCain.

Yesterday I mentioned the havoc we could expect in our already-depressed housing and banking sectors if all those people were forced to default on their mortgages or leases, or move out of their rentals. Added to that, I’m trying to decide whether all those (and by definition, if we use the term illegal, we are already calling them outlaws) with auto loans would politely park their cars back at the dealerships, or use their cars to drive back across the border. I am reminded of an answer Mao Tse-tung gave when asked how China would respond to an invasion from the Soviet Union. “On the first day,” said Mao, “We would surrender 100,000,000 people. On the second day, we would surrender 200,000,000 people. On the third day we would surrender 300,000,000 people. On the fourth day, Russia would give up.” Is Sears ready to repossess even 100,000 refrigerators and washing machines?

Anyone calling for the 120-day removal of 12 to 16 million members of our economy is thinking in terms of faceless numbers, and not people. When I think of individual people whom I have known and yet who fall within that statistic, one that comes to mind is Araceli, a junior high student I had in the early 80’s. For class, she wrote me an essay about being smuggled back into the U.S. after a Christmas trip to visit her grandparents in Mexico. Her parents owned (I’m sure in cooperation with a bank) a home. She had been in U.S. schools since kindergarten. After high school, she earned a license to work in elder-care, and the last time I saw her (18 years ago), she was working in a large assisted-living facility. She would now be forty-something, a productive member of our society, and (on 120 day’s notice!) sent back to live in a country she has only visited for Christmas. Who will replace her at the elder-care facility? Will adding her house to the over-supply of unsold houses help our economy? Which country will benefit most from using the skills we paid to educate her with? Multiply that 12 or 16 million times and we are talking about a self-inflicted Katrina.

So let’s examine the scarlet lettered A-word: Amnesty. When are amnesties appropriate? And when do they fail? Between 1862 and 1872, the United States under Presidents Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant offered ten separate amnesties, the first targeted to tempt active rebel soldiers back to the Union, and the last to return full citizenship to even the most high ranking former Confederates. Today, almost everyone would accept the wisdom of those amnesties, even where men had actually taken up military arms against the federal government. We’ll call that a success.

For nine years, I lived in Colombia, South America. While there, I taught Colombian history, a history marked by nearly continuous armed rebellions for almost the entire past 200 years. Amnesty is simply a part of their cycle. As generations of middle aged rebels become tired of the life of war, they accept an amnesty and a plot of government land, and a new generation of rebels takes up the warfare. We’ll call that a failure.

The difference is that the successful amnesty did not encourage a new infusion of individuals into an activity the government hoped to curtail. For an immigration amnesty to work, the United States has to have a solid fence. But once we have that fence, we ought to make every effort to make citizens of the people who are actually here.

The nice thing about politics is that once someone (a blogger, for example) has publicly declared themselves as a supporter, there is always the possibility for egg on the face when that candidate swerves one way or the other. Over the last week, it would seem that Mike Huckabee has moved more in the direction of being “tough” on immigration. I find that unfortunate. One of the things I found appealing about Huckabee in the first place was that he seemed more moderate than some of the other candidates for the nomination. As mentioned previously (even in another post today), I have been a serious student of movements and migrations of people for forty years. Oftentimes when populations have clashed, the solutions imposed by the dominant group have backfired. For example, at the very time Spain and Portugal were importing enormous wealth from the New World, they expelled all the Jews and Muslims from Iberia. Only later did it become obvious that they had eliminated entire segments of their economy. Most of that gold and silver wound up in the hands of merchants in Holland. Spain and Portugal went from world-class powers to also-rans.

Likewise, I find the following proposal, currently on the Huckabee site, very short sighted:
Propose to provide all illegal immigrants a 120-day window to register with the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services and leave the country. Those who register and return to their home country will face no penalty if they later apply to immigrate or visit; those who do not return home will be, when caught, barred from future reentry for a period of 10 years.
This is not a "touchback" provision. Those who leave this country and apply to return from their home country would go to the back of the line.

So, let’s see now: At the very time when our housing market is teetering on the brink of pulling our economy into a full recession or worse, we are going to take 16 million people who are currently either renting or making payments on houses, and we are going to send them away, throwing those additional houses into foreclosure and further aggravating a situation where too many houses are sitting empty.

We are going to suddenly reduce school enrollments—midyear—thereby throwing school districts into situations where they cannot fulfill contracts to their teachers.

Etc. I've listed only the first two that come to mind.

Yes, we ought to build a secure fence. Yes, we should cut off the flow of new crossings. But before we send all of them home, let's recognize that these people are CURRENTLY integrated into our economy. The process to change that is called disintegration. Why would we want to apply the process of disintegration to our economy, and on a 120 day deadline?

Going back to age 14, I have never missed a California primary.

In 1964, as a reporter for the junior high newspaper, I interviewed New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. I asked him what options were open to a person still too young to vote. He recommended studying the issues and volunteering at some candidate’s headquarters.

When I was 18, a voter had to be at least 21 (as opposed to when I was 21, when a voter only needed to be 18), but even while denied the ballot in 1968, I attended primary rallies and shook hands with Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, and—as I had four years earlier—Nelson Rockefeller. (That November, I licked envelopes at Nixon headquarters.) In 1972, I served on the UCLA committee to elect Shirley Chisholm. (Yeah, I was exploring my political identity.) Even when I was out on the Colombian Llanos (1988, 1992), I paid attention to the campaigns, and voted by absentee ballot in the primary.

So this week it was with some consternation that I woke up to the fact that the California Primary is sixteen days away—and this is happening in a year in which the California Primary will carry more weight than in any year since 1968.

Yesterday, I went on line searching for a local “Committee to Elect Mike Huckabee.” At the national Huckabee Campaign Website, I found a list of states where I could potentially volunteer. The option closest to my home is Oklahoma.

The closest thing I could find to a local entity was a web-based mikehuckabee group on meetup.com. I am now the eighth member of the Tulare County group, but it looks like two of the eight are organizers coming down from Clovis, and one has an address in Orange County. Beside “Our Next Meetup,” is the notation “None Scheduled.” However, newspapers reported that in Michigan, the Huckabee campaign had spent no money, hired no staff and had no office until six days before the primary. He still gathered 16% of the vote, for third place. In South Carolina, the Huckabee campaign had only a state manager and two paid staff members until about three weeks before the primary. He drew 30% and finished just behind McCain’s 33%. At this point, I’d have to call McCain the front runner (and I could happily vote for McCain in November), but I’m thinking this might be a rollicking fun sixteen days.