Glamour magazine's new blog, Glamocracy, features a rather statist star, but it also features a rather wonderful writer in, Amanda Carpenter, who presents the small government conservative view on campaign 2008. In Carpenter's latest post, she gets to the heart of the Huckabee problem - he's a tax and spend "conservative":

The feminist blogosphere is up in arms because Mike Huckabee pardoned a rapist and signed a petition that asks women to “submit graciously” to their husbands, but these same bloggers give him a free pass on taxes.

This make me think of that terribly stereotypical Teen Talk Barbie from a few Christmases back. “Math class is tough!” she said.

I’d hate to think that taxes are too “tough” for the Barbie blogs to address today. After all, the Huckster’s record on taxes portends a much more dismal future for women than his record on crime or a little unwelcome evangelizing.

As governor, Huckabee supported higher sales taxes, gasoline taxes and cigarette taxes. Knowing this, Huckabee is more likely to make women submit to “the man” in Washington, by forcing them to work more to pay a higher tax burden.

I'm excited to read a viewpoint that advocates small government conservatism rather than "family values" conservatism. Too often the token young and/or female conservative in the media (i.e. Elisabeth Hasselbeck) is all about religion or all about being pro-life or pro-chastity or anti-something fun. It's not that there's anything particularly wrong with people like that (although I usually disagree with them), it's that social conservatives are not the only kind of conservatives, particularly young ones.

In my neck of the woods, I'm surrounded by what I call "knee jerk liberals". These people think they're liberal, because they've been taught to associate conservatism with Republicans. So, to them, conservatives want to control who you sleep with, what you do to your body, what you read and listen to and conservatives hate the poor and love big business. (My God, I could almost feel Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan turning over in their graves as I typed that).

Once you talk to these folks about what they actually believe in, you quickly realize that they're only liberal because they don't realize that there's an alternative. My kudos to Glamour (of all places) for helping get the word out. Now, if only the GOP would open up the tent so some of us conservatives can vote in November without feeling like we need to take a shower when we're done.