No Runny Eggs

Or at least as instant as I get. Since I managed only one d-bomb, and I managed to more-or-less keep up, I’ll go with my notes:

Rudy Giuliani – B- – The good: He hung tough on the fiscal conservatism message. The bad: He once again pissed off the social conservatives. The ugly: Back to all-NYC, all-the-time, and he’s a Gorebal Warmnig acolyte.

Mike Huckabee – D+ – The good: Ducked-and-weaved his way around the fiscal trap. The bad: The pinata resembled old, fat Huck, and it got split open by as much his own words as his opponents’. The ugly: The claims that the “Fair”Tax will cure poverty and baldness.

Duncan Hunter – C+ – The good: Stayed on target. The bad: That target is leading Jack and spit, and Jack left town. The unexpected: He actually left San Diego for once on education.

Alan Keyes – D- – The good: He finally got to sit at the adults’ table as the “conscience” of the Republican Party. The bad: Instead of actually advancing his campaign, he burned his 15 minutes of fame trying to be said conscience. The takeaway: If you thought Thompson was late, he’s got nothing on Keyes.

John McCain – B from me, F from the average Iowan – The good (or what the Iowans would say is bad): Very strong on the fiscal conservatism issue; too strong for the average ADM corn farmer. The bad: He didn’t get quoted. The ugly: He’s almost a Gorebal Warming acolyte.

Ron Paul – D+ – The good: When dragged away from the Blame America First/Last/Always and goldbug lines, he actually makes sense. The bad: He always returns home to roas…er, roost. The ugly: He took Rosie O’Donnell’s advice.

Mitt Romney – B from me, A from the average Iowan – The good (at least not specific to Iowans): None of the candidates laid a glove on him (which speaks to the weakness of the field more than to his actual performance). The bad: 4 more years of Bush with even more gubmint-forced health care “solutions” and welfare handouts. The Iowa-specific good: He rediscovered his pander.

Tom Tancredo – C- – See Duncan Hunter’s wrap, only he wasted a golden opportunity on education.

Fred Thompson – B- – The good: He laid a good smackdown on Washburn. The bad: He reinforced the “lazy” line by saying he’d waste Year 1 doing a lot of talking (say, isn’t that what the campaign’s for?). The odd: His tax smack on Romney, which seemed good at the time, will not survive the first cutting of the raw tape.

Carolyn Washburn, the moderator – F – The good: At least this was less than 1:30. The bad: She is a domineering liberal bent on an agenda anathema to no less than 50% of each of the Pubbies on the stage. The ugly: That’s 1:23 I’ll never get back.

These debates, hosted by The Des Moines Register, will be the last debates before the Iowa caucuses. I cannot guarantee that I will be live-blogging either, mainly because I can’t guarantee I will be back in front of the computer by 1 pm. What will make these debates unusual, besides the odd start time and the fact that we’ll be going another 3 weeks without another before the selection process actually starts, is that it will be available over a multitude of networks; CNN, C-SPAN3, Fox News Channel, Fox News Radio, and C-SPAN Radio, as well as at DesMoinesRegister.com.

Since I wasn’t able to collate a look ahead to the Republican debate, which will feature not 8, but 9 candidates (including Alan Keyes), I’ll just point you in the general direction of Jim Geraghty’s preview. Besides, he put together something far better than I could with an unlimited amount of effort.

Ed: I had intended to make this a multi-part one-day series, but events are keeping me from getting to part 2 until at least tomorrow.

A couple of interesting things happened since my last look at the pool. The first is something I should have expected; the Democrats have historically been very reluctant to continue to embrace their early front-runner, in this case Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama has taken the lead in Iowa, and is threatening in New Hampshire and South Carolina. However, that also bumps up against the other Dem maxim – Iowa is not a reliable precursor to success. If it were, we would’ve had nominee Howard Dean. It remains to be seen which of the maxims holds.

The second is the meteoric climb of Mike Huckabee in Iowa and South Carolina at the putative expense of everybody else, but especially early-state front-runner Mitt Romney. The ease of Huckabee’s supplanting of Romney caused a pair of “panic” moves; Romney giving his “Mormon” speech, and Fred Thompson declaring Iowa his Alamo.

I’m almost certainly in the minority on the “Mormon” speech; I honestly and personally did not see the reason for it. By the same token, unlike a lot of others that can fairly be described as the “religious right”, my sole religious “test” is whether one’s religion (or lack thereof) compels him or her to violate the Constitution by imposing said religion (or lack thereof) upon the rest of the country. I don’t see that out of Mormonism.

Thompson’s campaign has come to the late realization that Iowa, as one of only 3 pre-Super Duper Tuesday states that count as much now as they did in prior elections, is wide open. Even though Huckabee, with the undoubted aiding and abetting by the media, has made a miraculous move, it wasn’t exactly a solid movement. A recent poll that gave Huckabee the lead also noted that roughly 60% of Iowans could still be persuaded to leap off a particular candidate’s bandwagon.

Now that the prelims are done, it’s time to eliminate the also-rans (later, Hunter, Paul, Tancredo, Richardson, Kucinich, Biden, Dodd, and Gravel) and focus on why each of the 8 remaining can and cannot win their respective party’s nomination:

Hillary Clinton (D)

Why she can win: She still has the popular (in Democratic circles) Bill as her husband, and thanks to DNC machinations, she has the reduced Michigan contingent locked up. Also, she and her campaign staff are masters of negative campaigning.
Why she cannot win: As stated above, the Democrats tend to dump early front-runners like yesterday’s trash. Morever, her campaign is imploding.

John Edwards (D)

Why he can win: He’s perfectly poised to benefit from any potential backlash from mud slung between Clinton and Obama.
Why he cannot win: This isn’t Wisconsin 1992, where those who play the nice guy can finish first.

Rudy Giuliani (R)

Why he can win: There’s way too much time between Iowa/New Hampshire/South Carolina and Super Duper Tuesday for any surprise candidates to maintain momentum on their own, and his entire strategy has revolved around SDT. This has been enhanced by the faltering of Romney in 2/3rds of that early triad.
Why he cannot win: He is, frankly, a liberal running in what is still considered a conservative set of primaries.

Mike Huckabee (R)

Why he can win: He’s got the big media-driven mo.
Why he cannot win: Other than abortion, God and guns, he is, frankly, a liberal running in what is still considered a conservative set of primaries. Morever, he doesn’t have the monopoly on the secular 2/3rds of those 3.

John McCain (R)

Why he can win: I believe that somebody other than Giuliani, Huckabee, and Romney will be the media flavor of the week before New Hampshire, and McCain’s been Old Reliable for them in the past. Also, he’s running further to the right than he’s run before.
Why he cannot win: Elephants tend to have long memories, and McCain has a lot of baggage.

Barack Obama (D)

Why he can win: He’s a shiny new package for the same tired liberal policies, and he wasn’t the early front-runner.
Why he cannot win: Seven letters – C-L-I-N-T-O-N

Mitt Romney (R)

Why he can win: He still has New Hampshire, and he still has a pile of money.
Why he cannot win: There’s a certain lack of trust of all his flip-flops. That was the big knock on the last candidate out of Massachusetts, and it would be ironic to say the least if the Republicans fell into the same trap the Democrats did the last Presidential election.

Fred Thompson (R)

Why he can win: Out of the 5 remaining Republicans, he is the most-conservative one left. There are still hints of something out there the pollsters are missing.
Why he cannot win: The campaign has frankly been a disaster, and the media is bound and determined to have two liberals duking it out from mid-February through November.

I’m still gathering my thoughts on a “X campaigning days to Iowa” update on the race, while waiting to see what a couple of late-breaking moves (one I should have seen coming, one I couldn’t) and the Mitt Mormon speech did. However, I can’t let Mike Huckabee’s meteoric rise in Iowa, South Carolina (if Rasmussen can be believed), and nationally (again, if Rasmussen or national polls can be believed) go without comment, especially since just about my entire blogroll is playing Hack-a-Huck. Allow me to get my six fouls in.

While I agree with Ace that the presstitutes are pretending to love Huckabee right now and that a Huckabee-Dem matchup would hand the Oval Office to said Dem, I’m a bit more conspiratorial than his implication that matchup is what they want. While they would like that matchup, it is only their second-favorite matchup behind the Rudy Giuliani-Dem one because they’ll win either way there. Despite the (apparent) lack of movement by Fred Thompson, they are still deathly-afraid of Thompson as the nominee, and they’ve also become afraid that the full “conversion” of Mitt Romney to a conservative is real. They needed someone to finish cutting the tires of Romney’s early momentum, and who better than someone that can finish the process of separating the pro-lifers from the Republican Party because his only conservative qualifications are that he’s a Baptist minister and pro-life?

The binary choice of Giuliani and Huckabee is unpalatable to signifiant and different, if somewhat-overlapping, segments of the Republican Party. Despite not being exactly a fiscal or governmental conservative, Giuliani is positively Goldwaterian (circa 1964) compared to Huckabee. On the pro-life front, there almost cannot be a wider difference between the two.

Huckabee has several serious problems as a Presidential candidate beyond his fiscal and governmental liberalism. Despite his late protestations that he isn’t an shill for illegal aliens (H/T – Hot Air), he has a long and sad record of being a shill for same. I wish those three items were enough to have killed his campaign, but as the second President Bush has proven over the last 8 years, the core of conservatism has been eroded over the last 75 years to the point where government-induced “compassion” has become a bigger draw than the desire for a hands-off government that actually maintains its borders.

Depending on whether Huckabee is stopped cold before or after January, it’s fortunate or unfortunate that those are the least of his problems. You may or may not have heard of Wayne Dumond (if you haven’t, he’s a convicted rapist who was paroled at the urging of Huckabee who went on to rape and murder a woman; a damning timeline of Huckabee’s involvement in the decision to parole Dumond at Hot Air). Considering that Republican voters care a bit more about stuff like that than Democratic ones (just ask Mike Dukakis), I’ll wager that Huckabee’s ultimate failure will come well before Dukakis’.

If those don’t sink Huckabee in Iowa and South Carolina, there’s an interesting (in a Chinese way) quote from Huckabee that was caught by Jim Geraghty that will finish the split job started by the presstitutes – “There’s only one explanation for it (Huckabee’s surge in the polls), and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people.”