In “Presidential Primary Book Club” Ms. Collins says this week’s installment of the Presidential Primary Book Club reveals a tale of two Mike Huckabees. Mr. Blow, in “The G.O.P.’s Abandoned Babies” says the Republicans’ budget exposes their contradictory position on child welfare: “pro-life” before birth, utter indifference afterward. It’s nice that someone has finally pointed that out… Mr. Herbert, in “Absorbing the Pain,” says at a gathering in Philadelphia this week, the deep pain of working Americans was readily apparent. Here’s Ms. Collins:
One of a journalist’s most important duties is to seek out information in places the readers wouldn’t go themselves, like following troops into combat or covering charter revision commission hearings. In that spirit, I have been reading all the books written by likely candidates for the Republican presidential nomination.
Almost all. Some. It’s one thing to tackle the oeuvre of Tim Pawlenty, which is one book. But our author today, Mike Huckabee, has written nearly a dozen, including “Living Beyond Your Lifetime,” “Can’t Wait Till Christmas” and “Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork.” We are just going to stick to his I-want-to-be-president efforts.
I know you would rather hear about Christmas and dieting. But be serious. We have a campaign to prepare for.
Huckabee, you will remember, ran for president in 2008 and was regarded as the most likable guy in the Republican debates. This was not actually all that heavy a lift and he has an excellent chance of continuing the tradition, if the rest of the field is Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.
His political intentions are still a little hazy, but personally, I hope he runs. I am looking forward to having more opportunities to discuss his revelation during the last campaign that when he was in college, he used to fry squirrels in a popcorn popper in the dorm room.
Also, it will be interesting to see exactly which Huckabee shows up. The guy who wrote his early books does not much resemble his most recent literary incarnation. Both authors dislike big government, but I believe it is only the new Huckabee who hates government-subsidized school breakfasts. (“Our pioneer forebears — who grew the wheat for their toast and the apples for their juice, who raised the cow for their milk — would be appalled at how pathetic many of us have become.”)
Huckabee’s new book, which he will be signing in Iowa this weekend, is called “A Simple Government: Twelve Things We Really Need From Washington (And a Trillion That We Don’t!)” This guy has a real thing about the number 12. Witness “A Simple Christmas: Twelve Stories That Celebrate the True Holiday Spirit.”
And then there’s my favorite, “From Hope to Higher Ground,” which was written by the rather sweet-natured 2007 Mike Huckabee. It has 12 chapters with titles like “STOP Robbing the Taxpayers” and “STOP Abusing Our Planet.” Each chapter ends with 12 “action steps” that you, the reader, can take to accomplish the goal. By the end you have a 144-item to-do list, ranging from “Buy Girl Scout cookies” to “Run for office!”
Some of the action steps are extremely practical (“Keep receipts for tax-deductible items”) and some are unarguable. (“Always say ‘Thank you.’ ”) However, I’m not sure that I’m prepared to stop people I see taking their kids shopping and say: “It just does my heart good to see a parent spend time with his/her child!”
That old Mike Huckabee spent his defining years as a minister and had sympathy for the most ostracized of the downtrodden, like illegal immigrants. “It hardly seems Americans should truly feel threatened by people who pluck chickens, pick tomatoes, make beds, wash dishes or mow lawns,” he wrote in “From Hope to Higher Ground.”
The best solution to the problem, he said, was to allow people who are here illegally to “pay a reasonable fine” and then put them on a path to legal citizenship. (The to-do list recommended: “Attend a naturalization ceremony.”)
The new book, however, is by a Huckabee whose defining life experience seems to have been hanging out at the Fox studios. Perhaps he contracted some sort of personality-changing virus. Or maybe visitors from another planet swooped down and switched his brain with Glenn Beck’s.
In “A Simple Government,” Huckabee laces into Democrats for suggesting that illegals “pay a fine and back taxes” and then be put on a path to legal citizenship. That’s “amnesty!” Mike 2.0 hates it!
The new book is basically one long howl about the Obama White House, whose occupants Huckabee compares to “the kid in school who waves his A test score in front of the entire class but never gets picked to play baseball. He’s an arrogant nerd, and no matter how smart he is, he can’t hit, he can’t throw and he can’t run.”
This is after he warns, in the introduction, that “if you’ve come here looking for a personal attack on President Obama and those in Washington, you should head to another shelf in the bookstore.” That’s on Page 1. The brain-switching space alien arrived somewhere around Page 6.
His current book tour may take him to your hometown any day. If it does, ask him about the illegal immigrants. Also, whether the squirrels were dead before they got popped.
Squirrels in a popcorn popper? Really??? Ewww…. Here’s Mr. Blow:
Republicans need to figure out where they stand on children’s welfare. They can’t be “pro-life” when the “child” is in the womb but indifferent when it’s in the world. Allow me to illustrate just how schizophrenic their position has become through the prism of premature babies.
Of the 33 countries that the International Monetary Fund describes as “advanced economies,” the United States now has the highest infant mortality rate according to data from the World Bank. It took us decades to arrive at this dubious distinction. In 1960, we were 15th. In 1980, we were 13th. And, in 2000, we were 2nd.
Part of the reason for our poor ranking is that declines in our rates stalled after premature births — a leading cause of infant mortality as well as long-term developmental disabilities — began to rise in the 1990s.
The good news is that last year the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the rate of premature births fell in 2008, representing the first two-year decline in the last 30 years.
Dr. Jennifer L. Howse, the president of the March of Dimes, which in 2003 started a multimillion-dollar premature birth campaign focusing on awareness and education, has said of the decline: “The policy changes and programs to prevent preterm birth that our volunteers and staff have worked so hard to bring about are starting to pay off.”
The bad news is that, according to the March of Dimes, the Republican budget passed in the House this month could do great damage to this progress. The budget proposes:
• $50 million in cuts to the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that “supports state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs.”
• $1 billion in cuts to programs at the National Institutes of Health that support “lifesaving biomedical research aimed at finding the causes and developing strategies for preventing preterm birth.”
• Nearly $1 billion in cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its preventive health programs, including to its preterm birth studies.
This is the same budget in which House Republicans voted to strip all federal financing for Planned Parenthood.
It is savagely immoral and profoundly inconsistent to insist that women endure unwanted — and in some cases dangerous — pregnancies for the sake of “unborn children,” then eliminate financing designed to prevent those children from being delivered prematurely, rendering them the most fragile and vulnerable of newborns. How is this humane?
And it doesn’t even make economic sense. A 2006 study by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies estimated that premature births cost the country at least $26 billion a year. At that rate, reducing the number of premature births by just 10 percent would save thousands of babies and $2.6 billion — more than the proposed cuts to the programs listed, programs that also provide a wide variety of other services.
This type of budgetary policy is penny-wise and pound-foolish — and ultimately deadly. Think about that the next time you hear Republican representatives tout their “pro-life” bona fides. Think about that the next time someone uses the heinous term “baby killer.”
And now here’s Mr. Herbert:
Lynda Hiller teared up. “We’re struggling real bad,” she said, “and it’s getting harder every day.”
A handful of people were sitting around a dining room table in a row house in North Philadelphia on Wednesday, talking about the problems facing working people in America. The setting outside the house on West Harold Street was grim. The remnants of a snowstorm lined the curbs and a number of people, obviously down on their luck, were moving about the struggling neighborhood. Some were panhandling.
The small gathering had been arranged by a group called Working America, which is affiliated with the A.F.L.-C.I.O., but the people at the meeting did not belong to unions. They were just there to talk in an atmosphere of mutual support.
What struck me about the conversation was the way people talked in normal tones about the equivalent of a hurricane ripping through their lives, leaving little but destruction in its wake.
Ms. Hiller had come in from Allentown. She’s 63 years old and still undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Her husband, Howard, who was not at the meeting, had been a long-distance truck driver for 35 years before losing his job in 2007, the same year Ms. Hiller received her diagnosis. Mr. Hiller thought at the time that with all of his experience he would find another job pretty quickly. He was mistaken.
“He looked for two years,” Ms. Hiller said. “He applied every place he could, sometimes four or five times at the same company. He went everywhere, to every job fair you can think of, to every place where there was even a mention of an opening. But for every job that came available, there were 20 people or more who showed up for it.”
Last fall, Mr. Hiller took a part-time job as a dishwasher at a Red Lobster restaurant. “It’s a job,” Ms. Hiller said. “It’s not fancy. It’s not truck driving.”
And it was not enough for them to keep their home. Ms. Hiller lost her job at a bank when she became ill. With both paychecks gone, meeting the mortgage became impossible. The Hillers lost their home and are now living day to day. “If my husband can get 30 hours of work in a week, then maybe we can pay some bills,” Ms. Hiller said. “If he can’t, we can’t. We’ve downsized our lives so much.”
The meeting was in the home of Elizabeth Lassiter, a certified nursing assistant whose job is in Hatfield, Pa., about 45 minutes north of Philadelphia. She doesn’t earn a lot or get benefits, but it’s a big step up from last year when she was working part time in Warminster and for a while had to sleep in her car.
“Back then I was working for a nursing agency and they kept saying they didn’t have full-time work,” she said. Until she could raise enough money for an apartment, the car was her only option. “I needed someplace to lay my head,” she said. “It was very hard.”
These are the kinds of stories you might expect from a country staggering through a depression, not the richest and supposedly most advanced society on earth. If these were exceptional stories, there would be less reason for concern. But they are in no way extraordinary. Similar stories abound throughout the United States.
Among the many heartening things about the workers fighting back in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere is the spotlight that is being thrown on the contemptuous attitude of the corporate elite and their handmaidens in government toward ordinary working Americans: police officers and firefighters, teachers, truck drivers, janitors, health care aides, and so on. These are the people who do the daily grunt work of America. How dare we treat them with contempt.
It would be a mistake to think that this fight is solely about the right of public employees to collectively bargain. As important as that issue is, it’s just one skirmish in what’s shaping up as a long, bitter campaign to keep ordinary workers, whether union members or not, from being completely overwhelmed by the forces of unrestrained greed in this society.
The predators at the top, billionaires and millionaires, are pitting ordinary workers against one another. So we’re left with the bizarre situation of unionized workers with a pension being resented by nonunion workers without one. The swells are in the background, having a good laugh.
I asked Lynda Hiller if she felt generally optimistic or pessimistic. She was quiet for a moment, then said: “I don’t think things are going to get any better. I think we’re going to hit rock bottom. The big shots are in charge, and they just don’t give a darn about the little person.”
I agree with her. It’s going to get a whole lot worse before it starts to get any better.
