With a measly $1 million take for the third quarter (1/5 of what Ron Paul raised,) Mike Huckabee was clearly unable to translate his 2nd place finish in the Iowa straw poll in August into any meaningful fundraising advantage, but despite this, early state polls are starting to show some real movement on his part.
After tying Giuliani for third place in Iowa in the recent DesMoines Register poll, today's Rasmussen poll finds Huckabee surging into a tie for second with Fred Thompson. In addition to that, the last two New Hampshire polls show Huckabee tied with Thompson for 4th place and the most recent South Carolina poll shows him rising into double digits for the first time in a respectable 5th place. Not to mention that Rasmussen's national daily tracking poll may have to add a 5th column for Huckabee -- he's now up to 7%. The fact that someone who's raised so little money is playing with the big boys is significant. If conservatives are as discontent with their field as polls seem to indicate and are still looking for a candidate without "a glass jaw," it would appear that many are finding him in Mike Huckabee.
Dick Morris, who's worked as a consultant for Huckabee, concurs.
In the meantime, plugging away in the shadows, with no money and no political backing, an articulate, principled, knowledgeable, conservative Christian, Mike Huckabee, has been plowing the fields in Iowa hoping to catch a break. He is witty, sincere, dedicated and courageous in his own way. With a minus share of the vote, he kept at it and refused to pander on the one hand or give up on the other. [...]Now he churns his way to the forefront of the pack in the Republican primary. He's still broke, but still finished a strong second in the Ames, Iowa, straw poll with 18 percent of the vote...[and] he has the best of all possible worlds: Rivals who are falling of their own weight. So here comes Mike.
One of the things that makes Huckabee such a stealth candidate is that he does seem to stay out of the news, content, it would appear, to do the retail politics thing, requiring neither money nor media attention. But when he does say or do something newsworthy, it's always something sort of strange, which further gives him the feel of a fringe candidate. First he's an advocate for the "fair tax," which wikipedia describes as
changing tax laws to replace the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and all federal income taxes (including Alternative Minimum Tax), payroll taxes (including Social Security and Medicare taxes), corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, gift taxes, and estate taxes with a national retail sales tax, to be levied once at the point of purchase on all new goods and services.
Crazy, right? And then there was his creepy suicide joke during the last GOP debate:
The former Arkansas governor, exaggerating, said other GOP presidential hopefuls were raising $100 for every nickel he had raised. "If I were some of these guys, I'd have to be sitting in a warm tub of water with razor blades," Huckabee said on MSNBC-TV.
Weird. And now we learn of this strange response to a question about whether his religious views would prevent him from supporting funding for safe-sex programs (From TPM):
"The best thing to do is to encourage people to make good choices," Huckabee said. "For example, if we were really serious about stopping a problem, whether it's drunk driving, we don't say, 'Okay, don't drive as drunk,' do we?"Huckabee offered another example: "We don't say that a little domestic violence is okay, just cut it down a little, just don't hit quite as hard. We say it's wrong."
Hmm. Again, odd, but Blue Hampshire's Mike Caulfield makes the case that we ignore Huckabee at our own peril. It's not that Huckabee's stances aren't crazy, it's just that he delivers them in a nice guy package that could, in Caulfield's estimation, be truly dangerous if he's the nominee.
Here's the thing though... as I type this all out, the fringe nature of [Huckabee's response] becomes obvious. But in Huckabee's presence it's not. There is this air of reasonableness which flows off of him. He's a year 2000 George Bush with 40 additional IQ points and without that damn smirk. Even that doesn't hit it -- Huckabee is as talented on the stump as any of the candidates, Democratic or Republican. [...]Hillary v. Huckabee is a threat to a Democratic victory in a way that Hillary v. Guiliani is frankly not. Were the Republican base to get past its craving for 2002, when hate was in vogue, they'd see that their best chance for an election win is to rerun the formula of 2000 with a sharper and more experienced candidate.
Huckabee is probably at the top of every candidate's VP list but if he hopes to be the guy choosing from his own VP list, Huckabee is going to have to build on his rising poll numbers with some money and some institutional support throughout the rest of this quarter. If he's able to do so, we could see an upset in the making.
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