Whoa, whoa, whoa — wait a minute. We’ve been back for two weeks and I haven’t once dropped by the Opinion section to give you even the tiniest tip of the Stetson yet?
Well.
Aren’t I the rude one.
Let me start February off right, then, by forgoing a tip and taking my hat off to you entirely.
I have, after all, been slanting the same sombrero in your direction for almost two years; that you want to keep me around for long enough to make that a whole two years surely deserves a little more than the standard salutation.
Now.
I don’t need to tell you that a lot has changed since you saw me last.
John, Joe, Chris, Dennis and Bill — Richardson, at least — have long since bid us Democrats adieu, leaving only Hillary, Barack and one very tenacious Alaskan in the race for the party’s presidential nomination.
On the Republican side, Rudy, Duncan and Fred have also decided to call it quits, ceding the field to the GOP’s very own Fearsome Foursome: Mitt, Mike, Ron and Mac.
As it now stands, the Mac in question — one Senator John McCain of Arizona — has taken the lead in that grandest of parties and been dubbed the frontrunner; Mrs. Clinton of New York and Mr. Obama of Illinois, however, remain engaged in their delicate dance to determine who will be crowned king (or queen) of the Democratic domain this August in Denver.
But you knew all of that already.
What you didn’t know — unless you paid extra close attention when you flipped through the News section this past Monday — was that your devoted donkey is cheering on an elephant in this horse race.
(People sure are animals sometimes, eh?)
Yes, Dear Reader, it’s true; “Mark Coombs ’08,” to quote the Sun’s Emily Cohn, “is a supporter of [Mike] Huckabee.”
Trust me: I’m as surprised as you are.
If you would have told me this time four years ago that I would be supporting a Republican for the top job in 2008, I would have laughed you out of the room. Indeed, I would have laughed us both out of the room; the walls, to put it simply, would have come crashing down around us, leaving us exposed to — and wholly unprepared for — the full onslaught of the worst Ithaca winter in recent memory.
It would not have been pretty.
That is because, by this time four years ago, I was already doing everything I could think of to get George Bush out of the White House and put John Kerry in it. And it certainly wasn’t my first time around the block; as a young Republican back in Texas, I had fought just as fervently for Dubya in 2000.
The differences between Candidate Bush and President Bush, however, had — over time — become so great that I began to feel a little bit like I had been, well … lied to.
The man who had been all about compassionate conservatism when he was running for president never seemed to mention it anymore once he became president. The man who had argued for a humble foreign policy in his debates with Al Gore pursued a foreign policy that was anything but when he was actually in a position to realize it. The man who had made faith-based initiatives a central focus of his campaign pushed them further and further onto the backburner as the election became more and more of a memory. The man who had worked so well with Democrats in Austin did everything possible to work around them in Washington.
And so on and so forth.
Still, my departure from the GOP was not a result of Bush’s transformation so much as it was a result of the rebuke I received from fellow Republicans for pointing it out. That is to say, I eventually came to the conclusion that, as a Democrat from the South, I could get away with being conservative; I wasn’t so sure if I — or anyone — could get away with being independent as a Republican.
Mike Huckabee, the former Governor of Arkansas and a Southern Baptist preacher, has proven me wrong.
Huckabee is a conservative, but he is not a polemicist.
To quote the candidate himself: “I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad at anybody.”
Huckabee believes in his religion — and he believes in the right — but he is not of the Religious Right.
“We should,” he writes on his website, “share and debate our faith, but never seek to impose it.”
Huckabee advocates a strong foreign policy, but he understands that there is no need to alienate our allies in the process of implementing it.
“The Bush administration’s arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad,” he said in the Council of Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Policy. “My administration will recognize that the United States’ main fight today does not pit us against the world but pits the world against the terrorists.”
Huckabee is, in many ways, the compassionate conservative that President Bush once said he was but ultimately proved not to be.
He is an individual who shatters many a stereotype and, I believe, a candidate who will defy just as many expectations.
For the majority of you who are skeptical of him, I suggest that you take a closer look; you will be pleasantly surprised by what you see, conservatives and moderates both.
I guarantee it.