Reid Wilson has done the latest Senate race rankings and lists New Mexico at number 2, saying:

News can’t get any worse for Republicans in New Mexico. But if it can, it probably will.

This is right.  I have some mixed feelings about the slow-motion implosion of the New Mexico GOP, since New Mexico has hardly benefited from seven decades of uninterrupted, virtual one-party rule from the other side, but it was unavoidable that the state parties that would suffer the most from the anti-Republican backlash are those in states where they are numerically weakest. 

The most remarkable thing on the list, which wouldn’t be possible without Lott’s retirement, is that Mississippi is almost as competitive a Senate race as Maine.  In addition to woes in Alaska and Mississippi, the GOP may have to start worrying about the Lone Star State.  Via Rod, I see that John Cornyn’s job approval numbers are quite bad for a scandal-free incumbent.  31% say they want him re-elected, which is remarkably low.  If a Democrat were to be elected to the Senate from Texas, it would be the first general election victory in such a race for them since Lloyd Bentsen won re-election in 1988.  It would probably also reflect the steady demographic changes in the state resulting from mass immigration.  The DSCC’s absolute best-case goal of picking up nine seats to reach a filibuster-proof majority of 60 is now looking slightly less implausible.   

P.S.  A September poll gave Cornyn better numbers, but showed that he is vulnerable.  His approval rating, if the later polling is to be believed, has gone down pretty dramatically.  Any Texans out there with an insight into why people are souring on him?

Rod wrote the other day:

I don’t think Huckabee was saying here what Mark (and others — I see that Larison took the same point) interprets him to be saying.

Rod is referring to Huckabee’s “law establishes morality” remark that I found so troubling.  I’m willing to entertain the possibility that Huckabee meant something other than what he said, but based on what he said I think that Shea and I drew the right conclusions.  Huckabee is not normally so clumsy or inept with language as Bush that he is in the habit of saying ludicrous things that he doesn’t mean.  He may well say ludicrous things, but they are usually intentional.  There are three alternative interpretations: 1) he meant just what he said in just the way Shea and I interpreted him; 2) he didn’t mean what he said, and was repeating a truism about codifying norms; 3) he has no idea what the word “establish” means.  Two of those don’t reflect well on him, and the one that gets him off the hook assumes that he cannot properly and clearly explain his understanding of the relationship between law and morality.  That’s not exactly something that inspires confidence in him as the social conservative candidate running for President.   

But suppose Rod is right.  Suppose that every time Huckabee, or one of the other candidates, says something deeply, profoundly wrong that we assume that he misspoke and meant to say something with which we can agree.  In short, we are admitting then that we cannot really rely on anything these people say.  This highlights a bigger problem with several of the major candidates.  Huckabee has recently found religion, so to speak, on immigration policy and has discovered that strongly opposing illegal immigration is a good political move in the fight for the nomination.  On substance, restrictionists should be slightly pleased that the political climate forces someone like Huckabee to adopt more of their positions, but the issue here, as with Romney’s numerous changes of position, is one of credibility and confidence in a candidate’s reliable support for the policies he advocates.  To some extent, it is always hard to know what you will get with a pol once he is in power, but obvious craven pandering is not a good sign.  If we cannot rely simply on their records as guides (because they have run away from their past positions), if we cannot take what they say literally, but must assume that we know what they must have meant (because the literal meaning of what they said sounds crazy), and if we cannot trust their new policy positions (because they have adopted them within the last year or two), it seems that there is no good reason to vote for any one of them.

“The Republicans as a whole lose because of these revelations,” said Steve Clemons, senior fellow and director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington. “If Chuck Hagel were running, he would be the beneficiary, but there’s no one like Hagel on the Republican side.” ~Helene Cooper

Yes, we get it.  Steve Clemons really likes Chuck Hagel.  A lot.  Remarks such as these are part of the reason why I am frequently so hard on Chuck Hagel: the man is built up by his admirers into a champion of a foreign policy vision that he has never, well, actually championed.  There is nobody like “Chuck Hagel” in the Republican Party, including the Senator from Nebraska named Chuck Hagel, because the Chuck Hagel you hear about from his boosters doesn’t really exist.   

Clemons also seems constitutionally incapable, both here and on his blog, of noticing that there is an antiwar Republican candidate in the race who has argued against targeting Iran, who has argued against illegal treatment of detainees, and who has argued against the entire aggressive foreign policy approach that Clemons also deplores.  Based on his policy views, Ron Paul is the most obvious political beneficiary of these revelations, but you would never know that from listening to coverage of the last week.  It is true that there’s no one like Chuck Hagel on the Republican side this cycle.  While Chuck Hagel was voting for the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq war resolution, Ron Paul was voting against them.  While Hagel was making critical remarks, Ron Paul was actually voting against failed policy.  While Hagel was making quips about “tough jobs” and shoe-sellers, Ron Paul was about to start running for President and providing a challenge to the GOP establishment on foreign policy.  While Chuck Hagel made jokes about being Mike Bloomberg’s running mate and appeared on the covers of men’s magazines, Ron Paul was representing the dissenting view in the Republican primary debates. While Hagel dawdled, Ron Paul spoke out and acted, and when Hagel started finally to speak out more forcefully Ron Paul started running his insurgent campaign to protest all the abuses that Chuck Hagel helped to create.

“People were saying, ‘It was like George Washington,’ ‘It was the Gettysburg Address,’ ” she said in an interview just after working a room of about 120 audience members, mostly women, at a restaurant in the JW Marriott in Summerlin.

“I mean, it was unbelievable, the response I heard from the people in there that heard it today. Almost everyone said they were moved to tears” by the speech, she said. ~The Las Vegas Review-Journal

It is unbelievable.  I don’t believe it.  The people who said these things are exaggerating.  It was a reasonably good speech.  I would be shocked if anyone was moved to tears by what was said.

During his recent visit to the Globe, Obama was asked if the change he is talking about is more style than substance, and if that is the real distinction between him and Hillary Clinton, his chief rival. “I’m not sure you can separate out the policy from the atmospherics in the sense that all of us are talking to the same experts,” he replied. He went on to say, “During the course of a campaign, there is going to be a strong convergence in a Democratic primary on various issues.”

In other words, yes, the major difference with Clinton is one of style, not substance – Obama’s “being able to work both sides of the aisle,” versus her alleged inability. Of course, there’s no absolute certainty a Congress controlled by Democrats would go along with an Obama agenda any more than a state Legislature controlled by Democrats went along with Patrick’s. From Beacon Hill to Washington, ego has a way of kicking in. ~Joan Vennochi

It’s a clever game that Obama is trying to play: he accuses Clinton of being too close to the Republicans and too much like the Republicans to be trusted (and allegedly worrying about what “Rudy and Romney” are going to say), but at the same time he wants you to think that he is far better at striking deals with Republicans based on fairly limited success he has had collaborating with a couple GOP Senators for the past couple of years.  In other words, she is a collaborationist, whereas he is bipartisan.  See the difference?  If you don’t, perhaps he just needs the right “atmospherics” and you can begin hallucinating substantive distinctions between them.

You know, Charles [Krauthammer] is probably one of my very favorite columnists. I don’t know of anybody who I love to read more than him, and I love almost every column he writes except the ones he writes about me. ~Mike Huckabee

The word pathetic comes to mind.

Iran is the most striking example. As recently as June, a debate question for GOP candidates was whether they would use tactical nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nukes. That none of the major ones ruled it out now looks excessively hawkish in light of the latest intelligence estimate that Iran ended its atomic weapons program in 2003. ~Michael Goodwin

Now it looks excessively hawkish?  What did it look like back then?  The voice of reason?

The prevailing Huckabee narrative maintains that he’s benefiting strictly from the loyalty of the religious right. ~Frank Rich

As it happens, the narrative is (so far) absolutely right.  Rich argues that this cannot account of his national polling, where he hovers around 16-20% these days.  But if Amy Sullivan’s figures are right (taken from this very early assessment of Romney’s religion predicament), evangelicals make up 30% of the GOP electorate.  Even assuming that Huckabee is rising simply as the evangelical and religious conservative candidate, that would suggest that Huckabee has not yet reached his ceiling.  Nonetheless, despite the flaws of Rich’s electoral analysis, he may have a point in seeing Huckabee as the GOP’s Obama.  Obama is a progressive who preaches a saccharine, feel-good message of hope and unity, and in a lot of ways so is Huckabee.

So Huckabee’s national lead has gone away over the weekend.  Obviously, daily changes in national polling are going to fluctuate back and forth and probably have no predictive value whatever.  Their main function is to measure media coverage and shifts in momentum among the different campaigns, and so they are useful in that respect.  Their basic worthlessness as a gauge of actual voting intention come early January is one reason to disbelieve pro-Giuliani arguments about his chances; the other reason would be Giuliani’s actual numbers in all of the early states.  (Naturally, similar speculation about Huckabee–and I have had some fun with this myself–is probably just as groundless, but there is the crucial caveat that Huckabee is currently polling as the leader in two of the first six states and he is polling second in two others, which currently makes him the strongest candidate on paper going into the start of the new year.)  At this stage in 2003, Howard Dean and Wesley Clark sat atop the national polls with numbers not so different from Giuliani and Huckabee’s, so based on that example there may be reason to hope that neither one will advance very far.  It seems to me that if the GOP nominates Giuliani, Romney, McCain or Huckabee it will deeply demoralise key parts of the party’s base, ensuring even weaker turnout and defeat, and the same may be true of the (now even more unlikely) nomination of Thompson.   

P.S.  Meanwhile, that Newsweek poll with the extravagant 22-point Huckabee lead may not have been quite as out of line as many have (reasonably) suggested.  It is still an exaggeration of Huckabee’s strength, but it does reflect what seems to be a real erosion in Romney’s support.  Mason-Dixon released a poll showing Huckabee leading 32-20 (margin of error +/- 5%).  Perhaps of some additional significance is the gap that seems to be opening up between the next two candidates: Thompson at 11, Giuliani at 5.  If this is right, Thompson is remaining more or less where he has been, while Giuliani is  losing what little support he has had.  More embarrassing for the ex-mayor is that he is trailing McCain by two points.  (Unfortunately for our candidate, only 2% back Ron Paul according to this.)

When looked at in more detail, the Mason-Dixon results are just weird in some places.  Unsurprisingly, Huckabee wins among “born-again” Christians 42-8 over Romney (and narrowly loses among  those who are not “born-again”), but inexplicably leads among voters who think “national security and terrorism” is the most important issue and among voters who think immigration is the most important.  Again, unsurprisingly, he leads among morality/family values voters by a staggering margin.  In short, on the three general issues that are most important to Iowan Republicans, Huckabee has somehow become the leader virtually overnight.  Voters who want a general election winner in November prefer Huckabee, as do voters who emphasise leadership as the most important quality in a candidate (what leadership has Huckabee shown that they would have ever heard about?).  Huckabee leads among both those who favour a “hard-line” approach to immigration (meaning deportation plus enforcement against employers) and a “comprehensive” (i.e., weak) approach.  The most baffling part is that he leads among the “hard-line” voters (who make up the majority of the respondents) by a larger margin (15 points) than he does among the others (7 points).  Romney has bigger immigration problems than the people his landscaper hires.  After a year of pretending to care about illegal immigration and adopting all the right rhetoric that should please the “hard-line” voter, he is losing (badly) to another former governor who used to be even more pro-amnesty and pro-immigration than he was.  This simply makes no sense.  According to this poll, over half of Iowa  caucus-goers want the government to deport illegal immigrants and they are backing a candidate who is one of the least likely to ever consider doing anything like that.  It also makes no sense that Tancredo isn’t doing a little bit better than he is (2% overall and only 4%  among the “hard-line” voters).  Perhaps craziest of all, those who think the economy is on “the right track” favour Huckabee by 18 points over Romney, while those who think it is on “the wrong track” just barely prefer Romney.  Didn’t these people get the memo that Huckabee is the economic populist supposedly worried about the woes of Main Street and Romney is the optimistic venture capitalist who thinks things are in fine shape? 

Adding still more to the insanity, Rasmussen now shows Huckabee marginally ahead in what is effectively a three-way tie in Michigan.  Yes, I know Huckabee has no money, and I know he has no organisation, so all of this is probably just so much fluff, but it has to say something about how truly uninterested Republican voters are in the others that Huckabee can so effortlessly vault into contention in every primary in the country.