Watch Romney and McCain go after those Thompson votes with their newfound enthusiasm for entitlement reform!

Does Huckabee enjoy people ridiculing him?

As the GOP field gears up for another snoozer of a debate in Florida tonight, here are some interesting Rasmussen polling numbers from Georgia: Huckabee 34, McCain 19, Romney 16, Paul 12, Giuliani 11.  Huckabee seems not to have been hurt by his second-place finish in South Carolina, and he has probably been helped by his active campaigning in Georgia earlier this week.  Assuming this lead holds up, it may be that his decision to stop contending in Florida and focus on the states he has a much better chance of winning on Feb. 5 will turn out to be very smart.  Oklahoma, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri, together with Georgia, offer Huckabee a possible 308 delegates, and he has definitely shown strength in Oklahoma, Alabama and Georgia.  Arkansas is presumably an easy win, and he should benefit in Missouri and Tennessee by coming from a neighbouring state.  (The inevitable “he’s a Republican Jesse Jackson” jokes will follow soon thereafter.)  The remarkable thing about this scenario is that come February 6th Huckabee could be in a competitive second place behind McCain, leaving Romney eating their dust.   

It’s conceivable that a McCain win in Florida eats into Huckabee’s lead in Georgia, but I don’t see Romney turning around an 18 point deficit in a week and a half even if he prevails next Tuesday.  Once again, Giuliani trails Ron Paul, even though Paul’s fav rating is almost forty points lower than Giuliani’s (an appalling piece of information, but there it is).  It will quite strange if New Hampshire turns out to be one of a very few states where Giuliani received more votes than Paul, while Paul bests him almost everywhere else.

Aides to Mr. Huckabee say he did not get to know Mr. Romney very well as a governor, finding him distant at meetings. The aides said they were also irritated that Mr. Romney did not call after Mr. Huckabee’s victory in Iowa. ~The New York Times

He has no convictions and he has no class?  Is it any wonder so many people dislike him?

Dennis Kucinich has dropped out of the race, and so departs the last consistent antiwar Democratic candidate for President.  It has puzzled and dismayed me that so many Republican antiwar voters have backed McCain in defiance of all logic, but at least there is a core of voters in the Republican primaries that has rallied to the real antiwar candidate on the right.  Meanwhile, Democratic antiwar voters mostly divide among those candidates who would bomb Iran and those who would invade Pakistan, all of whom endorsed the war against Lebanon in 2006.  By all rights, Kucinich ought to have been able to pull together 10% of the vote in every vote, but instead was usually drawing less than half the support given to Ron Paul on the other side.  However bad you think the GOP is, and I think it is pretty bad, don’t ever let anyone tell you that the Democratic Party is a party opposed to needless and illegal wars.

Jim Antle makes a very similar argument to the one I made here on the anti-Huckabee campaign’s result of clearing the path for McCain.

Rod suggested Huckabee might start building up his connections and ideas in a reformist direction  in the wake of an ’08 failure in the primaries, I doubted the prospects for the success of such a move, and Ross noted the lack of institutional infrastructure for such “reform conservatism,” but I now realise that there is an additional problem with this beyond the fact that Huckabee is apparently also not terribly interested in ideas (something I think we assumed all along).  Building on this conversation, Ross observes in a new bloggingheads, I think mostly correctly, that if Huckabee were to do what Edwards has done in his network-building, policy work and philanthropy he would end up building up support with the “Republican Party’s left.”  This would be the same part of the party that is, I think it’s fair to say, in utter disrepute with a substantial number of Republicans after the debacles of the last seven years, but even that isn’t the most significant difficulty here.      

Building support with the Republican left is, of course, exactly the opposite of the direction he’s been going in this year’s campaign, but it is also exactly what he needs not to do if he wants to be taken seriously by the mainstream movement figures as an acceptable candidate for the Presidency, since he has already been tagged by virtually everyone on the right variously as a Gersonist/Christian leftist, a not-very-closeted liberal or, in a memorable phrase, an “open borders drag queen.”  Perhaps Huckabee’s “vertical politics” will save him.  Otherwise, he will probably be tagged by the movement leaders as RINO and consigned to that political netherworld inhabited by the Republican Leadership Council, Olympia Snowe and Chuck Hagel. 

Incidentally, the hilarity of the reaction to the Huckabee campaign is that the shouts about his nice-guy liberalism have grown louder in direct proportion to the increasing number of his hard-right poses (and at the moment I still assume they are just poses) on issues.

With his second place finish in Saturday’s Nevada caucus, where Paul defeated Giuliani in every county in the state, the Texas congressman has now received 106,414 votes to 60,220 for Giuliani. ~The Politico

The Politico claim that neither Paul nor Giuliani has collected any “actual delegates” appears to be inaccurate, at least for Paul.  According to CNN, Paul has received four pledged delegates from Nevada and two from Iowa.  From the same source, it appears that Giuliani has received one pledged delegate from Nevada.

Here’s a passing thought on the politics of global warming.  David Brooks, in a column that I otherwise found reasonably persuasive in its main argument, proposed a rather odd claim:

An oppositional mentality set in: if the liberals worried about global warming, it was necessary to regard it as a hoax.

The problem with this, besides treating reasonable skepticism as reflexive opposition, is that the debate on global warming, or “climate change” as it is more irenically called these days, has focused on the reality of the phenomenon mostly as an arguing tactic to undermine support for the proposed solutions.  From there the debate shifted away from the reality of climate change, which I think most informed conservatives accept to one degree or another, to the question of causes.  Obviously, if the phenomenon isn’t real, there’s no reason to do anything, and if it is real but humans are not a significant cause we are no position to prevent it by changing behaviour.  Certainly, if climate change is happening (and I think it is), it will have real effects on weather and temperature patterns, just as past changes in the climate have done, and these are things for which we should be preparing.  But talk of hoaxes misses the main point, as does much of the argument over whether the phenomenon is anthropogenic, which is that conservatives have and will continue to oppose the “solutions” to global warming whether or not they acknowledge its reality, because they do not see climate change as the cause of impending cataclysms, much less on the scale portrayed by alarmists.  Barack Obama, ever the conciliatory figure, routinely refers to “the planet in peril,” which is roughly the liberal fearmongering equivalent of Republicans who go on and on about the “existential threat” from jihadism. 

The reaction against this kind of fearmongering, which has unfortunately been one of the main ways most Americans have become familiar with the question, is a natural skepticism about and hostility to granting regulatory agencies the kind of power needed to enforce the reduction in emissions that is being demanded.  The use of emergency to promote state power is not unique to this question or to one party, and again it finds a parallel in the alarmism about the jihadi threat.  Both alarmisms stem from a loss of perspective, a conviction that a major issue on which one party believes itself to have a significant advantage is one of the most, if not the most,important issues of the age and a sense of urgency that unless citizens surrender to the government whatever it demands in the emergency the world, or civilisation, or our way of life, will be irreparably damaged if not destroyed.  The Kyoto skeptics occupy the same ground vis-a-vis their opponents that civil libertarians and antiwar folks occupy vis-a-vis the “existential threat” alarmists in that they can recognise the reality of a problem, even a serious problem, and believe that it needs to be addressed, but they refuse to adopt absolutist and fanatical stances on the question when these make no sense and when they may actually do nothing to address the problem at hand.

The more obvious move is to find a Sister Souljah–after Saturday–to stiff arm. The most promising candidate is not a person, but an idea: race-based affirmative action. [bold original] Obama has already made noises about shifting to a class-based, race-blind system of preferences. What if he made that explicit? Wouldn’t that shock hostile white voters into taking a second look at his candidacy? He’d renew his image as trans-race leader (and healer). The howls of criticism from the conventional civil-rights establishment–they’d flood the cable shows–would provide him with an army of Souljahs to hold off. If anyone noticed Hillary in the ensuing fuss, it would be to put her on the spot–she’d be the one defending mend-it-don’t-end-it civil rights orthodoxy. ~Mickey Kaus

This would certainly be a bold move, but this is a cure that is worse than the illness from the perspective of keeping Obama’s campaign afloat.  In the wake of Obama’s speech in Atlanta (in which he rails against the “profound structural and institutional barriers” to opportunity and the “insidious role that race still plays”), can you really see him taking this position?  I’m also just trying to imagine the progressive reaction to this.  Many on the left had a conniption because the man referred to Reagan in a mildly positive way.  Just think of what would happen if Obama took a position that would actually be to the right of the Bush administration on such a policy–it wouldn’t just be the civil rights leaders who would react strongly.  How better to demonstrate his alleged lack of progressivism to the left than to take what is, in effect, the Republican position on race-based preferences?  Then, from the other side, his support for a “class-based preference system” would lead to predictable attacks from the right that he is stirring up “class warfare.”