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.

Responding to Ross’ post on the divided state of the GOP field, Isaac Chotiner asks whether Jeb Bush might have had a chance after all.  There might have been a way for Bush to get the nomination this time, assuming that the rest of the party establishment rallied around him and made him the prohibitive favourite going into the fall.  However, he would have been hampered by concerns that his name and association with the current President would mean general election disaster (and this is presumably a major reason why he stayed out this time), but more concretely he would have been at once the social conservatives’ favourite and the restrictionists’ target.  He would been something like a more fiscally conservative Mike Huckabee with many of the same liabilities on immigration that Huckabee has.  In short, the significant flaws that make each candidate in the current field appear to be an implausible nominee also extend even to Jeb Bush, and could conceivably have been made worse by his wife’s national background. 

Bush might have been able to finesse this question and talk up border security, much as the current pro-immigration Republicans are trying to do, but it would have been a real problem for him.   Also, his personal, direct intervention in the Schiavo case would have been a real liability in the general election.  Not even all pro-lifers believed that was an appropriate or legal move, and much of the rest of the country was appalled. I think Bush could have subtly overcome the resistance to his name by stressing all the ways that he isn’t like his brother.  He could have pointed to his competence in responding to hurricanes, for instance, or his fiscal responsibility, and tried to give the public confidence that his name need not imply similarly dreadful mismanagement and cronyism.

You’ve got libertarians, you’ve got antiwar types and you’ve got nationalists and xenophobes. I’m not sure that is leading anywhere. I think he’s a sui generis type of guy who’s cobbling together some irreconcilable constituencies, many of which are backward-looking rather than forward-looking. ~Brink Lindsey

Via Jesse Walker

But bringing together many different constituencies is the way that political coalitions are born.  Yes, many constitutionalists are “backward-looking,” in the sense that they look back to the kind of constitutional interpretation that did not permit rampant, unchecked growth of the state.  They assume that it was actually better to have a smaller government and more political liberty, and they recognise that this existed in the past, the best parts of which they would like to restore. 

It might be that the sheer numbers of Rep. Paul’s supporters nationwide are not great enough to create a new or functioning coalition, but it occurred to me earlier today that any coalition that can effectively unite non-interventionists, nationalists and libertarians certainly has the potential of leading somewhere.  A coalition that argues in defense of civil liberties, national sovereignty, and border security and calls for an end to empire at the same time without succumbing to any strains of cultural radicalism could have very broad appeal.  It would essentially be campaigning on all those important matters that the established parties have badly neglected and campaigning against the ruinous policies that the parties have embraced.

Kidding aside, Thompson’s decision to relocate full-time to Iowa and (one imagines) do nothing other than campaign until the caucuses is an interesting move.  It will make anything less than a third place finish appear to be a serious setback, but he could take advantage of Romney’s weakening position.  (Needless to say, a third place finish by Romney and he’s pretty much done; the Dean comparisons will not only be easy, but also apt.)  If Giuliani’s campaign-by-stealth (via mail) or a surprise showing by Ron Paul somehow surpasses him, I don’t see how he will justify continuing this charade.  Nonetheless, he has genuinely impressed many people with his policy acumen, so he could become a very credible selection for VP.  How about Huckabee-Thompson?  Too Southern?  He could play Cheney to Huckabee’s Bush–isn’t that a pleasant thought? 

It’s unlikely that two bitter rivals would be on the same ticket, but it has happened before.  It would be quite a come-down from the acclamations of Fred Sotir Euergetos that were being shouted out to him a few months ago.  It would be rather humiliating to have to be considered for Huckabee‘s vice president, since the preacher had been considered as no more than veep-worthy just a month or so ago.  With Fred sinking in polls just about everywhere and the huckster rising, the argument that Huckabee is filling the space that Fred was supposed to fill and didn’t makes a good deal of sense.  Second billing may be the best he can expect now. 

P.S. Via Dave Weigel, hereis ascintillatingexcruciatingly dull Thompson town hall meeting in Orange City, Iowa.  Consider one of Thompson’s “jokes” about the Democratic candidates: “It’s like they’re all in training for the NASCAR, you know, nothing but a left turn.”  That has to be the first time I’ve ever heard a Southerner, or anyone, liken liberalism to NASCAR.  Let us hope that it will be the last.

You have to enjoy the moment during the third part of the town hall when one of Thompson’s supporters is holding a campaign sign upside-down.  I think it must have been a distress call.

These are the kinds of things I’ve been talking about all of my life. Now, if the American people have other priorities, if they want someone who smiles a lot more than I do, or someone who is a better quipster than I am, who has no experience in these areas, that’s for the American people to decide. ~Fred Thompson

Well, Fred, think about who won the last four presidential elections, and think about who lost.  Now ask yourself again whether the American people prefer experience and knowledge over smiling quipsters (preferably ones who also gush with feeling over the suffering of small children, etc.). 

What Fred really wanted to say in the quote above is this: “You people asked me to be your savior, so why won’t you worship me?”

As America demonstrates, faith thrives in a free market. In Europe, the established church, whether formal (the Church of England) or informal (as in Catholic Italy and Spain), killed religion as surely as state ownership killed the British car industry. When the Episcopal Church degenerates into wimpsville relativist milquetoast mush, Americans go elsewhere. When the Church of England undergoes similar institutional decline, Britons give up on religion entirely. ~Mark Steyn

There’s something rather odd about this line of argument.  It’s a pretty obvious flaw that an acquaintance with the first 1,900 years of Christianity would reveal: established, state-backed religion flourished in Europe for most of European history.  Across Europe, institutional churches have lost the mass membership they once had, whether they are preaching “milquetoast mush” or very traditional orthodoxy (the latter undoubtedly fare somewhat better, but only relatively so).  Leave aside for now that the options in England aren’t just “Anglicanism or Bust!” and that Britons can (and sometimes do) choose to attend one of the other churches. 

This explanation of Europe’s greater secularisation is amazingly unsatisfying, designed as it is to vindicate “market forces” in every area of life.  I suppose that I expect it from a venture capitalist, but I also expect conservatives to question it.  I don’t deny that alliances between states and institutional churches (or, in many countries, the subordination of the church as effectively a department of government) over the last two centuries politicised the position of the church and radicalised opponents of the regime in an increasingly anticlerical and sometimes anti-Christian direction.  But that was not the “cause” of secularisation as such.  Here is a list, by no means exhaustive, of some of what were significant causes of the process of secularisation in Europe: scientific advances, materialist philosophies, the uprooting and deracinating effects of industrialisation and urbanisation, the introduction of ideological politics and mass political mobilisation, the material and moral ravages of the two wars, followed by the effects of two essentially materialist worldviews that claimed to “deliver the goods” more effectively or justly than the other.  Where the experience of Europe clearly differs from our own, and one of the reasons why Europe has gone further in its secularisation, is in their experience of the wars.  I have to wonder whether Americans would have been church-going and believing in the numbers that we are today if we had experienced the full horror of these conflicts and had endured the same losses.  There is a basic problem with the thesis that “faith thrives in a free market,” which is that there are now “free markets” all across Europe where there are no established churches or, where there are technically established churches they have no real authority over all citizens of that country who are not members, and yet faith isn’t exactly thriving and has been largely going into decline in the free, western European part since the war.  There has been some religious revival since the Cold War, but it is sporadic.  If “faith thrives in a free market,” Spain should not have undergone the rapid secularisation that it has experienced since the end of the Franco regime.  Italy disestablished the Catholic Church in 1984, which must be why religions of all kinds have been flourishing in Italy.  The Republic of Ireland hasn’t ever had an established church, yet it is experiencing the same secularisation that overtook Spain before it.  It has been the last twenty years of economic and social changes that have sapped the strength of religion in Ireland.  Clearly there is something much more complicated going on that cannot be explained with easy reference to establishment/disestablishment of religion.

 I believe, of course, that there are thousands of people who are not of faith who are moral. ~Mitt Romney

As for the rest of the atheists and agnostics, well, he isn’t going to say more.

On a note more appropriate to our Advent season, I should mention that I have started reading Paul Gavrilyuk’s The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought.   So far, it seems an excellent study in the theological and historiographical problem of understanding the interpretation of God’s essential impassibility and His suffering in the flesh.  Gavrilyuk sets out to be the ultimate anti-Harnack, and has so far been entirely persuasive in his arguments (I am still only in chapter 3).  I recommend it to you all.

The United States needs a new beginning. It cannot lie in the Tudor-Stuart-like alternation of the Bush-Clinton dynasties, nor in the macho militarism of Republicans who see war without end. It has to involve a fresh face that will reconcile the country with itself and the world, get over divisions — internal and external — and speak with honesty about American glory and shame. ~Roger Cohen

All right, Roger Cohen likes Obama, but what is this business about the “Tudor-Stuart alternation” of dynasties?  Isn’t Roger Cohen from Britain?  Wouldn’t he know that the Tudors and Stuarts did not alternate?  Apparently not.  One followed the other, and the latter came to power over both Scotland and England because there was no heir for the former (i.e., the Tudors–apologies for any confusion).  The Bushes and Clintons are nothing like the Tudors and Stuarts in this or in any other way.  Whatever else you might say about Cohen’s column, its historical parallels could use some work.

The two most talked-about candidates in their respective parties in my home district are Michelle Lujan-Grisham and Darren White.  At first glance, I am having a hard time finding a reason to support White.  He is, he says, “an optimistic person.”  That’s no good at all.  Meanwhile, Ms. Lujan-Grisham says that the “war in Iraq must end.”  That’s what we want to hear.  The choice seems clear: optimism cannot be tolerated.

White is actually our Sheriff, and he has a record for competence.  He stands a reasonably good chance of getting elected, but as of right now I have no clear idea of what his policy views are.  Also, Ms. Lujan-Grisham is a native New Mexican, while White is another transplant, just like Wilson.  I may have been born in Colorado, but even I have lived in New Mexico before White did.  He’s going to have to make a pretty strong pitch to win back voters, including me, whom Wilson alienated.