Huckabee hides his sermons

[Evil_Captor]

RT, wake up. They’ve got you talking about Kerry. The subject of the thread is Huckabee. Concede the point about Kerry – they’ve pretty much got ALL the evidence – and get back to Huckabee.

It does strike me that a sermon is a public address … they were given every week to a crowd in a room whose makeup Huckabee had no control over, or much interest in controlling. Grades and such are public records. Now if the candidate keeps a private journal or corresponds privately with an individual, the info is not public and shouldn’t be released unless the candidate (or his correspondent, in the one case) wants it released.

The idea of private sermons is just freaking ludicrous. Don’t none of you boys go to church?

[Mr.Moto]

[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
The idea of private sermons is just freaking ludicrous. Don’t none of you boys go to church?
[/QUOTE]

There is precedent for entirely private “sermons”. And though this may not apply to Huckabee, it certainly does to another Republican candidate.

Like I said above, I don’t think Huckabee ought to necessarily keep these sermons under wraps - but other aspects of his ministry do require protection, and he should be granted a certain amount of latitude to keep these under wraps. The same would apply to other candidates, of course.

Above all, I think most of us agree that Huckabee may be judged pretty completely by voters even if they don’t have these sermons in hand.

[John_Mace]

And it’s interesting that the only people I see in this thread clammering for him to release the sermons are people who would not vote for him under any circumstances. Which is exactly why he probably shouldn’t release them. He’s probably not going to win any votes by doing so, and he risks even innocent remarks being taken out of context by his political rivals.

[Mr.Moto]

Let’s get off the subject of Kerry, which may be unpersuasive to some. As noted above, the New Yorker obtained Bush’s grades in 2000, and the Washington Post did the same with Gore, labeling him a diffident student. In the Washington Post article is this kicker:

Gore has never released his transcripts, which were obtained independently by The Washington Post. Parts of them have been cited as well by Bill Turque, a Newsweek writer who has written a biography of Gore titled “Inventing Al Gore.”

So there is something of a pattern developing of candidates not releasing their grades and the press getting the information anyway.

I repeat my question above: Do we need this? Do we need a presumption that a candidate will release his medical records? His military record? His grades? These are important questions, and the issue of the sermons just dovetails with them.

[RTFirefly]

[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
I don’t have this kind of faith. Sorry.

[snipped, since it doesn’t matter how I feel about the issue]

Regardless of how you feel about the issue, it does not change the fact that the public and media demand an awful lot of information about candidates. I think in most circumstances that this is fair. But we haven’t yet said explicitly that we want all of our candidates to be completely open books, and that kind of a demand would be resisted by the public and by candidates both.

Clearly there are limits to what the public has an automatic right to know.
[/quote]
Well, yeah. None of this is under dispute.

And frankly, a situation that permits us to shame them into revelations they may not want to make isn’t good enough.

I don’t see how this is anything besides life in the human race. How do you ban people from shaming politicians into revealing records that they’ve made relevant?

Unless you ban it by law, it’s permitted.

Such a thing would blow holes clear through our privacy rights were they allowed in the private sector.

Why, is the public likely to shame CEOs into revealing their sermons, college transcripts, or military records?

I’m not worried about the effect on the peons; we’ve already lost that battle for the time being. As far as privacy goes, an employer can demand any info it damned well pleases from an employee, unless the privacy of that information is quite specifically protected by law. Comply or bye-bye. What the general public expects of Presidential candidates isn’t going to make a whit of difference.

I haven’t devoted much time to this subject. I think clearer rules about what the public was entitled to and the candidates were obligated to divulge would help.

More important, not much thought. What would such rules do? If they had the force of law, then anything a candidate isn’t legally required to provide now, a law would either leave that unchanged, or change it to a requirement that it be divulged. And if they didn’t have the force of law, then more scrupulous candidates would follow the rules, and less scrupulous ones wouldn’t, or they’d be ignored altogether.

Seems that the current ad hoc situation would be better than either of those alternatives.

[RTFirefly]

[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
Do we need a presumption that a candidate will release his medical records? His military record? His grades? These are important questions, and the issue of the sermons just dovetails with them.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t see that it does at all.

There are arguments that every candidate should release his medical records, his military or draft board records, his grades - but they’d apply to every candidate in every Presidential election, or none at all.

The question of the sermons is one that has to do with the particulars of the parts of a candidate’s life that he’s running on. Huckabee’s placed his Christian faith at the heart of his campaign. If he ever ran a restaurant, nobody gives a flip about those records, because he’s not running on the basis of his experience as a restaurateur. But we’re talking about a guy who’s in politics even though he doesn’t think politics has the answers, but wants to take America back for Christ.

Yeah, I want to keep the heat on him to see what he might mean by that. Damned straight.

John Edwards makes a big deal of being a mill worker’s son, and of his experience in battling corporate interests in the courtroom. If nobody could find any evidence that Edwards’ father had worked in a mill, and the Edwards clan was being tight-lipped about the issue, I’d certainly be demanding that he provide some evidence that his dad had been a mill worker. And if court records weren’t public and there was no way to verify that Edwards had done the things in court that he said he’d done, I’d demand that he waive his privacy rights with respect to that.

But what sort of general rule are you going to fashion? These all address the particulars of a candidate’s life that attach to the life experience s/he’s giving as a reason to vote for him/her. And aside from transcripts, medical records, and the like, everyone’s going to have different kinds of records that are potentially relevant. I don’t see what one has to do with the other.

[RTFirefly]

[QUOTE=John Mace]
And it’s interesting that the only people I see in this thread clammering for him to release the sermons are people who would not vote for him under any circumstances. Which is exactly why he probably shouldn’t release them. He’s probably not going to win any votes by doing so, and he risks even innocent remarks being taken out of context by his political rivals.
[/QUOTE]
Then he will have to balance the risk of losing votes due to what his sermons say, with the risk of losing votes because he refuses to reveal them, and people are making an issue of it.

If people think it’s a stupid issue, Huck wins. If people think it’s a reasonable request, then Huck loses. That’s exactly the sort of way politics should work, IMHO.

[Mr.Moto]

In general, I agree. Yet this leads to a sort of disclosure creep, doesn’t it?

That’s the sort of thing I worry about, for the reasons I noted above.

[John_Mace]

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
Then he will have to balance the risk of losing votes due to what his sermons say, with the risk of losing votes because he refuses to reveal them, and people are making an issue of it.
[/QUOTE]

But that’s exactly my point. Who, precisely, is making an issue of it? I haven’t seen any evidence that Huckabee supporters, or potential supporters, are doing so. I suspect that Huckabee wouldn’t get a single vote from regular readers of Mother Jones (unless the person reads it in order to see what the other side is thinking) whether he releases them or not.

[Mr.Moto]

In general, we should count on our enemies more than our friends to keep us honest. Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised that questions like this come from the Mother Jones camp, any more than we should be surprised that Hillary Clinton’s strongest critics are over on my side of the street.

That part doesn’t bother me too much - I just wonder if going after the sermons was overreaching, for the reasons I noted above.

[John_Mace]

[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
In general, we should count on our enemies more than our friends to keep us honest. Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised that questions like this come from the Mother Jones camp, any more than we should be surprised that Hillary Clinton’s strongest critics are over on my side of the street.
[/quote]

Well, yeah, that’s the way the system of free speech is supposed to work.

That part doesn’t bother me too much - I just wonder if going after the sermons was overreaching, for the reasons I noted above.

In this day and age, it seems that there is no such thing as “overreaching”. I think it’s perfectly legitimate for MJ, or any other news/commentary source, to poke around in Huckabee’s past. I expect them to do that. As for Huck, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. But he seems to be pretty tough politician, notwithstanding his friendly smile and folksy charm. I suspect he can handle the heat quite well.

[ASAKMOTSD]

I am afraid I can not understand what a report of John Kerry’s grades from 2005 have to do with Huckabee’s hidden sermons. Was he in charge of them somehow?

[Liberal]

Whom does your “he” reference, Kerry or Huckabee?

[Mr.Moto]

[QUOTE=ASAKMOTSD]
I am afraid I can not understand what a report of John Kerry’s grades from 2005 have to do with Huckabee’s hidden sermons. Was he in charge of them somehow?
[/QUOTE]

Mother Jones asks Huckabee for his sermons, and he says no.

The press asks Kerry for his grades, and he says no.

As above, this time for Gore.

Various parties pester Bush and Kerry alike for their military records, both of which were released only in a fragmentary and controlled manner.

There are more similarities than differences here, IMHO.

[John_Mace]

[QUOTE=ASAKMOTSD]
I am afraid I can not understand what a report of John Kerry’s grades from 2005 have to do with Huckabee’s hidden sermons. Was he in charge of them somehow?
[/QUOTE]

It certainly would appear so from reading the Boston Globe articles. It was he who “refused” to release them, and he who did release them after the election.

[ASAKMOTSD]

[QUOTE=John Mace]
It certainly would appear so from reading the Boston Globe articles. It was he who “refused” to release them, and he who did release them after the election.
[/QUOTE]

..and the parallel here is that Huckabee has “refused” to release his sermons? (or are we just off on a tangent?)

[John_Mace]

[QUOTE=ASAKMOTSD]
..and the parallel here is that Huckabee has “refused” to release his sermons? (or are we just off on a tangent?)
[/QUOTE]

Yes, that is the parallel.

[Jackmannii]

[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
Do we need a presumption that a candidate will release his medical records?
[/quote]
If his health is a legitimate issue (as with recent serious candidates having a history of cancer), yes.

His military record?

Yes, if a candidate is stressing the importance of his military experience/achievements, and notably if there are questions about whether the record as presented is accurate.

His grades?

If these are relevant to one’s qualifications or ability to relate past achievements honestly, yes. If you were to claim that you graduated summa cum laude and the truth is that you barely squeaked through with a C- average, voters might just view that as a key to your character.

@RTFirefly

…is the public likely to shame CEOs into revealing their sermons, college transcripts, or military records?

Dunno about “the public”, but some execs have put themselves in embarassing positions by lying about their qualifications. I seem to recall a recent story about a top university department head who had to quit after it was shown that she falsified her educational background.

@John Mace

And it’s interesting that the only people I see in this thread clammering for him to release the sermons are people who would not vote for him under any circumstances.

It’s not “interesting” that non-Huckabee supporters are clammering (sic) for potentially unfavorable revelations about him, it’s the way politics works. Surely you’re not naive enough to think that candidates should be able to get by with only the fluff that their campaigns churn out.

[elucidator]

I want to know the candidate’s opinions, I care very much less how he did in school. If Huckleberry opined in a sermon that Jesus loves all the children of the world, except the gay ones, I want to know that. Then I want someone to ask him if he still believes that, and if he does not, what changed his mind.

Thing is, when someone refuses to reveal something, its a pretty good bet it something he would rather you didn’t know. Duh. We are invited by such a refusal to speculate on the reasons why. In Kerry’s case, he didn’t want you to think he was as dumb as Bush seems the most likely explanation. In Huckleberry’s case, the most likely explanation is that he said some things that I am likely to find alarming.

Another explanation: a lot of fundie types like to express a “vanilla” fundamentalism, one that ignores or glosses over the sorts of theological differences of opinion that might give pause. For instance, many fundie evangelical types are much taken with the happy mythology of The Rapture, others think its utter hogwash.

What does Huckleberry think? Now, that won’t affect my consideration in the slightest, I’m firmly in the “over my dead body” camp. But it might disincline someone who was previously very supportive.

[Mr.Moto]

[QUOTE=elucidator]
Another explanation: a lot of fundie types like to express a “vanilla” fundamentalism, one that ignores or glosses over the sorts of theological differences of opinion that might give pause. For instance, many fundie evangelical types are much taken with the happy mythology of The Rapture, others think its utter hogwash.

What does Huckleberry think? Now, that won’t affect my consideration in the slightest, I’m firmly in the “over my dead body” camp. But it might disincline someone who was previously very supportive.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t see why it would. Previously, “fundie types” have voted strongly for both Bushes and Reagan, though none of these belonged to churches strongly connected with fundamentalism.

These voters look for commonality in social policy, among other things. They do not typically vote their theological differences.