High noon in Coralville. I’m at a Perkins just off I-80 and Governor Huckabee is shaking hands through the Iowa City Area Chamber of Commerce. He and I just chatted briefly about broadband wireless – hoping to catch him post-speech to talk more substantively about the campaign – but after we talked I found that the wifi here was dysfunctional. So we’re on tape delay. My power cord appears to be a trip hazard.
The Chamber of Commerce crowd is bipartisan in heavily Democratic Johnson County and a couple elected Dems are here. I’m curious to see how a candidate identified as a Christian conservative interacts with this audience. The crowd is about three dozen and focus at the moment seems to be on ordering food. Breakfast seems to be big. My tablemates ask whether Huckabee is a Democrat or Republican.
No other press appears to be present; the other fellow with a camera is with the campaign. The staffers say Huckabee’s going to be in-state most of the time between July 10 and the August 11 straw poll.
12:21 and the show appears to be starting with Chamber announcements. The Coralville city manager plugs the Fourth Fest and musical guests Grand Funk Railroad. “Last night in Little Rock put me in a haze” indeed. Huckabee’s musical bass skills are noted prior to his appearance later today at West Music, as storeowner Steve West intros him.
Huckabee stands in the middle aisle and praises Grand Funk. Notes he has his own band, Capitol Offense, who has actually opened for Grand Funk among others. “When you’re a sitting governor, you’re band doesn’t have to be that good.”
On to the meat. Notes that international issues are “the elephant in a room full of elephants.” But we need to also focus on domestic issues. Education, energy, and economy.
Education was my ticket out; I was the first male in my family to graduate high school. A patriotic family: “My father laid on the stripes and I saw stars.” My teachers both inspired me and taught me what to do with it. Discusses dropout rate. “The most expensive naps in our society are in our classrooms.” We need to do more than force-feed kids data. Kids get every kind of stimulus from games and video and we can’t expect them to learn in a traditional classroom. “They’re not dumb, they’re bored.” And while we’ve emphasized math and science, we’ve forgotten music and art. I challenge our system to look at music and art as essential, not expendable, because that’s where creativity comes from. Our future economy is likely to be a creative economy. Not an industrial or technological economy.
Tax system penalized productivity: the harder you work, the more that’s extracted from your income – your savings your dividends, your estate. Yet we subsidize irresponsibility, and that leads to mediocrity. (Waitresses work their way around him.) Too much taxation and litigation leads to job migration. We need to scrap entire tax code “duct tape can’t fix it.” $200-500 billion spent on tax compliance alone. Put that back into productivity and marketing. “Corporation’s don’t pay taxes – the consumer ultimately does.” We need a consumption based tax code – eliminate all of our tax code and replace it. It equalizes everyone’s participation in the economy and eliminates the underground economy. “Who do they ask to buy the little league uniforms – the Internet business or the local business.”
What about regressivity? “Get everybody a monthly check back up to the level of poverty.” This empowers people, so it’s truly a progressive tax. “If we became a tax haven, rather than a place to flee, imagine the $10 trillion flowing back.” Gets rid of the underground economy – drug dealers, illegal immigrants.
Won’t pass Congress? “Go to their bosses, their constituents – that’s the only way something truly revolutionary will take place.”
We never get questions about the intricacies of how the country works. We did three debates – and not one question about education. One question about health care. In New Hampshire, not one question about tax structure. “The issues people are talking about at the dinner table aren’t being discussed.”
Questions. What are you proudest of as governor? Restructuring education and the improvement of results. “You raise standards, you don’t lower them.” So we toughened the curriculum. What you don’t measure, you don’t know. And there must be accountability.
Overall tone is very conversational.
Fair tax and how are you going to explain this? Huckabee: People don’t understand the tax structure but they do understand it’s too complicated. Avg. American paying 33% of income in taxes. In my system, “If you don’t buy, you don’t pay – it’s that simple.” What we buy now has a 22% embedded tax in it through every step of production. And you’ll be buying with an entire check, not with a tax-deducted check.
How does a grassroots candidate overcome the big bucks? “I need to do well in Iowa, in places like the straw poll. The debates helped me get to the top of the second tier. The only rub against me is I just don’t have the money. If I do well in the straw poll I get that second break.” But if it’s all about money not ideas, we may as well auction off the presidency on EBay. He loves the caucuses. “We have to talk to people and actually listen to people. People need to have the interchange in real places with real people. If it doesn’t work, well, I spent a year of my life trying and we need to reform the system even more.” This isn’t Let’s Make a Deal – there are more than three doors out there.
Says Bill Richardson is raising many good ideas (“even if I don’t agree with all of them.”) and is incredibly qualified, he deserves a chance. Stand up to the east coast media, Iowa, and make your own decisions based on ideas. It may save the caucuses and it may save the country. “You’ve got to go back to work and earn some more money for the gov’t.”
1:10 and a brief press availability. We discuss the Fair Tax some more: “I wish I was a genius and could say it was my idea but its not. I’m not the chemist, I’m just the pharmacist.” He offers a further explanation of how a monthly rebate check would work, much like a social security check reimbursing people till they got up to poverty level. Says the effective rate would be 13% better for folks on the low end, 5% better for upper income, “so it’s really a progressive tax.”
Asked about the emphasis on economic issues in his speech vs. the barely mentioned social issues, he notes, “One of my responsibilities as a Republican is to make sure my party doesn’t forget people on the lower end. I didn’t grow up a child of privilege like some in my party. We have to govern in a way that touches people on the whole economic spectrum.” Says that while Bill Clinton had talked a great deal as governor of Arkansas, Huckabee had actually accomplished things in education and child health care.
So, what’s your favorite band? “The Stones, of those that are still around… the Beatles of course. I like a lot of 60s rock because it’s authentic music that the artist produced, not like a lot of things now that are so manufactured. You can tell in the first few licks if a song is by someone like Led Zeppelin or Creedence.”
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder