The CNN national poll showing McCain with a big lead has some other interesting numbers.  Either this poll is badly wrong, or the reason why McCain and Huckabee are doing so well is that…most Republicans approve of them and many are excited about them relative to their competitors.  To this you will say, “Yeah, obviously, Larison.  That’s redundant!”  Yet to listen to conservative pundits, talk show hosts and self-anointed pulse-takers of “the base,” you would think that McCain and Huckabee are radioactive.  They are coalition-killers!  I would have assumed the same thing myself given the virtual unanimity of activists on this point, but the effect of the nomination of either one is actually better than would be the case if Giuliani or Romney were nominated. 

When asked how they would feel after the nomination of each candidate, 31% said they would be enthusiastic about McCain, 46% would be satisfied, 18% would be dissatisfied and only 5% would be upset.  It seems as if that 5% is overwhelmingly concentrated in conservative media outlets and activists in their audiences.  For Huckabee, the numbers are revealing: 20/52/20/7.  Only 7% would be upset with the huckster, whom we have been assured would rend the coalition to bits.  For Giuliani the numbers are similar: 21/49/21/8.  Romney understandably generates the least enthusiasm and satisfaction put together (14/50) and the highest dissatisfied + upset number (27/6).  The choice of many movement conservatives, the champion of the three-legged stool, Romney apparently rallies the GOP less effectively than any of the others.  These numbers have obviously changed since November and could always change back (Romney and Giuliani have lost ground in generating an enthusiastic response), but if you were designing the GOP ticket with party unity and enthusiasm as your only criteria you would, bizarrely, be pushed towards selecting McCain or Huckabee.  The last one of the four you would select would be Romney.  This intuitively makes sense to me, since I think Romney is awful, but it really calls into question the judgement that he is the most “viable” in the field.  They did not poll for Thompson, of course, since he is drawing 6% in this national poll, so we don’t if Thompson would generate more or less enthusiasm than Romney as a would-be nominee.

P.S. The Iowa and New Hampshire outcomes seem to have decisively helped the winners in changing attitudes towards them.  Not only has McCain seen a big jump in enthusiasm, but far fewer would be dissatisfied/upset with his nomination today than was the case in November.  For Huckabee, as he has become better-known, enthusiasm and satisfaction have increased, and the negatives have decreased.  That suggests that the concerted anti-Huckabee campaign has failed to damage him and may have generated sympathy for him.

It’s not a good sign that Giuliani’s senior staff have decided to work without paychecks, and there is no way to spin it otherwise. The amount of money that’s involved is miniscule: about $50,000 per month.

So the campaign must really have a cash on hand problem. Breaking News: Giuliani’s national finance chair, Roy Bailey, no longer has that position with the campaign. Bailey was not only Giuliani’s finance chair, he was one of the founding partners of Giuliani’s consulting firm. ~Marc Ambinder

There is some hubbub about Huckabee fading in Michigan, according to one source, but yesterday Strategic Vision released a Michigan poll showing Huckabee effectively tied with Romney and both trailing McCain.  The race is still very fluid, since less than a third has definitely chosen a candidate.  Strategic Vision also showed strong Huckabee support in Georgia long before the latest AJC poll came out.  This new poll shows that Huckabee has expanded the lead he already had last month.  Presumably, his win in Iowa was responsible for the increase.

Other interesting numbers from that Michigan poll: 39% of Republicans want out of Iraq within the next six months.  More remarkably, two new polls from Florida and New York show Giuliani’s lead in Florida has vanished.  He is effectively tied with Huckabee for second there right now.  His position in New York has weakened considerably.  He and McCain are now statistically tied for the lead in his home state.

As long-time bloggingheads viewers and readers of his columns know, Jim Pinkerton has been pushing for Mike Huckabee for months, and now comes the claim that he is apparently formally joining the Huckabee team.  Given how strong Mr. Pinkerton’s views on immigration and border security are, I have always been a bit perplexed by his enthusiasm for Huckabee, but with Huckabee’s recent pivot on immigration it seems as if more restrictionist and enforcement-first conservatives are openly supporting him.  Elsewhere, Rod Dreher has declared for Huckabee. 

In case any of you were worried, let me assure my readers that this is something that I will never do.  As the natural “new fusionist” candidate, the second coming of Bush, the apostle of Gersonism, Huckabee represents everything wrong with the politics of the GOP in the last seven years.  I say this not because he is a social conservative, religious or Southern–those are the least of Republicans’ problems, if they could but see clearly.  If you were disaffected and alienated by Bush, you will be driven out of your mind by Huckabee.  This is all the more serious because Huckabee really does have the best chance of winning on the Republican side.  Perversely, one almost needs to hope for a Romney or McCain nomination, since that may be the only thing now that will save us from Huckabee.  Thompson has all but eliminated himself, and Giuliani is all but finished. 

Obviously, I have also taken an interest in trying to understand and, when possible, explain the rise of Huckabee, because I have found it startling and more than a little odd.  Unlike with the other three leading candidates, I do not feel the same kind of immediate revulsion and distaste with Huckabee.  Each time I am inclined to cheer him on as an anti-establishment candidate, I have to remind myself that he really isn’t any such thing.  Despite my willingness to give his statements the benefit of the doubt, I have tried to do this in the interests of accuracy and fairness to what he has actually said, but on no account do I want this man to be President.  No doubt, some of his supporters read Crunchy Cons and like what they find, some of them could be part of those Middle American Radicals Sam Francis described long ago, and many of them are probably the people Ross and Reihan are describing in their forthcoming book, but this is exactly what is wrong with Huckabee’s candidacy.  He draws in these people from these three very different parts of the population and relies on them for his political success, but I have no confidence that he would govern in their interests or according to their views.  It’s the same con that Bush used against evangelicals and social conservatives.  Because he could claim plausibly enough that he was “one of them,” he felt that he owed them nothing and could take them for granted, and by and large they allowed this to happen and happily re-elected him anyway.  Now there is the hope that Huckabee is really “one of them” and will really govern in their interests, because he once said some mean things about Wall Street, but he won’t.  In order for politicians to dupe you, you must be willing to be duped.  This is what Huckabee is doing, just as Bush did before, and I’m afraid people are falling for it all over again.   

By all rights, everyone who cannot bring himself, for whatever reason, to endorse Ron Paul ought to come to the same conclusion as Human Events’ editors did.  If you rule out Paul, Thompson is the only one that makes sense.  It doesn’t matter that his campaign is hopeless and his stump appearances cure insomnia.  It doesn’t matter that his face reminds you of Anakin Skywalker at the climax of Return of the Jedi.  Even then he is better than these other people.  Thompson can give you plenty of phony populism, but his policy views aren’t for the most part incoherent or crazy.  His foreign policy views trouble me, naturally, but given the futility of his campaign there are no risks that he will be in any position to do much damage.  Liz Cheney will certainly never be on the National Security Council, because Thompson isn’t going to get past Florida.  

Having said that, I remain, as always, a Ron Paul supporter.  Those who prefer the ethically challenged pardoner of murderers, the serially deceitful, the associate of mobbed-up indicted crooks, the Cheney crony or the warmonger are, of course, free to support whomever they like.  Let’s just not pretend that it’s because they are somehow morally superior to the lone constitutionalist and opponent of the war.

This is not directly relevant to Michael’s post (which you should go read anyway), but it does have to do with Mitt Romney.  Daniel Gross has an interesting article on why Romney may not do all that well in Michigan, reminding us that people who voted for his father must be at least in their early sixties.  This puts Romney in something of a double bind: the people who fondly remember George Romney make up a small part of the electorate, and Mitt Romney today represents the repudiation of much of what his father represented in his moderate-to-liberal business Republicanism and his later turn against Vietnam.  In a state ravaged by outsourcing, plant closures and layoffs (and, yes, a heavily taxed and regulated business climate), Romney comes actually boasting of his experience as a corporate “turnaround” man and friend of globalisation.  It’s even worse than it might at first seem:

But these days, private equity is a dirty word for many Michigan voters—even the Republican members of the managerial class. Private equity doesn’t signify profits and fortunes. It signifies Cerberus, the new owner of Chrysler, which is presiding over huge job cuts.

Gross points to the natural aversion the state’s Arab-American population will have to Mitt “It’s About Shia and Sunni” Romney.  Not only did Romney blow off the AAI conference last year, which may be relevant to some of these voters, but the man who wants to “double Guantanamo” is hardly going to win the sympathies of voters who believe the government is already too intrusive and abusive in its anti-terrorist activities.  That may provide an opening for Huckabee, though he has lamentably also gone in for talking idiotically about “Islamofascism,” and most of the Christian Arab-Americans in the state belong to churches (Catholic, Orthodox, etc.) that Huckabee backers are specifically not targeting for GOTV efforts. 

Maybe there will be a big, unexpected surge of Arab-American votes from both parties to support Ron Paul, considering that the Democratic primary is essentially meaningless and will make it possible for antiwar and civil libertarian voters from the other party to influence the outcome?  Polling doesn’t support any realistic hopes for a Paul resurgence, but he did best in New Hampshire among secular and rural voters, and he did well among those for whom the economy was the top issue, so if he can make himself known to those voters he could do better than the current 5% he has in polls.  If Ron Paul did exceed expectations in Michigan, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising.    

P.S.  I neglected to make this point explicitly, but the really damaging thing about Romney’s disconnect with Michigan voters is that pundits and journalists expect him to do well in his “home state” and have already discounted the value of any victory accordingly, and meanwhile he is reinforcing the must-win narrative every time he says “Michigan is personal for me.”  He has set himself up as the favourite in a state where he could very easily finish third; had Giuliani not effectively abandoned Michigan for lack of funds, it could have been worse than that.  There is a difference between projecting confidence and setting unreachable goals–I wonder if Romney knows what that difference is.

My Huckabee-supporting friends keep complaining about East Coast neoconservative elites who are against Huckabee. I think we should institute a rule: Any generalization about East Coast neoconservative elites that has to make exceptions for David Brooks and William Kristol is invalid. ~Ramesh Ponnuru

This is a fair point.  In fact, it is neoconservatives who have generally expressed the fewest objections with Huckabee’s domestic policy views (or rather gestures, since he doesn’t have many things well-formed enough to be called views), perhaps because they have been open to meliorist and big-government policies in the past.  They do not have quite the reflexive opposition to Huckabee’s fiscal record that others do, though some of them do seem to find the prominence of his religiosity irritating.  He has made protectionist-sounding noises, but lauds NAFTA, so he is not nearly so “heterodox” on trade as some have feared or hoped.  It is his foreign policy, or alleged lack of it, and the possibility that he could split the coalition that have caused the greatest concern for Krauthammer, Barnes, Continetti and others, but again his ideas are so unformed that he could go either towards more realism (as his essay’s Iran remarks suggest) or towards a more aggressive, activist policy (as some of his comments on Pakistan hint).  In the anti-Huckabee backlash you mainly see traditional, nationalist and economic conservatives making the most disparaging remarks about him.  Restrictionists in particular find him simply unacceptable–hence the otherwise very odd Tancredo-Romney embrace.  Then there are paleoconservatives such as myself who see Huckabee as a natural fit for a “new fusionist” alliance between social conservatives and neocons, and therefore potentially very dangerous.  Whether for substantive or tactical reasons, the preferred candidates of many neoconservatives, McCain and Giuliani, have laid off Huckabee for the most part.  To the extent that Huckabee would essentially be a modified George W. Bush, another iteration of the war-supporting “compassionate conservative,” as I think he would be, I think neoconservatives might see him as the most malleable and their best fallback candidate if both McCain and Giuliani fail to advance.  It is Thompson and Romney who have been going after him hammer and tong, because they see him as a more direct competitor and because they are seeking to position themselves as guardians of the old-time Reagan coalition, which Huckabee’s camaign chairman has famously declared dead.  There are many East Coast conservative elites attacking Huckabee (and many conservative elites in general, wherever they may live), but they are not neoconservative ones.

Human Events has endorsed Fred Thompson.  Unhindered by any standard that requires a candidate to be viable, Human Events has made the logical choice, given that they obviously weren’t going to associate themselves with Ron Paul and the rest clearly fall short of their standards.  It was interesting that they bothered to explain why they ruled out Paul.  That’s more than most would do, I suppose.  I do want to applaud Human Events for refusing to endorse any of the competitive candidates, and I don’t mean that sarcastically.  There is an idea when it comes to such endorsements that you trivialise your influence on the process if you endorse a candidate who cannot realistically win the nomination, and they clearly reject that kind of thinking.  (Having once predicted that Thompson would win the nod, mostly on the grounds that I could not see how the Republicans would nominate any of these others, I don’t think it is likely to happen now.)  By endorsing Thompson, Human Events has at least helped to remind conservative voters how flawed the leading four really are.

Indeed, many believe Republicans lost the 2006 congressional elections, not because of Iraq but because of Bush’s betrayal of domestic conservative principles — other than his tax policy. ~David Limbaugh

Then apparently “many” are a bunch of fools.  Compassionate conservatism is awful, but it isn’t primarily what cost the GOP the House and Senate.

Huckabee is, however, very good under fire – affable, not very flappable, and humane. His response to the Ephesians question was disingenuous, however. The Scripture does not tell husbands to submit to wives. It tells them to love their wives in return for their wives’ obedience. ~Andrew Sullivan

More than that, it calls on husbands to sacrifice for their wives as Christ sacrificed Himself for the Church.  If that isn’t a call to devotion, I don’t know what is.  From what little I heard, Huckabee’s answer to this truly irrelevant question was the most impressive one of the night.

I just heard Fred Thompson berate Huckabee for his complaint that the Pakistanis misappropriate our aid money to their military for purposes other than combating Al Qaeda.  Of course, what Huckabee was actually referring to, unless I am very much mistaken, was the problem that Pakistan has been using military aid funding to bolster their military strength on the border with India.  Contra Quin Hillyer, Thompson came off sounding like a buffoon.  Remind me again why we’re supposed to think Huckabee is weak on foreign policy and Thompson is not?  Because he’s advised by the Vice President’s daughter?  Not much of a recommendation.

P.S. I think I have been a bit too hard on Huckabee’s foreign policy views because of his NIE blunder.  He has been improving in this area over the last couple of months.  As I said before, his Foreign Affairs essay did show some decent understanding of Pakistan, and tonight’s performance confirms that.  As for Fred, anyone advised by Liz Cheney is going to make foolish statements.

Update: Thompson really is desperate to go after Huckabee tonight.  He knows that he has to tear the man down to survive in South Carolina, but it’s just not working.

Second Update: Via Ambinder, Joe Scarborough makes it clear that he doesn’t like Fred Thompson’s debate performance.  I think that invite to Chuck Norris’ ranch won him over to Huck’s side.