Romney’s support has started to vanish in Iowa.  Newsweek‘s latest Iowa poll puts Huckabee ahead of Romney 39-17.  If that held up on January 3, I think it’s quite possible that Romney’s campaign could implode entirely.  Mitt Romney, meet Howard Dean.  (Note: only 16% of respondents said they would be less likely to vote for Romney because of his Mormonism, which is still substantial, but doesn’t equal the national average.) 

More good news for Ron Paul supporters: Paul polls at 8%, two ahead of McCain, just one behind Giuliani and two behind Thompson.  If these numbers are right, Paul might have an outside shot at a decent, albeit somewhat distant third-place finish.  Giuliani could now conceivably place as low as fifth in Iowa, or perhaps even sixth if McCain can make use of Brownback’s organisation to mobilise supporters.  (Combined first/second choice numbers show that Paul would have a hard time beating all three of them, but it is still possible for Giuliani to end up in fifth.)

Patrick Ruffini makes a reasonable case that a divided field may help Giuliani in the end, but I still thinkit won’t.  The divided field right now is giving Giuliani the illusion of hope, just as his high national poll numbers have created an illusion that he is dominating the race when he clearly isn’t.  What is telling about all of this is that, absent Huckabee’s mostly unexpected and unpredicted rise in Iowa, Giuliani’s “strategy” for the primaries was fairly crazy.  It remains so, even though Huckabee may have made the crazy strategy slightly more workable.  It should have been a warning to the Giuliani camp that their cunning plan was essentially identical to Fred Thompson’s goal of winning South Carolina and then going on to win in many February 5 states.  It should have been clear early on that a campaign strategy that bore strong resemblance to Fred Thompson’s was not going to work.  At least Thompson had the excuses that he entered the race late and didn’t really seem interested in campaigning.  Giuliani’s predicament in several of the early states is that he already knew voters there wouldn’t go for him, so there wasn’t much point in investing a lot of time and effort in wooing them.  Thompson’s strategy seems to have been conceived in boredom, while Giuliani’s was conceived in fear.  That’s not promising for Giuliani’s chances.

Huckabee remains atop the Rasmussen national tracking poll of likely Republican primary voters for the third straight day, now leading Giuliani 22-18, and poor ol’ Fred Thompson is now at 9%.  Ron Paul has 7% support nationally.  Looking at these numbers as a Ron Paul supporter, I am encouraged that our candidate is on the verge of moving into a reasonably competitive fifth place nationally.  If I were a Thompson supporter, well…I wouldn’t even publicly admit that at this point, so I wouldn’t say anything at all about these numbers.

Also, polling shows that the candidates who stand to benefit politically on Iran are those who have been most hawkish and suspicious of the Iranians, since these are views shared by a broad majority of the public.  When even a majority of Democrats doesn’t believe that Iran has halted its nuclear weapons program and a majority of Democrats believes Iran to be a threat and favours the continuation of sanctions, the political climate is ideal for candidates who have taken more confrontational positions.  A majority of every demographic believes Iran to be a threat.  People wonder how we wind up getting into senseless, unnecessary wars–there’s part of the answer.

There is no obligation to be fair to foreigners. ~Michael Kinsley

This is one of those things that you never expect to see in Time or any other mainstream publication, and then suddenly there it is.  The debate really does seem to have shifted in the last year.  I don’t know that I would put it quite this way, but the basic insight is right. 

We do have some obligation to be just in how we act towards foreigners (for starters, we might refrain from attacking their countries without good cause or treating their political systems as our toys), but it isn’t at all clear that justice demands–or even allows–mass immigration.  For reasons I have stated before during a debate that I have neglected to follow up recently, we have prior obligations to our fellow citizens that take precedence over whatever obligations we have to others.  Mass immigration is most unjust to native labour and to the communities in other countries that lose a lot of “human capital” to other markets, but it is also unjust to taxpayers who foot the bill and bear the costs of this immigration.  Under the current arrangement, even the immigrant labourers–who are supposedly the beneficiaries of all this–are treated exploitatively and unfairly.  Thanks to the importation of cheap labour, we do have cheaper goods and services, which means that there is an entire economic structure based on taking advantage of these labourers, which is also unjust.  

I have never quite understood how supporting mass immigration was the position that was obviously more “fair” to foreigners.  There are arguably just as many foreigners in their own countries who suffer on account of more industrialised economies drawing away some of their most productive and educated people.  The latter may ultimately benefit greatly, but, as Kinsley says, let’s not kid ourselves that immigrant labour is preferred because of an innate sense of fair play and a desire to help the foreign opportunity-seekers of the world.

As Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher and Governor of Arkansas, surges to the front of the Republican field here, the question looms: Which storybook ending lies ahead? Is he Carter or Robertson? ~Time

Those are the options?  What kinds of depressing storybooks did this man read when he was young?

No reasonable and reasonably informed person could have missed that the persons most involved in whipping up anti-Americanism were Gerhard Schroeder, Jacques Chirac and  Jean Chrétien, all of whom were replaced by leaders far less corrupt and far more sympathetic to American positions than their predecessors. ~Clarice Feldman

Schroeder, Chirac and Chretien were the ones “most involved” in whipping up anti-Americanism?  I guess that means that public approval of the United States must be soaring worldwide now that they are gone.  Or not.  Is that why Turkish public opinion is more anti-American than at any time in post-war history?  Because Jean Chretien said some critical things?  To put it mildly, someone who thinks that a mildly critical Liberal Prime Minister of Canada is one of the greatest sources of anti-U.S. feelings in the world is not in a position to lecture anyone on being out of touch with current affairs.  By all means, oppose Huckabee, but please don’t base on such a bizarre view of international affairs.

Largely unrelated to the theme of his speech, the main part of which I am refraining from discussing any further for a couple of weeks, Romney threw in some added Europe-bashing and Fred Thompsonesque disrespect for Allied war dead.  He said:

No people in the history of the world have sacrificed as much for liberty. The lives of hundreds of thousands of America’s sons and daughters were laid down during the last century to preserve freedom, for us and for freedom loving people throughout the world.

The last sentence is true, and the first sentence is not.  The last sentence passes over in silence all the hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers from other countries who were sacrificing every bit as much and were fighting “for liberty” as much as our soldiers were.  Once again, I would repeat that there is something unhealthy in ranking nations by tallying up body counts or pints of blood shed, but even if it were a contest our country would not “win” first place.  That doesn’t make one nation more admirable than another, since it was an allied effort.  

I don’t exactly know what the point of any of these direct and indirect shots at Europe was, except perhaps to advance the dubious and easily disproven thesis that religion and freedom need one another to survive.  Both can be desirable, but they are not necessarily or obviously complementary in all times and in all places.  Also, while we all presumably understand that England’s established church lost still more authority at the end of the seventeenth century with the Act of Toleration, it has never been all together clear how the post-1688/9 established religion of England was fundamentally at odds with constitutional liberties and parliamentary government.  Several American states continued to have established churches after independence (Romney’s Massachusetts gave up on an established church only in 1833).  It was the relative religious diversity among the states that was one of the reasons for anxiety about a federal government establishment of religion; the prohibition of a federal religious establishment was intended as much to protect state and local religious establishments as it was to protect dissenters.   

Alex Massie has more.

During the Cold War, you were a hawk or a dove, but this new world requires us to be a phoenix, to rise from the ashes of the twin towers with a whole new game plan for this very different enemy. Being a phoenix means constantly reinventing ourselves, dying to mistakes and miscalculations, changing tactics and strategies, rising reborn to meet each new challenge and seize each new opportunity. ~Mike Huckabee (from his official campaign site, no less)

Via Alex Massie

So Mike Huckabee promises us a foreign policy that will make sure that America repeatedly bursts into flame for all of eternity.  That’s the kind of bold, new thinking you don’t get from just any candidate.  You do almost have to admire how this strained metaphor sits awkwardly beside the call for a “whole new game plan,” while said plan is, of course, nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, Sweden should be concerned:

When I make foreign policy, I want to be able to treat Saudi Arabia the same way I treat Sweden, and that requires us to be energy independent.

Implicit in this statement is that he would really like to treat Saudi Arabia badly (on behalf of, as he says, “the good guys,” who remain conveniently unnamed), but cannot because of oil dependence.  What did Sweden ever do to Mike Huckabee?

P.S.  Lost in the jungles of Huckabee’s rhetoric are at least a couple reasonable views (e.g., support for the Powell Doctrine in the event of military action).  Unfortunately, I fear that Huckabee’s national security and foreign policy ideas are as muddled and incoherent as his domestic policy proposals.  One moment he will say something refreshingly sane, and then start barking about Islamofascism.

The Rasmussen South Carolina results are really remarkable when you look at the breakdown by age and ideology.  Fred Thompson has 38% support among 30-39 year-olds and 0% among 18-29 voters.  There is apparently a deep and yawning chasm separating my age cohort from our Gen X elders that does not allow any pro-Fred Thompson sentiment to cross over.  Then again, most people my age and younger may have literally no idea who Fred Thompson is outside of the world of television.  Meanwhile, the kids love Ron Paul, who gets 16% of the 18-29 group, which puts him in second behind Huckabee (however, Paul has an overall 4% in S.C.). 

Perplexingly, Ron Paul is at 11% among “moderates” but only 3% among conservatives, and Fred Thompson scores best with liberal Republicans at 27%, while Huckabee, who is arguably one of the more liberal Republican canndidates out there, manages only 6% of liberals but gets 29% of conservatives.  Equally inexplicably, Huckabee leads among voters who say immigration is the most important issue.  From this I have to conclude that these people have no idea what their respective candidates believe about most things.