Peggy Noonan has an interesting column today.  There was an enjoyable part about the Clinton campaign:

It is a delight of democracy that now and then assumptions are confounded, that all the conventional wisdom of the past year is compressed and about to blow. It takes a Potemkin village.

A lot of observers have been declaring the Clinton campaign to be in real trouble.  Her position in New Hampshire has been weakening.  She is occasionally being compared unfavourably to Howard Dean, but it is actually these early signs of weakening that may hint that she will not suffer the Vermont governor’s fate.  Dean was riding high in state and national polls until he slammed straight into the brick wall of actual vote tallies.  The dashing of high expectations may do more damage to a primary campaign (especially if it has an extensive organisation and deep pockets) than setbacks at the polls.  Now there is some reason to think that Clinton could lose Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and that has started to be factored into assessments of her chances.  Pundits have already been running scenarios for what happens if she finishes third in Iowa, and her anointed status as “inevitable” has been rescinded by many of the same geniuses who bestowed it upon her in the first place.  All of this makes it easier for her to survive disappointing results and what might otherwise be a sudden collapse of confidence in her candidacy.  Even if she “wins ugly,” so to speak, and just ekes out a victory, she can then play Mondale to Obama’s Hart and the nomination will probably go to her. 

If she now wins in two, or maybe in just one, of these contests, her campaign remains alive and you will then begin to see stories that describe how her campaign has avoided disaster and has been strengthened in the process yadda yadda yadda.  I think it is true that she cannot realistically lose all three of those contests and hope to succeed (just as it is ludicrous to think that Giuliani can succeed after going 0-for-4).  However, she may just need one win, and I think Obama’s current lead in these three states makes it much more crucial for him to win in all three.  The real danger to both, as I’m sure others have already pointed out, is that Edwards’ strength in Iowa may be greater than the polls suggest, which is where his potential for shaking up this race is obviously greatest.

The candidate chose to occupy his snow day with a moral blunder of the first order — accepting the endorsement of Jim Gilchrist, the founder of an anti-immigrant group called the Minuteman Project. ~Michael Gerson

Gerson has turned on the “compassionate” conservative candidate pretty quickly here.  Not because of the man’s real moral blunders (see Wayne Dumond et al.), but because he associates himself with restrictionists and adopts restrictionist proposals.  In Gerson’s moral universe, opposition to illegal immigration and support for border security seem to be among the worst errors one can make (“a moral blunder of the first order,” he says).  Ironically, Gerson’s criticism of Huckabee’s embrace of Gilchrist is just the kind of thing Huckabee needs in the nomination contest to shore up his reputation as an “authentic conservative” (as his advertisements refer to him).  Anything that will distance him from Gerson and “compassionate conservatism” is a plus for him, since it undermines the argument that the rest of us are promoting that Huckabee is in many ways not conservative and is not the candidate that conservatives should want to support.  Gerson’s disapproval may become for some people another reason to give Huckabee another look, when they should not even give him a first look.  

Considering Huckabee’s incredibly small campaign staff, this question was quite amusing:

Did someone vet Gilchrist’s past statements?

The candidate doesn’t even have someone to brief him about leading news stories on national security, and we’re supposed to expect a rigorous vetting process of endorsers?  The strange thing is that Huckabee’s transparent flip on immigration probably won’t hurt him that much, despite what Gerson thinks it will do to his reputation for “authenticity.”  The beauty of a politician having a reputation for authenticity is that it is almost always undeserved.  In any case, it can be effectively faked by clever performers, and there’s no doubt that Huckabee is that if he is nothing else.  Further, all of his main rivals have been as bad or worse on immigration than he was.  I was going to say, “except for Fred Thompson,” but Thompson isn’t really a main rival anymore.  This means that their collective stampede to the right on immigration gives him plenty of cover to transform himself cynically into an anti-amnesty, border-enforcing champion.  Unbelievably, Iowan restrictionist voters are buying into it right now.

And it matters that so much of his gorgeous rhetoric is devoid of actual meaning. ~ Eugene Robinson

Quick–guess which candidate Robinson is describing.

Strangely, it isn’t Obama.

It’s two centuries since the passage of the First Amendment and our presidential candidates still cannot distinguish establishment from free exercise. ~Charles Krauthammer

It seems clear to me from the article that it is exactly these things that Krauthammer seems unable to distinguish, or rather he seems unable to understand that they do not even apply to the role of religion in this campaign.  The establishment clause concerns a prohibition against any law establishing a religion at the federal level in the United States.  That is what it meant and what it still means.  It is elementary, which is why it is tiresome that so few people seem to grasp that this has nothing to do with expressions of public opinion or political preferences.  The hollowness of the objection Krauthammer and others are raising is evident once you notice that the only kind of political judgements about someone’s religion that they really find unacceptable is a negative one.  They may find positive judgements in favour of a candidate on account of his religion undesirable, but they do not usually make an issue out of it. 

If voting is an exercise of political speech (it is), and freedom of speech is guaranteed under the same First Amendment, there is nothing illicit or impropr in exercising that freedom, so long as it does not endanger public safety under very specific circumstances and conditions (e.g., inciting to riot, etc.).  The implicit complaint in this debate is that somehow disapproval of a candidate’s religious beliefs is a curtailment of that candidate’s religious liberty, which is not true.  The argument seems to be that free speech should, as a matter of practice and custom, end where there are strong disagreements and that this applies only to questions of religious difference, which I think is an appalling idea.  Mind you, this is not a violation of anyone’s First Amendment rights, because it is not the government that is trying to impose this rule.  Nonetheless, it is a very deliberate attempt to stifle one particular kind of political expression through the deployment of social pressures and the implied or explicit accusations of prejudice.  Conservatives who rebel against the principle of thought-policing rules on campuses and elsewhere should reject this argument, which is based on the same principle.  All thhose who constantly tell us how interested they are in intellectual diversity and open debate should have no problem with a debate that also includes religious beliefs.  If voters believe these things are irrelevant, they are perfectly capable of selecting candidates who do not engage in this kind of politics. 

What is so frustrating about this debate is that neither establishment nor the free exercise of religion is at stake here.  Religious liberty is not endangered, and no one is proposing an established religion.  We do indeed live in an increasingly religiously diverse society.  It seems bizarre that this would be the one aspect of our society that we would refuse to talk about in our political discourse.

In the same way that civil rights laws established not just the legal but also the moral norm that one simply does not discriminate on the basis of race — changing the practice of one generation and the consciousness of the next — so the constitutional injunction against religious tests is meant to make citizens understand that such tests are profoundly un-American. ~Charles Krauthammer

No, the injunction was meant and is still meant to prevent federal offices from being dependent on whether or not you confess a particular creed or religion.  When it was written, there were many state religious tests (because there were still a few state established churches), and there were likely members of the Constitutional Convention who had no problem in principle with religious tests in their own states.  What they would not accept is the religious test that someone from another church in another state might try to impose on them through the federal government.  Krauthammer does at least admit that the prohibition of religious tests is a prohibition against what the government does, not a statement about what citizens may or may not do in selecting their representatives.  It’s a funny word, representative.  Taken at face value, you might even think that it is supposed to mean that citizens select those whom they believe best represents them.  All this complaining about prohibitions against religious tests is a concerted effort to make people feel guilty for wanting what they regard as their best representation. 

But there is some hope for common ground: both Krauthammer and Huckabee seem to be of the mistaken view that laws establish moral norms.  This is particularly bizarre in the American context, since such laws would likely have never been enacted by elected representatives unless there was already some considerable moral consensus behind them that enacting the law, and enforcing existing moral norms, was the appropriate and right thing to do.

In a sense, Huckabee is the second coming of former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who now seems about as relevant as a typewriter at a bloggers’ convention. ~Stuart Rothenburg

A typewriter at a bloggers’ convention would at least have the advantage of being unusual and something of a curiosity.  Some of the younger bloggers may have never seen one outside of a museum.  I’m afraid Fred Thompson is no longer that interesting.

The word is that Huckabee will be getting a big foreign policy endorsement tomorrow that is supposed to shore up his (non-existent) credibility on national security and foreign affairs.  If it’s anywhere as surprising and incomprehensible as the Gilchrist endorsement, I think we should fully expect to see Henry Kissinger up there in the snows of New Hampshire alongside him.

P.S.  The Kissinger bit was a joke, of course, but now that I think about it more it occurs to me that the recent Chafets profile may have given us the answer.  The profile said something about how Huckabee had “visited” with Richard Haass once.  So, for lack of any plausible alternative, I am going to guess that it will be Haass.  That would be something of a feather in Huck’s cap, but it would also reinforce the loathing for him in the party.  Just consider–Huckabee consorting with realists!  Then again, a Haass endorsement would deflate a lot of the ill-informed “his foreign policy is just like Jimmy Carter’s” garbage that establishment voices are spreading around.

The sound you hear is Ross screaming in horror.

Reid Wilson reports on the Thompson campaign’s continuing woes:

Thompson has effectively focused his entire campaign on Iowa, a state which, thanks to the caucuses, requires more organization than most. If his campaign can’t manage 500 signatures in Delaware, Thompson could be in for a rude surprise on January 3.

Thompson will not be on the Delaware primary ballot because his people could not round up 500 signatures?  It sounds like time to call it all off.