Huckabee Watch

Bold predictions have paid off in the past here, but the last major one — that Huckabee would place 2nd in New Hampshire — seems pretty silly in retrospect. That said, Huckabee was still a big winner in New Hampshire. Mitt Romney is damaged goods, and Huckabee gets to take on McCain in a southern state where McCain has had trouble before.

Today brought news of Thompson becoming very aggressive against Huckabee. Having performed poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire, this is Thompson’s last chance. Huckabee has engaged Thompson, which could potentially sink them both if McCain can seize the “higher ground” amidst a Thompson/Huckabee spat.

During this week’s republican debate in Iowa, Mitt Romney introduced an intriguing model:

We’re not going to get the White House nor strengthen America unless we can pull together the coalition of conservatives and conservative thought that has made us successful as a party. And that’s social conservatives. It’s also economic conservatives. And foreign policy and defense conservatives.

Those three together form the three legs of the Republican stool that allowed Ronald Reagan to get elected and allowed our party to have strength over the last several decades.

Adopting Romney’s construction, we have three distinct stakeholders participating in the Republican nomination: Social conservatives, Economic conservatives, and Defense conservatives.

Clearly, Huckabee is enjoying strong support from the social conservative “leg” of Romney’s stool. He has either achieved — or is on his way to achieving — a plurality in every poll taken about the GOP nomination; meanwhile, his four other “viable” (McCain, Thompson, Romney, Giuliani) opponents have lost grip on the social conservative leg and are jockeying for the other two legs.

Romney’s model might suggest a balance of ideological influence by the three distinct stakeholders under the “Conservative” umbrella, but Huckabee reminds us that when it comes to electoral influence, social conservatives make Romney’s stool uncomfortably wobbly for the Defense/Economic conservatives.

The Defense/Economic conservatives have always had more influence and bigger megaphones. They have well-funded, palatial think tanks (with a quota of cubicles for their kooky cousins, the social conservatives), book publishing companies, newspapers, and magazines. They have Rupert Murdock on speed dial.

None of that is important to Huckabee, though. He’s got the numbers.

We’re seeing this paradox playing out right now: as the press on Huckabee gets louder and nastier (mostly from the Right), Huckabee’s poll numbers go higher and higher. This phenomenon (worse press = better numbers) will become even more incongruous over the next two weeks, and it will pave Huckabee’s way to becoming the republican nominee.

Throughout my short adult life, almost every commentary I’ve heard on Huckabee came through the mouthpiece of a democrat in Arkansas. I remember attending my first Democratic Party events in high school and early college, where Huckabee was a common punching bag. Nobody took him seriously. It became my duty as a Democrat, and I learned to embrace the mockery and even began ridiculing Huckabee on my own.

The 2002 election cycle was preceded by speculation (and hope) that then-Attorney General Mike Beebe would run against Governor Huckabee. He would eventually be criticized for not taking him on that year, and instead leaving the job for then-State Treasurer Jimmie Lou Fisher. I, too, was frustrated that Beebe didn’t run, because I’d been indoctrinated to think of Huckabee as a joke. Jimmie Lou gave Huckabee a run for his money, but she ending up losing. This loss was tough, not only because I love Jimmie Lou, but because it challenged my world-view that Huckabee was a joke.

After Huckabee’s reelection in 2002, chatter began to surface that he was considering a run for president. The mere idea of this was viewed as preposterous to democrats in Arkansas — it was used by our party chairman as a joke at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner to get a rise out of the crowd. Once again, I laughed at the Huckabee jokes.

When Huckabee finally announced he was forming an exploratory committee, the national press felt about the same as the folks in Arkansas: they didn’t think much of it. This would continue into the early summer with speculation of Fred Thompson’s entry. By the mid-summer of 2007, when I brought up Huckabee’s candidacy as something to keep an eye on, my out-of-state republican friends would laugh at me. Then, by the end of the summer, things started becoming interesting…

The republican straw poll in Iowa planted the seed for what we see now: an impending Huckabee sweep of the Hawkeye state. Brownback dropped, the “front-runners” didn’t participate, and suddenly the only obstacle in capturing the attention of Iowa conservatives was a well-funded, flip-flopping, Mormon, New Englander whose support was broad but never deep.

Deja vu: our “joke”-of-a-former-governor is about to win Iowa.

Clarence Page cites an astonishing figure in today’s Chicago Tribune:

Of the likely Republican caucusgoers surveyed, Huckabee scored 29 percent, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney scored 24 percent and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani scored 13 percent.

That’s got to be a jolt to Romney. He has been a front-runner for weeks in Iowa, where he has spent more than $7 million. Huckabee has spent only about $300,000. [emphasis added]

23:1 :: Romney:Huckabee.

Twenty three to one.

Huckabee has been underestimated his entire career. He’s a shock to Arkansas Democrats. He’s schooling Romney. If the Iowa media dominoes fall in ‘08 for the GOP like they did in ‘04 for the Democrats (as I think they will), he could easily be  the republican nominee.

When will Huckabee’s opponents learn to stop underestimating him?