It’s easy enough to determine the truth for yourself by filing your own request for a copy of Tax Hike Mike’s immortal words.
Indeed. I recall conservatives (quite correctly) criticizing Hillary Clinton on similar grounds for keeping her thesis under wraps.
If he allowed people to read them, we could make up our own minds whether Mother Jones’ hypothetical analysis was reasonable or not.
Secrecy always invites negative presumptions.
So, I assume you totally support Nixon’s refusal to release the White House tapes, because they could do him no good. Nixon had far better reasons - executive privilege, expectation of privacy, than Huckabee who gave these in public.
I don’t disagree with your conclusion of why he won’t release them, but we’re talking do what is right here, not what is expedient.
If he said something dreadful, he can say he grew since then. After all, that was before he got experience in government, one can hope he’d learn something. I suspect though that he said things his hyper-religious base would still like, but the rest of the electorate won’t find so appealing. Wouldn’t it be helpful to force him to say where he stands on whatever issues he covered? He’s damn good at evading questions - do we want another president who does that?
No, sir. Jesse Jackson was a presidential candidate who happened to be a minister. Mike Huckabee (despite having an established non-clerical political track record such as Jackson never had) is running as a minister.
OK, maybe I got that wrong.
Actually, I wasn’t asking you-- I was asking Fear. It’s like when Mr. Moto talks about what he thinks the Dems should do. 
Why?
That may be, but he still has to win in order to be president. There are other ways to look at his faith rather than his sermons, though. Those are more likely addressing specific issues of theology, and may not be relevant to the nation as a whole. He has a record as a governor to look at-- that should be sufficient.
Not necessarily. Taken out of context, they could be very damaging. What he tells his congregation to do or to think isn’t necessarily what he would tell the American people, as a whole, what to do or to think. And you can be certain that his political opponents (either Dem or Pubbie) will take things out of context.
Why would you assume that would happen. It didn’t happen to Kerry with the Swift Boaters. People believed the “analysis” done by those guys.
No, it doesn’t. His secrecy in this case isn’t inviting any negative presumption from me because I can think of a good reason why he might not want to release them.
Nixon was compelled to release the tapes, eventually, but the courts. The two instances are not even remotely related. Besides, we’re talking about something Nixon did as president, whereas Huckabee performed his sermoning as a private citizen.
If politics was all nice and polite, then it would be easy to determine what is “right”. But given how nasty politics can be, he can still be “right” in not wanting to give fodder to his political opponents.
This one?
No. This one.
Thanks for clearing that up. He is a man of divers interests. 
He’s into SCUBA, too?
I said above that he would probably pay a political penalty for this. That’s probably fair.
I wonder how far this will go, though. Would you demand the public be able to look into all aspects of a candidate’s life? We see this come up all of the time, in relation to a great many things that have no direct bearing on a candidate’s fitness for office.
Demands for a candidate to release his military records (whoever that candidate happens to be) instantly comes to mind here.
I don’t think it is quite as simple as that - Jackson and Sharpton both were running as civil-rights leaders, and that position was intimately related to their status as black clergymen. You might think these things are separable - I don’t think they can be, at least within a man’s soul.
Now, whether such a separation can be made in governing is another matter entirely.
Why which?
Well, yeah, and I think we should see what he’s about before we vote on him.
I’ve attended my share of evangelical preachers’ sermons. Even the ones who aren’t politicians have a tendency to wander in the direction of politics.
Not to mention, the fundie idea of ‘theology’ is “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”
Nah, I want to see what he said when he felt like he was among his own kind.
Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m saying. He’s gonna say different things to them than he would to us during a campaign. But it doesn’t mean he’s changed.
That’s always a problem. Why is it especially relevant with respect to his sermons?
Why do you think he said things that would sink him in the general?
He needn’t “change” in order to say different things as a preacher at a pulpit than as a candidate on the stump
It’s not. Which is why you don’t generally see other candidates releasing papers of theirs from 15- 20 years ago that aren’t already part of the public record.
That’s so sensible that it bears repeating.
Clearly no one is going to force him to release the sermons, and he shouldn’t be forced to. But I sure as hell don’t understand why anyone would vote for someone fearful of people learning about his positions in the past. Mitt would be in better shape if he could have hidden his speeches while governor, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.
Bush has spent his time speaking only to carefully invited audiences, no doubt to avoid giving fodder to his opponents. Are we better off for him not to have been confronted with tough questions from real people?
BTW, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Baptist service, but I’ve been to a few Christian ones of various stripes and lots of Jewish ones, and I don’t recall a sermon ever being purely on theology. Do you think he never spoke about the world and what his congregation should do? I got the impression that he was a successful preacher, not one who bored the crap out of his audience by making the sermon look like a high level GD thread.
Maybe because he doesn’t want to release them?
Sure he’ll say different things. But, given his current position, if he said something should be illegal because God said so, do you think he’s going to act differently as president. (Not that I’m accusing him of saying something different on the stump, at least not while he’s appealing to Iowan evangelicals.) Kerry said that while he was opposed to abortion personally, he didn’t think his religiously based position should be imposed on others. I haven’t noticed Huckabee in this camp, so I’m curious as to the details of what he thinks god wants.
He might or might not want to impose this on us, but I’d like to know his old thoughts, to give him a chance to confirm or deny that he still believes in them.
“Minister” is one of the few professions I regard as being lower than “politician”. If he was one of the few that didn’t guilt young people into handing him their money at the threat of eternal hellfire; if he didn’t con old people out of their money at the promise of life everlasting; if he didn’t get rich off of feeding a gullible congregation fairy tales; I would hope he would like to provide some evidence of that. Otherwise, I don’t blame him for hiding it.
And Capital Offense is the worst band name I have ever heard – even without knowing it is a stinking, rotten pun on their politician bass player.
Either way he isn’t getting my vote.
I think that, quite often, they are synonyms. Politicians, in the sense of people who manipulate other people for personal gain, infest practically every discipline, from politics to religion to science to the arts.
Meh.
Put me in the camp that suspects that most of the sermons were trashed, long ago, when some other minister took over his pulpit, (assuming there was ever a serious record, to begin with), and that the rest are “not available” because some minimum wage drudge in the church office does not think it is worth her time to wander around for six hours in the dust of the parish basement looking for the (probably poorly marked) decaying cardboard box that holds his Christmas and Easter sermons.
Because I’ve got a working familiarity with the sorts of things evangelical preachers tend to say from the pulpit. There’s a strong tendency amongst the breed to mindlessly repeat whatever right-wing glurge is going around about how godless and evil the libruls are. (It fits in a sermon because it’s about who’s evil and godless in America these days, and who good Christians therefore have to watch out for, and be ready to combat in the battle for America’s soul.)
Exactly. He needn’t ‘change’ to put a completely different spin on the political implications of his beliefs than one would derive from his sermons.
I have an aversion to the idea that one can take what one said publicly at one time, and decide retroactively to hide it because it’s inconvenient later.
If he’s changed, if he’s grown, since being the person he was in his sermons, then that’s fine. But I’m tired of Republicans being able to pull off this straddle of being one person to their base, and a different person to undecided voters. This seems like a golden opportunity to bring that out in the open.