'A Bleeding-Heart Conservative'

GOP presidential candidate Sam Brownback, a U.S. senator from Kansas, was in town Friday for an award dinner and was kind enough to have lunch with about a dozen of us who are still sorting through the candidates. Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney are leading the pack at the moment, with conservatives like Brownback and Mike Huckabee a bit further back. And I'll really be surprised if Newt Gingrich doesn't jump in sometime in 2007.

At the lunch meeting my friend Pat McGuigan asked Brownback why Republicans should favor him over the other candidates. Brownback replied that his core philosophy best represents the party, as well as the country as a whole (which he believes is still a center-right majority). He believes there's a disconnect between the bigger-name GOP candidates and the party's more conservative base. Brownback calls himself a "bleeding-heart conservative" and says he cares most about life issues, rebuilding the family and the culture, free-market economics, human rights, and religious freedom (he noted that more people in the world have been killed for their faith in the last 30 years than in the history of mankind).

Brownback is impressive and is worth taking a look at. (Of course, at the moment I'm inclined to say the same about all the aforementioned candidates except McCain.) Brownback is not a front-runner right now, but as Marvin Olasky observed a few months ago, "a strong finish in the early 2008 Iowa caucus could lead to a fundraising breakthrough and the chance to be competitive in primaries around the country."