Romney went negative this week, airing an ad in Iowa hitting Huckabee on tuition breaks for illegal immigrants, but the aforementioned aide suggested it was far too tepid. “Romney has to turn mother’s picture to the wall and really start beating the crap out of guy.” ~Tom Bevan

A bit crude, perhaps, but I agree with the assessment.  The ad was very tepid.  It was so tepid that Romney makes a point of bragging about how neutral and  non-judgemental it was, as he did again in his Today Show appearance.

Thus the scandal of Jesus and Satan being brothers is one based entirely on extrapolation and syllogism. Yes, because both Jesus and Satan were created as part of the offspring of God, you could say they’re related, or even brothers. ~Ryan Bell

In other words, because Mormonism holds a doctrine similar to Arianism (i.e., that the Son is created), what Huckabee said is obviously horribly wrong, except that it’s actually correct.  I don’t think anyone will be hiring this guy to do spin control.  You do have to admire the gall of bringing Hitler into the debate.  That is always a good way to persuade and win new friends.

But I think attacking someone’s religion is really going too far. It’s just not the American way, and I think people will reject that. ~Mitt Romney

Romney said that on The Today Show in response to Huckabee’s question in the Chafets profile.  David Kuo made the right point about this:

I’m sorry but I am really confused about all of this. Since when is asking a question about someone’s religion attacking it?? This is bizarre.

Kuo referred to Romney’s appearance as “pathetic.” 

I am obviously just about as strongly opposed to Romney as you can be, but no one can possibly confuse me for a fan of Huckabee, either.  I think Romney’s Mormonism is something that is legitimate for voters to take into account, but I also know that Huckabee has stated publicly time and again that he thinks it should be irrelevant.  (Here he makes the statement as clearly as anyone could possibly want.)  As a matter of fairness and accuracy, it seems wrong to impute to Huckabee the views and motives of those who are going to vote against Romney on account of his religion unless there is evidence that he actually holds such views and has such motives.  Huckabee has plenty of flaws, all of which are amply detailed in the same Chafets profile.  Ironically, by focusing on this one sentence, the media and Romney are giving Huckabee an easy out  on his genuinely worrisome record and policy views.  By protesting about one sentence, which they must regard in itself as an irrelevancy, and ignoring the serious flaws in Huckabee’s ideas (or lack thereof in certain cases), the media are actually empowering the candidate who stands to benefit from the anti-Mormon reaction among Republican voters.  Whatever Romney may or may not have accomplished with his speech last week, he stands to lose by embracing the rhetoric of the oppressed minority (which, if you haven’t noticed, does not exactly win over conservative voters).     

The small but growing effort to tar Huckabee as some sort of sectarian campaigner or incipient theocrat strikes me as wrong on the merits and seriously counterproductive for those making the argument.  If I am a caucus-goer or a primary voter who has not firmly committed to another candidate, I could very easily see Mitt Romney as someone working with the mainstream media to accuse a social conservative candidate of bigotry.  Think about how that appears to a conservative audience.  It does not make Romney look better to them, let me tell you.  

It seems to me that you give people the benefit of the doubt in these cases.  Huckabee was probably innocently asking the question he asked, and he has since gone out of his way to make it clear that he thinks that the issue shouldn’t be part of the campaign.  He has had opportunities to say publicly whether he thought Mormonism was Christian or not, and he demurred.  He could have very easily said something else, but chose not to do so.  If you find all the talk about Mormonism disconcerting, you really don’t want to get things to the point where Huckabee feels compelled to start answering those questions by labeling Huckabee, pretty much baselessly, as a “sectarian” who is playing “the Mormon card.” 

More bizarre yet is Romney’s reaction.  The question that Huckabee asked actually reflects Mormon teaching with a reasonable degree of accuracy.  (You can say that it takes this view out of context and implies something that the LDS church does not teach, but I think this is a reach.)  If, in fact, Huckabee doesn’t know much about Mormonism, his question might reflect something that he has heard over the years and was asking in the natural give and take of conversation.  Now you can argue that he shouldn’t have said it, or you can argue that Chafets shouldn’t have included it, but Romney’s reaction doesn’t really make sense unless he finds the tenets of his own religion so embarrassing and strange that the mere mention of them constitutes an “attack” or unless you are a candidate, as Romney is, in need of something, anything, you can use to tear down your opponent.  Of course these beliefs are a political liability, as we all know, but if Romney believed what he said last Thursday that those who think these things matter “underestimate the American people” he cannot possibly see a mere question as an attack worthy of condemnation. 

Pluralism doesn’t mean that we all become silent about matters of great importance.  You do not really have a free society if asking questions is considered an assault.  More basically, you need something more substantial than this if you’re going to charge someone with attacking your religion. 

Ron Paul has raised more than $11 million for the fourth quarter, and right now needs a little over $600,000 to meet his goals for the quarter.  The Tea Party on Sunday should be able to break that barrier in a matter of hours.

Well, that was … thoroughly uninteresting. And that is fantastic, spectacular news for new Republican front-runner Mike Huckabee, and a giant missed opportunity for Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and all the rest of the would-be Iowa contenders. ~Rick Klein

That may be overstating things a bit, but it was the last debate before the caucuses and the last chance to expose Huckabee to the kind of pressure his rivals need to put on him if they expect him to slip up or lose popular support.  If Klein is right that Huckabee and Paul were the winners coming out of the debate, that can’t be anything but bad news for Thompson, who needs Huckabee to implode and who also needs Ron Paul to go away.  Fourth place or single digit results and Thompson is pretty much finished. 

On the other hand, the sheer lack of organisation and money that Huckabee has, as we are reminded in the Times magazine piece today, has to catch up to him at some point.  Huckabee’s poor fundraising is frankly a little bit surprising.  Granted, he has raised his national profile in just the last few weeks, which hasn’t allowed much time to raise funds, but how is it that he is getting such massive support in Iowa and noticeable support everywhere else in the country and can’t translate that into some real funding right now?  As this article about Huckabee’s daughter (and natonal field coordinator) reminds us, they won’t have a campaign bus until next week. 

The lack of funding is demonstrated very simply by the Huckabee campaign’s own site.  His goal for Dec. 15th is $1.5 1.15 million.  He needs about $300,000 in the next three days to reach this fairly extremely modest goal.

P.S.  A thought occurred to me when I was reading Chafets’ profile and came across the part where Huckabee selected T.G.I. Friday’s for their lunch (a selection Chafets refused).  Someone has made the crack about Huckabee that his name sounds like that of a chain restaurant, and I read the Chafets’ piece after watching Amy Sullivan and Rod Dreher’s bloggingheads last night (in which Rod invokes Applebee’s America).  Then I saw the reference to Huckabee’s preferred chain restaurant.  Somehow that struck me as the perfect symbol for Huckabee’s campaign.  On a more substantive level, the chain restaurant connection reminded me of something else.    This made me wonder whether Huckabee is the ideal candidate of Applebee’s America.  The points from that book that seem to apply to Huckabee’s success thus far are these:

• People make choices about politics, consumer goods, and religion with their hearts, not their heads.
• Successful leaders touch people at a gut level by projecting basic American values that seem lacking in modern institutions and missing from day-to-day life experiences.
• The most important Gut Values today are community and authenticity. People are desperate to connect with one another and be part of a cause greater than themselves. They’re tired of spin and sloganeering from political, business, and religious institutions that constantly fail them.

Of course, the idea that Huckabee is “authentic” while others are not is an idea that Huckabee has tried hard to cultivate.  It seems to me that it isn’t true, but in the same way that Clinton claimed that he felt your pain Huckabee can certainly make people feel as if it is true and make them feel that he understands their predicaments. 

Update: Huckabee is now also running in a close second place in Wisconsin of all places, up seventeen points from three months ago.

Following up on my earlier remarks on the state of the GOP field, this Strategic Vision poll from Georgia helps to illuminate the schizophrenia of Republican voters:

13. Do you view President Bush as a conservative in the mode of Ronald Reagan? (Republicans Only)
Yes 7%
No 79%
Undecided 14%

16. For the 2008 Republican Presidential Nomination whom would you support? (Republicans Only)
Mike Huckabee 23%
Fred Thompson 20%
Rudy Giuliani 17%
John McCain 11%
Mitt Romney 10%
Ron Paul 4%
Tom Tancredo 2%
Duncan Hunter 1%
Undecided 12%

17. How important is it for the Republican presidential candidate to be a conservative Republican in the mode of Ronald Reagan, very important, somewhat important, not very important, not important, or undecided? (Republicans Only)
Very Important 56%
Somewhat Important 24%
Not Very Important 5%
Not Important 7%
Undecided 8%

So here you have Georgia Republicans, most of whom think Bush has deviated from the Reagan “mode” or standard, and they very much want someone who operates in that Reagan mode…and then you have over 40% selecting either Huckabee or Giuliani, the two whose differences from this “mode” are the most egregious and obvious.  Republicans keep telling themselves that they want a new Reagan (which may or may not have something to do with wanting to support the kinds of policies implemented by the actual Reagan administration), and find themselves confused and divided over how to reconcile the current state of their party with their political ideal.  They belong to Bush’s GOP, and they clearly don’t like this, but at the same time they don’t support much significant or noticeable change of direction from where Bush has taken them.  The Reagan nostalgia is a way to express discontent without having to reflect on how Republicans have reached their current predicament.  The enthusiasm for Fred Thompson’s candidacy stemmed from the idea that he could return the party to the good old days, and there was and is a desperate desire for such a return.  It is now translating into a huge boost of support for Huckabee (who leads the Georgia race without, so far as I know, ever having appeared in the state once since the campaign began), because he has now become the empty vessel into which many people are pouring their hopes.  Bizarrely, voters who want a new Reagan are currently giving the lead to someone  who seems in almost every way to promise to be another Bush, whom the same voters see as significantly different from their ideal.

Update: The same split-mindedness afflicts Republicans in Wisconsin and, obviously, Iowa.

Eve Fairbanks has an interesting profile on the candidate I once predicted would take the field by surprise, Duncan Hunter.  There is a part of the profile that explains a lot about why Hunter doesn’t connect with his natural constituency in the GOP:

At a town hall meeting in Reno, Hunter’s policy profile attracts several heavily made-up women upset about Mexican immigration. They’re mad as hell. But Hunter never yells, and his detailed discussion of an intercountry highway supposedly proposed after NAFTA only serves to confuse them. “I don’t understand. NAFTA–you would build a highway in between our country and theirs?” one of the women shouts.

As Fairbanks notes, he is “too fringe to be mainstream” and “too mainstream to be fringe,” and this episode shows that he is also too policy and detail-oriented to be the kind of politician who can win over restrictionist voters, namely the single-issue candidate who talks about virtually nothing else (Tancredo) or the simplistic panderer who will say whatever you want to hear (a role apparently filled now by Huckabee).  We can rest assured that Huckabee will never confuse his voters with unnecessary details and information.

Given how horribly he has done everywhere, why did I ever think that Hunter might be the surprise dark horse candidate in the race?  I originally thought that someone with his trade and immigration policy views he would become a successful insurgent candidate, tapping into the discontent of the base, and could offer the GOP a chance to compete respectably in a political environment in which the GOP needs to appeal to populist voters.  With his long years of service on the Armed Services Committee, he was better prepared to take up the Presidency during wartime than just about any other candidate.

But without digging into the theological nitty gritty here, the bottom line is that however different the theology may be, Mormon morality is very much the same manichean [bold mine-DL], good vs. evil outlook as traditional Christianity. ~Mark Hemingway

In fairness, Hemingway clarifies in an update that he doesn’t use manichean here in a way that actually refers to, well, Manichean beliefs, and he certainly isn’t the only person who uses manichean in a very loose and inaccurate way, but it is notable that he uses this word in a post that is trying to explain and contextualise a heterodox idea in Mormonism.  In the Mormons’ defense, they do not have a Manichean understanding of the universe, and neither do Christians.  Manichees believe the created order is a prison for human souls that was created by an evil principle, and understand morality as a war of spirit and matter that is significantly different from the moral theology of both Mormons and Christians.  Since Manichee is one of the most overused heresiological tropes in history, it was an unusually unfortunate choice for someone who wanted to deflect criticisms of Mormonism.

P.S.  Hemingway’s update is itself unfortunate when he refers to the “dualistic notion of good vs. evil” in Christianity.  Christianity doesn’t have a dualistic notion of good vs. evil.  In the classic patristic formulations, whether of Augustine or the Greek Fathers, evil is the negation and absence of good.  A dualistic notion of good vs. evil would be…the Manichean understanding.

Ross talks with Yglesias about Obama’s “respect for conservatism” and comes to a conclusion that is somewhat close to mine, at least when it comes to the political danger to conservatives and Republicans.