Capers With Carroll

Can't Wait Till Christmas
by Mike Huckabee

• Reading level: Ages 4-8
  
• Hardcover: 32 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Juvenile (October 5, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399255397
• ISBN-13: 978-0399255397

With back-to-back best-sellers about Christmas, one might believe that Mike Huckabee was an active candidate for Santa Claus, rather than an unannounced candidate for President of the United States. The two roles have several similarities.

For starters, both Santa and presidential campaigners come with fictions that everyone recognizes, but with which all participants play along. In this case, we have the fiction that Huckabee has not decided whether or not to run. Like sports seasons, campaigns break down into practice games, league play, and a national championship. During preseason play, candidates romance the voters with the fantasy that they have not made up their minds about running. For Huckabee to say he’s not running is comparable to the San Diego Padres saying, “It hurt a lot last year to get beat in the play-offs by the Giants, so we’re coming to Spring Training this year, but we haven’t decided yet whether we will play any regular season games.” While it’s true that candidates may drop out at any time (and at a rate of about one every-other week during primary season), about a dozen Republicans could now be described as running until-they-are-forced-to-drop-out. In this pack, Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich stand out as the leaders.

In 2009, I supported Huckabee in the primaries and waited for him to make a local appearance, if not in Visalia, then in Fresno or Bakersfield. When he never came, I realized he had chosen not to contest California. Huckabee has now worked Visalia twice in 20 months (he spoke at the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast in May, 2009). We may be a city of only 125,000, but we’re the commercial center of a red county in a blue state, and a link in California’s Bible belt. This time, it’s safe to say Huckabee plans to do battle in the California primary.

After writing several books on public policy and a couple of exhortations in favor of weight loss and building a legacy, the pair of Christmas books might seem a little innocuous. Not so. The Christmas season follows immediately after the November elections and allows Huckabee to hit the stump before the last recounts have been decided from the midterm contests. It also quietly plays the nostalgia card for Huckabee’s base. There is considerable resentment that Winter Holidays have supplanted Christmas Vacations. It certainly wasn’t that way in the 1950’s, when these autobiographical stories took place.

Last year’s A Simple Christmas told 12 stories from Huckabee’s childhood. They stress the influences and events that built his character. (And certainly character is one of Huckabee’s long suits: there will be no intern embarrassments or Watergate burglaries from a Huckabee presidency.) Each story teaches a lesson, and some express Huckabee’s Christian faith. This year’s Can’t Wait Till Christmas takes just one of those stories, adds pictures, and reworks it as a children’s story.

The plot is simple. Young Mike and his somewhat older sister cannot resist sneaking a peek at the Christmas presents wrapped under the tree. One thing leads to another until Mike is re-wrapping a dirty football to return to the pile. His sister is re-wrapping a slightly used chemistry set. They are discovered. Parental wisdom and mercy prevail, but a lesson is learned about the importance of patience.

Or has it really been learned? This two-week, “non-political” book tour started at the Richard Nixon Library (how’s that for an icon of non-politicosity?), and runs to Seattle, with multiple signings each day. Huckabee appears to be chomping at the bit to launch a campaign that technically won't start for another year. Notice the transportation being used for this tour. I ask my author friends: have you ever traveled to a book-signing in this kind of style?







Or has your publisher hired personal assistants to travel ahead, to organize the crowd before your arrival, and then to open and hold the books for economy of motion as you sign and give handshakes as well? (The guffaws some of you may hear are my writing friends exchanging book-signing stories.)

I was about 12 when I attended my first celebrity autograph event, Sandy Koufax coming to a local bank to sign souvenir plastic bats. At 14, as a reporter for my junior high newspaper, I went through the reception line twice in order to interview Nelson Rockefeller in his primary contest against Barry Goldwater. I’ve attended presidential campaign rallies with Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Shirley Chisholm, and George McGovern, and author signings by Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Franzen, Randy Alcorn, T. Davis Bunn, and Jerry B. Jenkens. All of my experience tells me this was a campaign stop, not a book signing.

Yet it was very impressive, and scrupulously clean. There were no sign-up tables, campaign buttons, or literature handouts. The press release said he would be at Borders in the evening, from eight until nine, and sign 400 books, signature only—no personal inscriptions. Borders distributed numbered tickets throughout the day, and began organizing the line at 7:00. The candidate author arrived four minutes early (Clinton would have been 90 minutes late), as personable and at-ease as I have ever seen any person at the center of attention. Perhaps 250 people stood ready. (For a children’s book, reading level four to eight, surprisingly few of the attendees were under voting age.) When people asked for anything extra, he politely told them he needed to get signatures for everybody first, but they could try coming through the line a second time. I had him sign his 2009, Do The Right Thing, and then went and got a second book. As the numbers thinned, he began posing for pictures. When Pictures slowed, Borders employees rolled out several carts with another couple hundred books, which his staff fed him assembly-line style. Finally, at six minutes past nine, he was out the front door and back on the bus. At each step in the process, as people encouraged him to run or promised to vote for him, he graciously thanked them for the comment, but stated that he hadn’t made any decision.

So does any of the imposture put me off? No. Two years ago Huckabee was my favorite candidate based on issues. Now I’ve seen him up close. He is the most talented politician I have ever seen, winsome, easy-going, yet remarkably self-disciplined.

In a manner of speaking, I can’t wait till Christmas.

What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy
by Malcolm D. Magee
Baylor University Press, 2008
ISBN 1602580707

The tragedy is that Woodrow Wilson was right. Wilson stood alone as the last best hope of staving off World War II. Of course, that just adds to the enormity of his failure.

In my last post, I mentioned that I was reading Malcolm D. Magee’s What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-based Foreign Policy. (Full disclosure: since my previous post, I have become Facebook friends with Magee.)

Forty pages into the book, I called it a “Woodrow Wilson biography,” but the book is much more focused than the usual biography. Magee gives us only enough biography to explain the mental processes that carried Wilson to his critical moment at Versailles, and there failed him.

The title uses “foreign policy” narrowly, but “faith” broadly. Magee makes no mention of Wilson’s dealings with Haiti, Panama, Nicaragua, or the Bolshevik Revolution (using the take-over of Veracruz Mexico as a sample of Wilson's interventionist policies), nor his reaction to the Balfour Declaration or Armenian genocide. I found myself turning to other sources to fill the gaps. This study’s concept of faith, however, goes beyond Wilson’s understanding of Biblical Christianity. The objects of Wilson’s faith included democracy, the power of his own mind, and a paternalistic sense that as both God’s Man for the Moment and a White American, Wilson could know better what would benefit other countries than the citizens could know for themselves.

From his father, Wilson inherited both a tradition of Presbyterian thought and a mantel of Presbyterian leadership. Young Wilson’s faith was heavy on Christian duty and the idea that in each generation, God picked a Moses or a David to lead society into greater conformity to God’s will. Early in life, Wilson developed a deep metaphysical appreciation for the power of Words in the hand of God’s Chosen Servant.

Wilson also grew up comfortable with a wide range of antinomies. Antinomies are those apparent contradictions within Christian doctrine: Jesus is 100% God at the same time he is 100% man, or salvation is by Free Will at the same time it is predestined. Antinomies require the faith that God can resolve these paradoxes at a higher level than man can presently see, and Wilson saw no reason why antinomies couldn’t exist in every area of life. For example, even with the great weight he placed on Words in the hand of God’s Servant, he saw no reason why subsequent generations could not reinterpret the meaning of such words, whether found in the Bible, the Constitution, a treaty to end a war, or a charter for his League of Nations. Wilson also saw no conflict between what our age would delineate as Creation and Evolution.

Magee makes only quick mention of the fact that 21st century labels like fundamentalism (or liberal and conservative) only confuse the issue when applied to late 19th century debates, or to Wilson’s early 20th century eschatology. I would have dwelt more on the sea-change in Christian thought brought on by the two World Wars: American leaders from Washington to Wilson believed mankind was getting better, that with advances in Christian institutions and education the world could be sanctified enough to make it ready for Christ’s second coming. Unfortunately, the carnage of civil war within European Christendom changed this. Post-war Christianity could no longer hope that man might bring in an age of righteousness on behalf of Christ. Only Christ’s physical return could solve mankind’s problems. True, this swerve came after Wilson left the stage, but somehow, readers need to understand how the stage itself has shifted.


One of Wilson’s characteristics was an inability (or powerful unwillingness) to change his mind, either in the face of new facts, or of potent opposition. He was, after all, God’s Chosen Vessel. I find this interesting because so often we hear politicians criticized for their “flip-flops.” Wilson could have benefited greatly from some carefully nuanced redirection. Politics is the art of the achievable. In 1999 and 2007, I was first drawn to George W. Bush and Mike Huckabee over the issue of immigration reform (having already narrowed my field over abortion). In each case, I felt these men hoped to rearrange policy in a direction of mercy rather than retribution. However, after the 9/11 attacks, I recognized that Bush could not do this, and in the face of vocal opposition, Huckabee needed to retreat. Wilson, as described by Magee, could not bring himself to any such reevaluation. There were indications that the Senate might have approved Wilson’s treaty with the addition of only minor “reservations,” but Wilson refused to pursue the feelers.

Another Wilson pattern was to trust the reports of personal friends over those of State Department professionals, even when his friends did not speak the language or have any previous experience in the country. Eventually, the only friend he trusted was Edith, his second wife, and she only told him what she thought he wanted to hear.

The presentation is relentless. Seventy pages into the book, I found myself rooting for Wilson, hoping that he could do at least one thing right. Ninety pages into the book I began to wonder if I was being set up for an argument against Dominionism.

Perhaps I am primed to such a suspicion. A couple of years ago, an atheist I am close to challenged me with questions about this doctrine as if it was something to which I probably adhered. I had never heard of it. In poking around, I’ve come to the conclusion that Dominionism is the derogatory term used by opponents who largely caricature its teachings or exaggerate its influence. I found Magee’s page at the website of Michigan State University’s Department of Religious Studies, and indeed, Magee lists a “growing anti-intellectualism in much of modern American religion” as the impetus for leaving his earlier profession and pursuing the study of history, and mentions as his current project “a study of Christian Reconstruction’s influence on politics.” Christian Reconstruction is the term preferred by adherents of what the other side calls Dominionism.

By whatever name, this movement grows out of the writings R. J. Rushdoony and David Barton, and has been promulgated by media ministers such as D. James Kennedy. (Full disclosure: In the 1980’s I was given a book by Rushdoony, but couldn’t get into it. I soured on Kennedy when I wrote for his pamphlet on Thomas Jefferson, only to find lots of interesting tidbits, but no footnotes or bibliography. I finished at least one book by Barton. Though it was slanted in favor of the U.S. being a Christian nation, it was no worse than—and a health balance to—the state textbooks I had been given to teach from. The 8th grade text gave five pages to the Plymouth Puritans without ever mentioning that they had come to America looking for religious freedom. The 7th grade world history gave 124 words to Jesus, presented as a progressive Jewish rabbi; a full page to Paul, seen as the founder of Christianity; and four pages to Muhammad. Since the 80’s, my impression is that textbooks have improved greatly.)


In the end, though, Magee makes no attempt to tie Wilson’s failure to any current political debate. This is good, because it wouldn’t have worked. Rushdoony wasn’t born until the end of Wilson’s first term, and Rushdoony would likely not have claimed Wilson as the best example of what Rushdoony hoped to reconstruct. On the other hand, the ACLU—organized at the end of Wilson’s second term—might well claim to be in the tradition of Wilson’s Progressivism. The Fundamentalist Movement, which didn’t appear until Wilson was on his deathbed, would have been put off by Wilson’s relaxed attitude to reinterpreting both the Bible and the Constitution, and by his willingness to entertain the possibility of his own person fulfilling the promise of Christ’s Second Coming (Magee, 87-88).

The fact is, no one accomplishes admittance to the rarified heights of the presidency without some kind of faith, whether that be theistic, secular, or merely pragmatic. It would be fanciful to posit that someone might formulate a foreign policy divorced from any faith. Magee makes something of the same argument in a short epilogue. (Actually, the whole book is short: a body of 114 pages, four pages of epilogue, and 70 pages of appendices, notes, sources, and an index: I suspect this study served as a PhD thesis.)

It is always disappointing to realize how ordinary our giants are up close. We want our Great Men to be flawless, and we despise them for falling short of that mark. None will either be or bring the Second Coming. It is hard to imagine a different president leading us into World War I. Teddy Roosevelt? William Howard Taft? William Jennings Bryan?

I opened this book with some questions I hoped it might answer. I enjoyed the read, but finish up with only a longer list of questions. That, I think, may be the best measure of a good read.

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.