George Will on Hillary and Huckabee

Will thinks that he's found the common link between Hillary and the Huckster. He says that they're both practicing elements of Nixonian attack politics. While it seems a stretch to connect campaign attacks to Nixon as if politicians haven't been attacking each other for years and years, Will is correct that both the Hillary campaign and Huckabee have weaknesses that should disqualify them from their party's nominations.

Hillary touts her experience, but her experience hasn't been all that impressive.

She had two experiences wielding power regarding important matters for her husband's administration. One concerned the selection of his first, second and third choices to be attorney general -- all in just 50 days. The decisive criterion would be chromosomes: The attorney general had to be a woman. The first selection, Zoe Baird, crashed because a slipshod selection process did not discover that she and her husband had employed two illegal immigrants as domestic help and had not paid Social Security taxes. Then Kimba Wood failed because she once hired an illegal immigrant before such hiring was itself illegal, a nonoffense magnified by the Baird debacle.

The third choice was Janet Reno, whose eight-year tenure was notable for three things. One was the botched assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., in which 86 people died, 17 of them children the assault was supposed to rescue. Another was seizing, at gunpoint, 6-year-old Elian Gonzales from his Miami relatives and deporting him to Castro's Cuba, from which he and his mother had fled in an escape in which she drowned. The third was the optional appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the Whitewater land deal, an investigation that led to Paula Jones. When Hillary Clinton adamantly opposed a financial settlement with her, the investigation meandered to Monica Lewinsky and impeachment.

The second of Hillary Clinton's important experiences was the drafting, in secret, of a national health-care plan. It was so dauntingly baroque and ominously statist that a Congress controlled by her party would not bring it to a vote.

Her experiences that should matter most to primary voters reveal consistently bad judgment. Her campaign's behavior radiates bad character.

I'm still waiting for the Hillary campaign to tell us specifically what she has accomplished with all her well-touted experience.

As for Huckabee, Will points out that he's more out of step with conservative voters than Giuliani. And Huckabee's question about Mormons believing Satan and Jesus are brothers was a telling moment about how he was willing to exploit religious tensions.

Imagine someone asking "in an innocent voice" this: "Don't Jews use the blood of gentile children to make matzoh for Passover?" Such a smarmy injection of the "blood libel," an ancient canard of anti-Semitism, into civic discourse would indelibly brand the injector as a bigot with contempt for the public's ability to decode bigotry.

Huckabee's campaign actually is what Rudy Giuliani's candidacy is misdescribed as being -- a comprehensive apostasy against core Republican beliefs. Giuliani departs from recent Republican stances regarding two issues -- abortion and the recognition by law of same-sex couples. Huckabee's radical candidacy broadly repudiates core Republican policies such as free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America's corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and opportunity. And consider New Hampshire's chapter of the National Education Association, the teachers union that is a crucial component of the Democratic Party's base.

In 2004, New Hampshire's chapter endorsed Howard Dean in the Democratic primary and no one in the Republican primary. Last week it endorsed Clinton in the Democratic primary -- and Huckabee in the Republican primary. It likes, as public employees generally do, his record of tax increases, and it applauds his opposition to school choice.

For me, the New Hampshire NEA endorsement of Mike Huckabee is just about enough of a disqualifier. And Will is right to contrast the Giuliani and Huckabee positions. Giuliani is not in line with the party's social conservatives and Huckabee is out of alignment with our economic conservatives. And he's rather far off from where most Republicans are on foreign policy. I am beginning to suspect that he's heading for a footnote in history. If he wins the Iowa caucuses, he may well be the answer to the trivia question a few years from now about which candidate won the Iowa caucuses and then went nowhere.