DMN endorses Huck, Obama

Today my newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, endorsed Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama in their respective party contests. I agreed with both editorial decisions, and voted for both in our board ballot. It was not a unanimous decision in either case (few editorial positions on any topic are), and if you're interested in how we arrived at these decisions, my boss, editorial page editor Keven Ann Willey, explains the process here.

In our board's deliberations, we compared the positions on issues held by all the major candidates with the editorial board's stated positions. We're a fairly centrist editorial board, overall. We're what you might call "business Republican" in our general orientation: pro-market, moderate to liberal on immigration, socially liberal (e.g., pro-choice, pro-affirmative action), in favor of Bush's "compassionate conservatism", and so forth. We've embraced a greener politics full-force. When we sat down with the results of our compare-and-contrast, the candidates on either side whose positions overall most corresponded to the editorial board's were Clinton and Obama on the Dem side, and McCain and Huckabee on the GOP side (actually, on paper, Biden scored highest on the Dem side, but there was no enthusiasm at all for his candidacy, seeing as how he's in the cellar).

The thing that stands out to me about the vote on the board -- and it was fairly close in both the Democratic and Republican contests -- is how almost all the Obama voters also went for Huckabee, and almost all the Clinton voters also went for McCain. What it came down to was a significant minority of the board wanted to go with experience over change, but a majority of us felt that a clear change of course is what the country needs to get it back on track. Personally, I was surprised that most of my colleagues wanted to go with Huckabee on the GOP side. I thought his social conservatism would be off-putting. But as we say in the editorial, his record in Arkansas showed that his religious-right convictions expressed themselves more in compassionate social policies, and we praised him for being willing to pay for these programs with taxes, instead of running up a deficit.

I can't say for sure, because I haven't talked about it in detail with my colleagues, but I'm pretty confident that Huckabee's visit with the board back in the spring made a big difference. I've said before here that I didn't get to attend that meeting, but was startled that my socially liberal colleagues came out of the meeting really impressed by Gov. Huckabee, saying that he seemed like a good man who would listen to his opponents. That counted for a lot when it came down to endorsement time. Huckabee is doing so well today because he connects with voters on the stump. Well, he connected with the DMN editorial board too, and that made a difference.

Personally, I would have been fine if we'd have gone with our close second choice, John McCain (I would not have been fine had the board chosen Hillary Clinton in the Dem contest). But you know, while everyone on the board respected McCain -- a lot -- it seemed to most of us that his moment has passed.