If he was saying “I never bothered to keep copies of my sermons, and I doubt my church still has many of them after all this time, but as AFAIAC you’re welcome to pay the secretary to look for them, and I’ll ask them to make any sermons of mine they find publicly available,” I’d be perfectly OK with that.
Instead, Huckabee’s campaign is simply saying that they’re “not able to accommodate” requests for his sermons. The pastor’s assistant at one of his churches indicates that while much of the material from Huck’s days as pastor there have been destroyed, the rest isn’t available to the press.
I don’t think it is right that he shields his sermons either, but between Article VI and the First Amendment, I don’t think there’s much you can do except for punishing him politically.
I did not say that he claims to have not kept them.
I see a person not trained in PR (particularly presidential level PR) trying to deal with a request they neither understand not care about and the people who are expected to make that public using language that tries to stay neutral–neither “we can’t be bothered to impose on this person” nor “you don’t have a right to ask for them,” but the neutral “we are unable to accommodate your request.”
I do not see a “big difference” between the statements that have you so worked up and my imagined scenario.
There is more than enough to hang Huckabee in the statements that he makes daily during the campaign that I just see this as overkill. If you want to know how he would act as president, look at how he acted as governor. On the one hand, he got his shorts in a wad over a legal expression that is older than the republic; on the other hand, I have not heard that kids in Arkansas are required to accept Jesus as their personal savior to graduate from high school. Somewhere in the middle are his actual public actions and this is a distracting sideshow.
The thing is, I am a little disturbed by the implications of even the request.
We could learn an awful lot about how Romney would behave in the Oval Office if we could see some of the transcripts or personal recollections of his meetings at Bain Consulting or Bain Capital. That, however, doesn’t give us the automatic right to see all of these records, does it?
I mentioned military records above - these seem relevant as well. And we routinely now see a candidate’s grades being discussed.
It isn’t a matter of legal right, or even necessarily custom. A candidate’s role is to try to win our trust. If he’s hiding something significant, or just appearing to, he’s hurting himself, not us.
If you feel that this action has caused you not to trust Huckabee, and if you are eligible to vote in a Republican primary and choose to do so (big ifs, here) don’t vote for him. I said above that this was damaging to his campaign to some degree, and I said that that was fair.
I can’t make him electable - I have little interest in doing so. And I suspect the rest of you care far less.
I care very much, Moto, oh, yes, indeedy. There is some comfort in living this close to the Canadian border, but not that much. And if I can dissuade an otherwise reasonable Pubbie from supporting him, then somewhere in Heaven a bell will ring and an angel will get a puppy.
So can we therefore expect that you will have nothing critical to say about the Democratic candidates between now and November 2008, no matter what surfaces about any of them?
If something negative comes to your attention, all you need do is not vote for the candidate(s) in question.
ISTM that he has made his sermons relevant to the discussion.
I have no similar curiosity about Romney’s meetings at Bain. If you do, then go ahead and make your case that he should provide minutes, if they are available to him. If you don’t, then don’t.
Gotta admit, I’ve totally missed out on the discussion of candidates’ school grades. OTOH, one should assume by now that the matter of a candidate’s military service - or how and why he didn’t serve - will be asked about. (You guys started that one, thanks.)
I think you’re missing out on a key component of how this ‘democracy’ thingy is supposed to work.
Voting isn’t the beginning and the end of democracy. It doesn’t work by us all living in hermetically sealed boxes between the beginning of a campaign and the time we vote. There’s this freedom-of-speech bit where we get to freely express opinions to or at one another, try to change people’s minds, and all that. It’s an American tradition, I’m glad to say.
We on the left DO care about changing people’s minds about the Huckster. (And Rudy, and St. John, and the Mittster…no need to bother with Gramps Thompson anymore, I reckon.) And if nothing else, we who want him to not get elected can introduce each other, in threads like this, to more convincing facts about how nutso he is, and sharpen our arguments about why he shouldn’t be President.
I do, quite sincerely and unfacetiously, appreciate the help you provide in this process.
I recall a discussion of both Bush’s and Kerry’s college grades in the last election.
As for the military service thing, with Clinton it became somewhat of an issue because there was some evidence that he evaded the draft - this, of course, drew a huge collective yawn from most people, so it wasn’t too much of an issue. Demands for a presidential candidate to release his military records seem to have come first from your camp.
I’m glad you do. As usual, your recollection means zip without a cite; we’ve been around this bend too many times.
Cite? I recall Rush Lardbutt and others of his ilk making as much of an issue as they could out of Clinton’s conscientious objector status, but I don’t recall any claims that Clinton evaded the draft. Since draft evasion is a Federal crime, it would have been a very big deal indeed.
You guys made an issue out of Clinton’s 1-O status; we made an issue out of Bush’s hiding out from Vietnam in the TANG, and avoiding even a good chunk of that service, as far as anyone can tell.
If you can see much of a difference there, I expect that’s just you.
And of course, Bush verbally supported the war he chickened out of. By 2004, this was even more relevant, as he had the courage to send others over to face war, when he hadn’t been brave enough to face up to it himself.
I dunno about how relevent I’d make that. I mean, if the only President who can send people to fight has to be one who has, then doesn’t that make combat veterancy a prerequisite of the Presidency? Dunno if I want to go there.
Besides, Kerry made such a big deal out of his military record being fact-based, like that made him special.
