Jan

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When Did Class Warfare Become a Conservative Talking Point?

January 4, 2008 | |

Former Governor Mike Huckabee won the Iowa Caucus running away. Looking at the exit polls, it is clear that evangelical Christian conservatives had much to do with it.

There’s an issue that keeps coming up with Huckabee that I want to address, and that is the issue of class warfare. Peggy Noonan in her column today makes note of something Mike Huckabee said on Jay Leno show a couple of nights ago:

People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off.

The former governor was of course referring to Mitt Romney. This is not the first time he has invoked class warfare as a talking point. Most of you I’m sure are familiar with his comment about CEOs:

A lot of American workers are finding that their wages continue to get strapped lower and lower while CEO salaries are higher and higher. And the reality is that when you have the average CEO salary 500 times the average worker, and you have the hedge fund manager making 2,200 times that of the average worker, you’re going to create a level of discontent that’s going to create a huge appetite for unions.

If that sounds familiar to you it should, because John Edwards said just about the same thing in New Hampshire:

You’ve got the head CEO of one of the biggest health insurance companies in America, last year he didn’t make a million dollars, he didn’t make tens of millions of dollars, he made hundreds of millions of dollars.

We of course know what the liberal solution to this problem is: Redistribution of Wealth. As conservatives we know that all this accomplishes is making everyone less wealthy, and not even equally so. Those with money will still have money, those without will have less (the very people the backers claim the system would help).

As evangelical Christian conservatives, we should reject this mentality for two reasons.

1. It reduces the income of everyone, there by directly decreasing our ability to spread the gospel. Money is one of the means we need to do this (which includes Christian Charity).

2. It hurts the poor the most. It is our duty to look out for the less fortunate even in who we select as our leaders.

It should bother us that one of the Republican candidates for POTUS (and a self-proclaimed Christian one at that) so easily uses this talking point against one of our own. It should also give us a window into the character of the man that would use it.


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