Given the current political landscape, there’s probably not much of a point in criticizing Mike Huckabee anymore — his campaign clearly doesn’t have too many days ahead of it — but this is just ridiculous, even by his standards.
On Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes” last Thursday, Romney said: “I think most people recognize that a vote for Mike Huckabee is a vote for John McCain, and if they want John McCain as their nominee, why, that’s exactly what that vote would do.”
Today, Huckabee responded: “I know Mr. Romney has been trying to do a little voter suppression by telling people a vote for me is really a vote for John McCain.”
After the event, campaign reporters followed up on the notion that Huckabee perceives Romney as being guilty of “voter suppression.”
“If you try to discourage people from voting for somebody, what else would you call it?” he asked, refusing to apologize for the accusation.
“Isn’t voter suppression where you try to keep people from voting a certain way? By anybody’s definition, if the goal of saying certain things or doing certain things is to discourage a person’s voters, can anyone tell me otherwise? Isn’t that voter suppression — suppressing the vote, pushing it down, keeping people from feeling comfortable going and making the vote. I think that’s exactly what we’re seeing.”
I’m not the least bit interested in a semantics debate with Mike Huckabee, but if he thinks Mitt Romney encouraging people to consider electoral consequences while voting constitutes “voter suppression,” the former governor is even more confused about reality than I realized.
Indeed, if Huckabee really wants to talk about vote suppression, we can talk about vote suppression.
Vote caging is an illegal trick to suppress minority voters (who tend to vote Democrat) by getting them knocked off the voter rolls if they fail to answer registered mail sent to homes they aren’t living at (because they are, say, at college or at war). The Republican National Committee reportedly stopped the practice following a consent decree in a 1986 case. Google the term and you’ll quickly arrive at the Wizard of Oz of caging, Greg Palast, investigative reporter and author of the wickedly funny Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans — Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Palast started reporting allegations of Republican vote caging for the BBC’s Newsnight in 2004. He’s been almost alone on the story since then. Palast contends, both in Armed Madhouse and widely through the liberal blogosphere, that vote caging, an illegal voter-suppression scheme, happened in Florida in 2004 this way:
The Bush-Cheney operatives sent hundreds of thousands of letters marked “Do not forward” to voters’ homes. Letters returned (“caged”) were used as evidence to block these voters’ right to cast a ballot on grounds they were registered at phony addresses. Who were the evil fakers? Homeless men, students on vacation and — you got to love this — American soldiers. Oh yeah: most of them are Black voters.
Why weren’t these African-American voters home when the Republican letters arrived? The homeless men were on park benches, the students were on vacation — and the soldiers were overseas.
Tom DeLay’s re-redistricting scheme that violated the Voting Rights Act? Voter suppression. Georgia’s re-redistricting scheme to disenfranchise black voters? Voter suppression. The conservative campaign to fabricate an epidemic of voter fraud? Voter suppression.
Mitt Romney claiming that a vote for Huckabee is a vote for McCain? That’s hardly worth raising an eyebrow over.