Human Events has endorsed Fred Thompson.  Unhindered by any standard that requires a candidate to be viable, Human Events has made the logical choice, given that they obviously weren’t going to associate themselves with Ron Paul and the rest clearly fall short of their standards.  It was interesting that they bothered to explain why they ruled out Paul.  That’s more than most would do, I suppose.  I do want to applaud Human Events for refusing to endorse any of the competitive candidates, and I don’t mean that sarcastically.  There is an idea when it comes to such endorsements that you trivialise your influence on the process if you endorse a candidate who cannot realistically win the nomination, and they clearly reject that kind of thinking.  (Having once predicted that Thompson would win the nod, mostly on the grounds that I could not see how the Republicans would nominate any of these others, I don’t think it is likely to happen now.)  By endorsing Thompson, Human Events has at least helped to remind conservative voters how flawed the leading four really are.

Indeed, many believe Republicans lost the 2006 congressional elections, not because of Iraq but because of Bush’s betrayal of domestic conservative principles — other than his tax policy. ~David Limbaugh

Then apparently “many” are a bunch of fools.  Compassionate conservatism is awful, but it isn’t primarily what cost the GOP the House and Senate.

Huckabee is, however, very good under fire – affable, not very flappable, and humane. His response to the Ephesians question was disingenuous, however. The Scripture does not tell husbands to submit to wives. It tells them to love their wives in return for their wives’ obedience. ~Andrew Sullivan

More than that, it calls on husbands to sacrifice for their wives as Christ sacrificed Himself for the Church.  If that isn’t a call to devotion, I don’t know what is.  From what little I heard, Huckabee’s answer to this truly irrelevant question was the most impressive one of the night.

I just heard Fred Thompson berate Huckabee for his complaint that the Pakistanis misappropriate our aid money to their military for purposes other than combating Al Qaeda.  Of course, what Huckabee was actually referring to, unless I am very much mistaken, was the problem that Pakistan has been using military aid funding to bolster their military strength on the border with India.  Contra Quin Hillyer, Thompson came off sounding like a buffoon.  Remind me again why we’re supposed to think Huckabee is weak on foreign policy and Thompson is not?  Because he’s advised by the Vice President’s daughter?  Not much of a recommendation.

P.S. I think I have been a bit too hard on Huckabee’s foreign policy views because of his NIE blunder.  He has been improving in this area over the last couple of months.  As I said before, his Foreign Affairs essay did show some decent understanding of Pakistan, and tonight’s performance confirms that.  As for Fred, anyone advised by Liz Cheney is going to make foolish statements.

Update: Thompson really is desperate to go after Huckabee tonight.  He knows that he has to tear the man down to survive in South Carolina, but it’s just not working.

Second Update: Via Ambinder, Joe Scarborough makes it clear that he doesn’t like Fred Thompson’s debate performance.  I think that invite to Chuck Norris’ ranch won him over to Huck’s side.

No, really.  It would serve the Democrats’ interest to have the GOP race be prolonged as much as possible.  Romney should show that he’s not going to play into their hands and drop out tomorrow.

No female — young, old, black or white — could ever play the knight-on-charger with meager experience. If she presented herself as the human embodiment of national unity and world peace, everyone would have fallen down laughing. ~Froma Harrop

This is quite right.  The question that keeps puzzling me is why there aren’t more people laughing at Obama.  His is an absurd and pretentious pose.  It seems unlikely that people will continue to indulge this fantasy for another ten months. 

Update: A Clinton adviser has an amusing, if self-serving, summary of the difference between Clinton and Obama voters: “If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.”

In the wake of New Hampshire, I know we’re all supposed to ignore polls and pretend that they tell us little, but it seems useful to look at the most recent Iraq war polling again in response to this Jennifer Rubin piece.  Rubin wrote:

To look ahead to the general election, the surge may also have changed the landscape for the Republicans as a whole. If progress continues, the GOP will not face searing headlines and escalating body counts. The traditional image of the GOP as the more responsible and less skittish party in national security may be restored somewhat and the Democrats’ willingness to “cut and run” again becomes a viable campaign issue.

So the lessons of the surge are familiar ones, but ones repeatedly forgotten by politicians anxious to seek safer ground in any controversy. Short-term political gain does not always translate into long-term electoral success [bold mine-DL]. The public in the end will reward political courage — in part because it is so rare.

With all the usual caveats that the election is still ten months away and many things may change, I confess that I don’t see where Rubin is getting this impression that the “surge” stands to benefit the GOP.  Obviously, “surge” supporters hope that it does, and anything is possible, but there is little reason to think that it has had any meaningful impact on public opinion about the war.  On the surface, yes, McCain is doing better (because he won in a state he had won eight years ago, though with almost 30,000 fewer voters this time), while bizarrely losing to Romneyamong strong supporters of the war 44-23%.  Huckabee has probably temporarily benefited in the GOP primaries from being unequivocally for the “surge” while Romney was more skeptical about its success, but this may, in fact, prove to be a liability should he win the nomination.  It is worth noting that Romney’s very modest skepticism and caution actually put him closer to the majority of the country than does McCain’s mantra “we are winning.”  McCain’s best electoral asset seems to be that he wins the votes of Republican war opponents, as he did in New Hampshire, in spite of his close identification with the war–this is probably a function of the weakness of Republican war opponents’ opposition rather than McCain’s ability to appeal to those on the other side of the debate.  It seems implausible that non-Republican war opponents will be as willing to support him.

In the NBC/WSJ poll from Dec. 14-17, opposition to the war remained as strong as ever.  63% disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war.  That would have to include, as of last month, the “surge” as well as everything that came before.  56% believe victory is not still possible.  44% believe the “surge” has made no difference, and 14% believe that it has made things worse.  These numbers are virtually unchanged from earlier months.  57% want to remove most troops by 2009.  In a Dec. 16-19 ABC News poll, 62% say they believe was not worth fighting.  More recent polling by Rasmussen from Jan. 2-3 tells us that 51% believe the war will be judged a failure in the long-term, and only 34% believe that things will improve over the next six months (this group includes 61% of Republicans, but only a fifth of Democrats and a quarter of “other”).  Barring fairly major shifts in public opinion in coming months, the relative military gains of the “surge” seem to have had no effect whatever on opinions about the war.  Since several polls last month showed that the public had more confidence in the Democrats on the Iraq war, it is not at all clear where anyone would get the idea that the “surge” is helping the GOP electorally.

Ross writes:

At the moment, though, there’s a big difference between the two parties’ divisions: The Democrats’ fault lines are primarily demographic (upscale vs. downscale, professional vs. working class, women vs. men), whereas the GOP’s fault lines are demographic and ideological.

This is right, but it’s also important to note that the fault lines within the Democratic Party seem to be mostly persistent and enduring ones.  The same divide seems to keep replaying over and over in every cycle, and as we all know Democrats have usually ended up choosing the constituency-oriented incumbent or machine politician rather than the upscale candidate of “new ideas” or reform.  I would add that there was a combination of demographic and ideological fault lines in the 2004 Democratic race, to the extent that there was a relatively more progressive, netroots-backed antiwar candidate of a sort running against a relatively more hawkish liberal and the then-“centrist” Edwards.  The ideological divide was really more between the supporters of the candidates than between the candidates themselves, and the election exaggerated the extent of this divide, but it was there. 

The main contenders and the eventual nominees on the ticket in ’04 arguably represented the last hurrah of neoliberalism on the Democratic side, and the last three years have seen the gradual strengthening of progressives within the party to the point where all three leading Democrats are running on a platform as progressive as any there has been in my lifetime and probably more so.  Ross is also right to point out that the prospect of victory and the desire to capture the White House are uniting the Demmocrats. Just as the hunger to win and eight years out of executive power pushed Republicans to unite around Bush in 2000, the Democrats are suppressing whatever real ideological arguments they might have over foreign policy, trade or anything else for the sake of winning.  In the ideological fragmentation on the GOP side, we are seeing something like the Republicans’ 1968 moment, but to the general convulsions within the party there is the added problem that there is also no incumbent to lead the party, which exaggerates the effect of the disagreements.  It makes the nomination fight a contest over the future direction of the party in a way that 2004 did not affect the Democrats.

With the Kemp endorsement earlier this week, McCain is definitely becoming the second coming of Dole.

Via Jim Antle