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.”
