Ross coins the term Huckenfreude:

Pleasure derived from the outrage of prominent conservative pundits over the rising poll numbers of Mike Huckabee.

There are moments when I feel this, but it is balanced by an equally powerful feeling of Huckenschreck, the gnawing horror that Mike Huckabee might just be nominated and have an outside shot at acquiring immense power.  As a wrecking ball who smashes the rest of the field and drives the establishment into fits of insanity, Huckabee is great.  As a candidate for President, he is just about as awful as the people he is tearing down.  If he could just clear the field of its more objectionable members and then go away, that would be ideal.

Huckabee. It sounds like one of those American restaurant chains popular across the South, the kind of place where on All You Can Eat Tuesdays the patrons down buckets of barbecued ribs and fried chicken while sucking on 32-ounce tumblers of diet soda. ~Gerard Baker

The chain restaurant meme continues, but from this sentence it is clear that Gerard Baker has never actually been to these chain restaurants.  There is also something strange about the association of Huckabee, weight-loss fanatic, with restaurants that are renowned for serving people excessive portions.  If this meme gets around, I can see it aiding Huckabee in small but important ways.  If most Republicans are suburban voters, and since these restaurants cover the suburbs like locusts during a blight, linking Huckabee in their minds with these restaurants would make him just a bit more attractive to them.  Plus, as weight-loss guru, he represents the kind of popular therapeutic self-help culture (which is in turn fueled by the overindulgence that the chain restaurants represent) that Michael long ago feared might make him popular:

I don’t want a President whose primary qualification seems to be the self-mastery of weight loss, spurred by diabetes.  I fear also that this is exactly what the American people do want. 
   

I have never given Fred Thompson much of a break this year, and from the beginning I thought the enthusiasm for him was an irrational outburst, a kind of mania that revealed despair among Republicans.  Simply put, it never made any sense.  But if I had to choose among all the non-Paul Republicans in contention right now, I would probably still have to say that Thompson was preferable to the rest.  What a pity, then, that the recent commentary praising his debate performance while saying that the debate is proof that he may not be finished yet is just not correct.  It really is over.  He just hasn’t acknowledged it.

Hotline/Diageo’s December survey has Thompson in fourth place in Iowa behind Giuliani, who isn’t even really campaigning there (a critic would say that Thompson isn’t really campaigning, either), and he has a fav/unfav of 37/42.  As a second choice, he still trails in fourth.  This is not the beginning of a comeback. 

Question 29 is also revealing about Huckabee’s advantage in Iowa: “Which of the following people, if any, do you think best represents strong moral and religious conviction?”  Huckabee receives 50%, Romney 24, and everyone else is in single digits.  The survey was taken between Dec. 7 and 12, so these are post-speech results. 

P.S.  Some small consolation for Thompson is that Research 2000’s Iowa poll has him tied for third with Giuliani at 9%.

With Rich Lowry’s scathing “Huckacide” column in National Review today and two Huck-bashing pieces in the Post, doesn’t it feel like the backlash against Huckabee has reached a critical saturation point? Does this start to show up in the polls? ~Eve Fairbanks

I think not.  It’s a fair question to ask, but I think it overestimates the power of conservative pundits, especially those who, like Krauthammer and Gerson, are not exactly speaking the language that current Huckabee supporters will understand or accept.  It also misses one of the reasons why Huckabee is doing so well.  He is most definitely not the establishment’s preferred candidate, and he is making the establishment go crazy.  Many of the criticisms against him are completely sound, but when his flaws are compared to the flaws of his rivals you begin to see that the establishment hostility to Huckabee is disproportionately great.  This image of Huckabee as the populist and the anti-Washington candidate, which he is cultivating assiduously, is one that I think is helping him tremendously, so every Washington and New York-based pundit who attacks him is contributing to that image.  (Incidentally, if Obama were in any danger of radically changing anything in Washington, I think you would see a much more concerted backlash against his candidacy.)  Huckabee’s support may start to weaken as his lack of organisation and money bring him back to earth, but I don’t think it will be because the pundits have rejected him.

Public political discussion of Governor Romney’s faith in recent weeks, however, has been marked by so many flagrant misstatements about that faith, and the repeitition of so many long-conventional bigotries about it, that it seemed to me to far beyond the limits of fair discussion. ~Michael Novak

So many flagrant misstatements?  Which misstatements are these?  Even if this is were tue, Novak’s point here seems to be that a little-understood religion is not well understood and open to mischaracterisation, so it is high time that we stop talking about it.  I confess that I don’t understand the complaints about unfairness at all.  Is it unfair to state publicly what a religion teaches?  If it is indeed the case that someone in this debate has erred and misrepresented LDS teachings, it seems to me that it is all the more important for those who see these statements as misrepresentations to step in and correct the record.  In the course of any other discussion, that is what would happen.  The natural response is not, “Everyone is being unfair to this presidential candidate, so I will endorse him.”  By the same token, I should endorse Obama if I think that it isunfairthat people spread the falsehood that he is a Muslim.  This is, to put it mildly, a strange approach to political endorsement.

Via Noah, Rasmussen reports its latest Florida poll in which Giuliani trails Huckabee and Romney.

And, besides, the thinking goes, people far from the border really don’t care. ~Peter Brown

Brown’s article makes a lot of sense, but I think it overlooks that the crucial thing that is driving the new wave of opposition to immigration is the response from voters in both border states and in states that are far in the interior.  If anyone does still think that people in interior states don’t care about immigration, this is incorrect. 

Open borders advocates often cite polling on immigration from border states as evidence that the issue is a losing one, which ignores intensity of the opponents who live in these border  states.  Meanwhile, the farther away from the border one is, the more troubling a broader mass of voters tends to find illegal immigration to be, especially as it begins to affect their communities.  I think this is because it strikes them as evidence of just how out of control things have become.  Obviously, Iowa is pretty far away from the Rio Grande, but immigration is a burning issue there, and not just among the activists.  The same was true for western Massachusetts and even among some Democratic voters, as the special election earlier this year showed.  Part of this, as Lizza’s story on immigration politics explains, is the reaction to recently arrived immigrants in places where there had not been large numbers of them before.  The shock of sudden change combined with the underlying dissatisfaction with government failures in this area of policy make for a fearsome political reaction.  Add to that the long-standing unhappiness of a significant number of very intense opponents in the border states.  As a result, enforcement and restrictionism become much more attractive throughout the country.

Peggy Noonan has an interesting column today.  There was an enjoyable part about the Clinton campaign:

It is a delight of democracy that now and then assumptions are confounded, that all the conventional wisdom of the past year is compressed and about to blow. It takes a Potemkin village.

A lot of observers have been declaring the Clinton campaign to be in real trouble.  Her position in New Hampshire has been weakening.  She is occasionally being compared unfavourably to Howard Dean, but it is actually these early signs of weakening that may hint that she will not suffer the Vermont governor’s fate.  Dean was riding high in state and national polls until he slammed straight into the brick wall of actual vote tallies.  The dashing of high expectations may do more damage to a primary campaign (especially if it has an extensive organisation and deep pockets) than setbacks at the polls.  Now there is some reason to think that Clinton could lose Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and that has started to be factored into assessments of her chances.  Pundits have already been running scenarios for what happens if she finishes third in Iowa, and her anointed status as “inevitable” has been rescinded by many of the same geniuses who bestowed it upon her in the first place.  All of this makes it easier for her to survive disappointing results and what might otherwise be a sudden collapse of confidence in her candidacy.  Even if she “wins ugly,” so to speak, and just ekes out a victory, she can then play Mondale to Obama’s Hart and the nomination will probably go to her. 

If she now wins in two, or maybe in just one, of these contests, her campaign remains alive and you will then begin to see stories that describe how her campaign has avoided disaster and has been strengthened in the process yadda yadda yadda.  I think it is true that she cannot realistically lose all three of those contests and hope to succeed (just as it is ludicrous to think that Giuliani can succeed after going 0-for-4).  However, she may just need one win, and I think Obama’s current lead in these three states makes it much more crucial for him to win in all three.  The real danger to both, as I’m sure others have already pointed out, is that Edwards’ strength in Iowa may be greater than the polls suggest, which is where his potential for shaking up this race is obviously greatest.

The candidate chose to occupy his snow day with a moral blunder of the first order — accepting the endorsement of Jim Gilchrist, the founder of an anti-immigrant group called the Minuteman Project. ~Michael Gerson

Gerson has turned on the “compassionate” conservative candidate pretty quickly here.  Not because of the man’s real moral blunders (see Wayne Dumond et al.), but because he associates himself with restrictionists and adopts restrictionist proposals.  In Gerson’s moral universe, opposition to illegal immigration and support for border security seem to be among the worst errors one can make (“a moral blunder of the first order,” he says).  Ironically, Gerson’s criticism of Huckabee’s embrace of Gilchrist is just the kind of thing Huckabee needs in the nomination contest to shore up his reputation as an “authentic conservative” (as his advertisements refer to him).  Anything that will distance him from Gerson and “compassionate conservatism” is a plus for him, since it undermines the argument that the rest of us are promoting that Huckabee is in many ways not conservative and is not the candidate that conservatives should want to support.  Gerson’s disapproval may become for some people another reason to give Huckabee another look, when they should not even give him a first look.  

Considering Huckabee’s incredibly small campaign staff, this question was quite amusing:

Did someone vet Gilchrist’s past statements?

The candidate doesn’t even have someone to brief him about leading news stories on national security, and we’re supposed to expect a rigorous vetting process of endorsers?  The strange thing is that Huckabee’s transparent flip on immigration probably won’t hurt him that much, despite what Gerson thinks it will do to his reputation for “authenticity.”  The beauty of a politician having a reputation for authenticity is that it is almost always undeserved.  In any case, it can be effectively faked by clever performers, and there’s no doubt that Huckabee is that if he is nothing else.  Further, all of his main rivals have been as bad or worse on immigration than he was.  I was going to say, “except for Fred Thompson,” but Thompson isn’t really a main rival anymore.  This means that their collective stampede to the right on immigration gives him plenty of cover to transform himself cynically into an anti-amnesty, border-enforcing champion.  Unbelievably, Iowan restrictionist voters are buying into it right now.

And it matters that so much of his gorgeous rhetoric is devoid of actual meaning. ~ Eugene Robinson

Quick–guess which candidate Robinson is describing.

Strangely, it isn’t Obama.