The Republican field (save Ron Paul) marches in support of the war to their eventual political doom. 

Huckabee likens WMDs to easter eggs–Pinkerton, call your office!

“A superpower, if you will,” Romney says of jihadis.  It makes Huckabee’s easter egg remark seem informed.

By the way, whatever you think of Paul’s monetary views, his statement that wars produce inflation is absolutely right and pretty much irrefutable.  At some point, you have to be either pro-dollar or you can be pro-war.

Watch Romney and McCain go after those Thompson votes with their newfound enthusiasm for entitlement reform!

Does Huckabee enjoy people ridiculing him?

As the GOP field gears up for another snoozer of a debate in Florida tonight, here are some interesting Rasmussen polling numbers from Georgia: Huckabee 34, McCain 19, Romney 16, Paul 12, Giuliani 11.  Huckabee seems not to have been hurt by his second-place finish in South Carolina, and he has probably been helped by his active campaigning in Georgia earlier this week.  Assuming this lead holds up, it may be that his decision to stop contending in Florida and focus on the states he has a much better chance of winning on Feb. 5 will turn out to be very smart.  Oklahoma, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri, together with Georgia, offer Huckabee a possible 308 delegates, and he has definitely shown strength in Oklahoma, Alabama and Georgia.  Arkansas is presumably an easy win, and he should benefit in Missouri and Tennessee by coming from a neighbouring state.  (The inevitable “he’s a Republican Jesse Jackson” jokes will follow soon thereafter.)  The remarkable thing about this scenario is that come February 6th Huckabee could be in a competitive second place behind McCain, leaving Romney eating their dust.   

It’s conceivable that a McCain win in Florida eats into Huckabee’s lead in Georgia, but I don’t see Romney turning around an 18 point deficit in a week and a half even if he prevails next Tuesday.  Once again, Giuliani trails Ron Paul, even though Paul’s fav rating is almost forty points lower than Giuliani’s (an appalling piece of information, but there it is).  It will quite strange if New Hampshire turns out to be one of a very few states where Giuliani received more votes than Paul, while Paul bests him almost everywhere else.

Aides to Mr. Huckabee say he did not get to know Mr. Romney very well as a governor, finding him distant at meetings. The aides said they were also irritated that Mr. Romney did not call after Mr. Huckabee’s victory in Iowa. ~The New York Times

He has no convictions and he has no class?  Is it any wonder so many people dislike him?

Dennis Kucinich has dropped out of the race, and so departs the last consistent antiwar Democratic candidate for President.  It has puzzled and dismayed me that so many Republican antiwar voters have backed McCain in defiance of all logic, but at least there is a core of voters in the Republican primaries that has rallied to the real antiwar candidate on the right.  Meanwhile, Democratic antiwar voters mostly divide among those candidates who would bomb Iran and those who would invade Pakistan, all of whom endorsed the war against Lebanon in 2006.  By all rights, Kucinich ought to have been able to pull together 10% of the vote in every vote, but instead was usually drawing less than half the support given to Ron Paul on the other side.  However bad you think the GOP is, and I think it is pretty bad, don’t ever let anyone tell you that the Democratic Party is a party opposed to needless and illegal wars.

Jim Antle makes a very similar argument to the one I made here on the anti-Huckabee campaign’s result of clearing the path for McCain.

Rod suggested Huckabee might start building up his connections and ideas in a reformist direction  in the wake of an ’08 failure in the primaries, I doubted the prospects for the success of such a move, and Ross noted the lack of institutional infrastructure for such “reform conservatism,” but I now realise that there is an additional problem with this beyond the fact that Huckabee is apparently also not terribly interested in ideas (something I think we assumed all along).  Building on this conversation, Ross observes in a new bloggingheads, I think mostly correctly, that if Huckabee were to do what Edwards has done in his network-building, policy work and philanthropy he would end up building up support with the “Republican Party’s left.”  This would be the same part of the party that is, I think it’s fair to say, in utter disrepute with a substantial number of Republicans after the debacles of the last seven years, but even that isn’t the most significant difficulty here.      

Building support with the Republican left is, of course, exactly the opposite of the direction he’s been going in this year’s campaign, but it is also exactly what he needs not to do if he wants to be taken seriously by the mainstream movement figures as an acceptable candidate for the Presidency, since he has already been tagged by virtually everyone on the right variously as a Gersonist/Christian leftist, a not-very-closeted liberal or, in a memorable phrase, an “open borders drag queen.”  Perhaps Huckabee’s “vertical politics” will save him.  Otherwise, he will probably be tagged by the movement leaders as RINO and consigned to that political netherworld inhabited by the Republican Leadership Council, Olympia Snowe and Chuck Hagel. 

Incidentally, the hilarity of the reaction to the Huckabee campaign is that the shouts about his nice-guy liberalism have grown louder in direct proportion to the increasing number of his hard-right poses (and at the moment I still assume they are just poses) on issues.