Huckabee needs to hustle up some dough quick

Quick, can you please just send Mike Huckabee $300,000 by tomorrow midnight?

It seems that he's desperately trying to win Saturday's South Carolina Republican primary, and he and his campaign manager, Chip Saltsman, were just riding on the campaign bus a little while ago, going over the plans for the final push and they realized, doggone it, that they actually needed $300Gs right away to pay for voter ID and turnout phone calls.

So, how about it?

It only took them a few minutes to gin up this urgent fundraising appeal and blast it out to about 36,000 unsuspecting e-mail readers, another of the wondrous blessings of the Internet. Mike said, "I firmly believe, this may be the difference between victory and defeat for our effort in South Carolina Saturday. We must raise $300,000 immediately." And to emphasize how important this is, he underlined the sentences like this. In political appeals, as you no doubt have learned by now, underlining means "very important."

Mike said if everybody getting the e-mail -- oh, wait, we don't need the underlining anymore -- sent in only $25 each, they'd actually get more than $900,000. Of course, if everybody getting the e-mail sent in $300,000, they could buy South Carolina.

So, in truth, doing the math here, the Huckabee campaign could have actually asked for only about $8.35 from each person getting the e-mail and still gotten its $300,000. But that's not important now.

-- Andrew Malcolm

Comments

[NH_GOP]

Do a little digging and you find, Huckabee's sudden attention in the media is due to the Ed Rollins/Richard Haass/CFR connection, not because he has any grassroots support.

The sheeple blindly headed to the polls and voted for McCain in NH because the papers told them to, not because they researched whether McCain was a conservative or not.

Similar thing happened with Huck who is now in the CFR's pocket.

[mark]

Mike Huckabee is the best candidate we've had in a long time. I've never been so excited to support a candidate. This is the first time I've ever donated to a presidential campaign. He's a proven conservative with a great track record. The insiders are going nuts trying to discredit him. If you look beyond the surface you can clearly see how they are distorting the truth and his record. I love it when people attack him because it confirms he cannot be bought & he is not one of the establishment. The establishment is discrediting themselves by continuing to distort the truth about Mike Huckabee.
Go Mike Go

[Chris]

And those 36,000 e-mail will probably be immediately by caught by spam filters. And if they did in fact send out 36,000 e-mails to "unsuspecting e-mail readers", I image they just broke some laws.

(I believe these folks have, like me, willingly signed up to receive the e-mails so the filters would allow them through.)

[Keith Henderson]

I'm scratching my head about this one.

In 2000, George Bush was able to unite the three major segments of republican voters: "values voters", fiscal conservatives, and war hawks (by virtue of his legacy and his running mate). He also attracted what I call the "aw shucks" voters, a smaller segment that seems to be fixated on having a beer with each of the candidates to help them pick.

In 2008, all that is gone. Those four segments are divided among Huckabee (and to a lesser extent Thompson), Romney, Guliani (losing his share to McCain), and Thompson, respectively. That's why McCain was able to do so well in New Hampshire and will probably continue to do well -- he has fairly broad appeal and all the single-issue voters will keep canceling each other out.

I point this out because it seems unlikely that a broke campaign can do well, even if it raises enough to win one additional early state. "Joementum" didn't work for Joe, and it is even less likely to work in the seventeen-way tie that the Republican convention is turning into (at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if the Governator won CA as a write-in).

Even if Huckabee won SC and got a fundraising boost from it, I contend that it would be a case of throwing good money after bad. I can't fault him for trying, of course-- he wants to win and there's no other strategy that makes sense. He'll make a great running mate for McCain, but I don't see his presidential campaign going the distance at this rate.

[sam]

Chris- all those email adresses are of people devoted to his campaign.
keith- i agree that hucka nd mccain would make a great pair but i think it would be the best if it was huck/mac08 rather than mac/huck08.
GO MIKE!!!!!

[Amused]

I'm laughing.

Imagine getting an email blast....
asking me to send money.....
to pay for phone calls.....
that will interrupt my dinner nightly until the primary.

DOH!

(EXCELLENT Point!)

[Tannim]

So he really is broke after all...well, his campaign won't be around much longer...

[Jamie Hindman]

As of around 10:45 tonight, Huckabee met his goal of 300,000 before midnight. YEAH!!!! Let's get to 10M before Super Tuesday!

[Ian Repley]

It's not only important that Huckabee's campaign stay alive, but that he succeeds at winning SC. Mr. Huckabee's advocacy of the FairTax ( http://snipr.com/irsgone ) is the single most important policy position in this election. Here's why:

The FairTax rate of 23 percent on a total taxable consumption base of $11.244 trillion will generate $2.586 trillion dollars – $358 billion more than the taxes it replaces ( http://snipurl.com/whatratewks ). [BHKPT]

The FairTax has the broadest base and the lowest rate of any single-rate tax reform plan ( http://snipurl.com/baserate ). [THBP]

Real wages are 10.3 percent, 9.5 percent, and 9.2 percent higher in years 1, 10, and 25, respectively than would otherwise be the case ( http://snipurl.com/realwages ). [THBNP]

The economy as measured by GDP is 2.4 percent higher in the first year and 11.3 percent higher by the 10th year than it would otherwise be ( http://snipurl.com/econbenes ). [ALM]

Consumption benefits ( http://snipurl.com/econbenes ) [ALM]:

• Disposable personal income is higher than if the current tax system remains in place: 1.7 percent in year 1, 8.7 percent in year 5, and 11.8 percent in year 10.

• Consumption increases by 2.4 percent more in the first year, which grows to 11.7 percent more by the tenth year than it would be if the current system were to remain in place.

• The increase in consumption is fueled by the 1.7 percent increase in disposable (after-tax) personal income that accompanies the rise in incomes from capital and labor once the FairTax is enacted.

• By the 10th year, consumption increases by 11.7 percent over what it would be if the current tax system remained in place, and disposable income is up by 11.8 percent.

Over time, the FairTax benefits all income groups. Of 42 household types (classified by income, marital status, age), all have lower average remaining lifetime tax rates under the FairTax than they would experience under the current tax system ( http://snipurl.com/kotcomparetaxrates ). [KR]

Implementing the FairTax at a 23 percent rate gives the poorest members of the generation born in 1990 a 13.5 percent improvement in economic well-being; their middle class and rich contemporaries experience a 5 percent and 2 percent improvement, respectively ( http://snipurl.com/kotftmacromicro ). [JK]

Based on standard measures of tax burden, the FairTax is more progressive than the individual income tax, payroll tax, and the corporate income tax ( http://snipurl.com/lessregress ). [THBPN]

Charitable giving increases by $2.1 billion (about 1 percent) in the first year over what it would be if the current system remained in place, by 2.4 percent in year 10, and by 5 percent in year 20 ( http://snipurl.com/moregiving ). [THPDB]

On average, states could cut their sales tax rates by more than half, or 3.2 percentage points from 5.4 to 2.2 percent, if they conformed their state sales tax bases to the FairTax base ( http://snipurl.com/staterates ). [TBJ]

The FairTax provides the equivalent of a supercharged mortgage interest deduction, reducing the true cost of buying a home by 19 percent ( http://snipurl.com/homebenes ). [WM]

ALERT: Kotlikoff refutes Bruce Bartlett's shabby critiques of the FairTax ( http://snipr.com/bbrebuke ).

(I assume everybody got every bit of that.)

[P Campbell]

Mr. Malcom, you're a funny guy:O

[Jason]

The fair tax is far from fair. Ron Paul has the best plan. get rid of the IRS and the income tax and replace it with NOTHING. If i make 20,000 a year and spend half my income to support myself i am spending more of my income on tax then my neighbor who makes 90,00 and still only spends the same 10,000 on living expenses. So you see its not fair tax after all. There is no reason to have taxes in the first place. The goverment needs to cut spending period that is the only way to do it.

Mike huckabee is a part of the council on foreign relations and consults them on everything he does. HE IS NOT what he says he is.
read http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/keller21.html

In our post 9-11 society we have seen our government, in the name of public safety, form the Department of Homeland Security as well as legislate and implement the Patriot Act. What we must all realize is that legislation such as the Patriot Act, which on the surface is intended to protect the United States from terrorism, simultaneously strips American citizens of many of our most basic civil liberties. Additionally, a law has recently been enacted that mandates a national ID card, which will eventually be required for airline travel, entering a courthouse, and receiving government benefits (and that’s just the beginning). Plans to embed a microchip within the ID card have been postponed but not eliminated. In a few years, it is entirely conceivable that the whole population of the United States could be required to be chipped in the interests of "national security."

Furthermore, trade agreements such as NAFTA and CAFTA could be logically viewed as a key part of an overall movement toward a unified global government and a unified currency. To quote from Dr. Paul’s website: "NAFTA’s superhighway is just one part of a plan to erase the borders between the U.S. and Mexico, called the North American Union. This spawn of powerful special interests, would create a single nation out of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, with a new unelected bureaucracy and money system."

Many conservative Christians are so focused on the terrorist threat that they have not even given thought to the implications of the gradual loss of our civil liberties and our national sovereignty. I believe that this is a grave mistake; in fact, I would even go so far as to say that the erosion of our civil liberties and our national sovereignty is a far greater threat to Americans than any threats from militant Islamists.

Wake up Christians! Ron Paul doesn’t quote scripture and wear his religious beliefs like a fluorescent button on his shirt. His quiet faith is expressed in his firm, moral public behavior, and in his private life. Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate who has directly stood up against the encroaching threat of the Globalists as they push toward world government and Armageddon. He has tirelessly opposed all threats to our national sovereignty and our individual civil liberties. He has a clear intellectual grasp of the issues that currently affect our nation that no other candidate has articulated. And unlike the other candidates, the solutions he proposes to our economic and foreign policy challenges are comprehensive.

MIke Huckabee is far from the conservative that Ron Paul is. Anyone person who claims to be so conservative and pro life yet set 1000s of prisoners free, raised taxes more then any other governer, and lots others

For these reasons, I believe that Ron Paul is the candidate who deserves our fervent support.