Two post-New Hampshire polls are showing McCain in the lead in South Carolina following his New Hampshire win, overtaking Huckabee who's had a consistent lead there for the past month. Results of the Fox News (500 LVs, 1/9, MOE +/- 4%) and Rasmussen Reports (785 LVs, 1/9, MOE +/- 4%) polls are as follows:

Candidate	Fox News	Rasmussen (1/6)
McCain	25	27 (21)
Huckabee	18	24 (28)
Romney	17	16 (15)
Thompson	9	12 (11)
Giuliani	5	6 (10)
Paul	5	5 (4)

This will be very interesting to see how solid McCain's bounce turns out to be (we've seen how ephemeral they can be this week) especially considering that he is competing in two states simultaneously while his chief competitors are competing in just one each (Romney in Michigan and Huckabee in South Carolina.) If McCain wins both Michigan and South Carolina, he'll be the favorite for the nomination and if Huckabee loses SC, even if he comes in 2nd, that will be devastating for his campaign.

On January 15, Michigan will vote in its primary, and it's turning into quite a race on the Republican side, being billed as Romney's final stand. Certainly he's playing into this perception, pulling ads from South Carolina and Florida to focus on Michigan, although if he gets another silver here no one doubts he'll continue on. It's just he's going to have to win one somewhere and where better than the state of his birth and where his father served as governor. Results from the latest (post-Iowa/pre-New Hampshire) Strategic Vision (700 LVs, 1/4-6, MOE +/- 4 and %) and Rossman Martin Survey (300 LVs, 1/6-7, MOE +/- 5.8%.) polls are as follows:

Candidate	Strategic Vision     1/4-6	Rossman Group       1/6-7
McCain	29	18
Romney	20	22
Huckabee	18	23
Giuliani	13	8
Thompson	5	4
Paul	5	3

These numbers seem pretty messed up since you'd think the poll immediately following Iowa would be most favorable to Huckabee and the poll closest to New Hampshire would be most favorable to McCain, but consider them a baseline. McCain's win in New Hampshire and now Romney's camping out in the state (and Huckabee's doing the same in S.C.) will shake the whole race up moving forward.

Looking a bit deeper into the Strategic Vision poll, things look promising for McCain. First there's the whole experience/change thing:

Do you prefer a candidate who has experience in office or one who represents change?
Experience 44%
Change 28%

And then the list of voter priorities has McCain's strengths at the top (and a distinct weakness a bit lower down.)

What do you believe is the number one issue facing America?
War on terror 21%
Economy 17%
War in Iraq 15%
Immigration 11%
Taxes 10%
Crime 9%
Healthcare 8%
Education 5%

One area that might hurt McCain is on ideology. McCain is distrusted greatly by conservatives for his advocacy for campaign finance reform and "amnesty" so the fact that 61% of voters feel it's either very or somewhat important that the candidate be "a conservative Republican in the mode of Ronald Reagan" could hurt him. Then again, McCain beat Romney slightly among Republicans in New Hampshire, which may indicate that the distrust among the rank and file of the party is dissipating. I suspect Mitt Romney will spend the next week reminding voters why they distrusted him in the first place.

Democrats are voting next week as well, of course, although the only candidates on the ballot will be Hillary Clinton, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel and Uncommitted. Right now, The Rossman Group poll has Hillary beating Uncommitted 48%-28% (again, pre-New Hampshire.) An interesting factor in this is to what extent Democrats will go to the polls to beef up the Uncommitted vote as a defacto vote for Obama or Edwards. There is an active campaign underway to get them to do just that.

Detroiters for Uncommitted Voters, a group of mostly Obama supporters, wants to make sure that people vote in the Democratic primary Tuesday, even if their candidate isn't on the ballot. [...] U.S. Rep. John Conyers and his wife, Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, will begin airing radio ads this week urging voters to cast their ballots for uncommitted.

The Uncommitted vote in fact is not a wasted vote, as delegates will be seated at the convention to represent those voters (assuming Michigan's delegates are re-instated, that is.)

If enough Democratic voters choose "uncommitted," delegates at the district or state level will be chosen to fill that void for the national Democratic convention in August. [...] It's presumed that most uncommitted delegates will favor Obama or Edwards, but once at the convention they can support any candidate in contention for the Democratic nomination.

There's yet another factor here, which is that Democrats in Michigan can actually vote in the Republican primary, as many did in 2000, which led to McCain's victory there. This year, with many Democrats largely disenfranchised, will Democrats with a soft spot in their heart for McCain help hand McCain another victory or will they vote strategically to deny arguably the strongest Republican candidate an important early win?

This election cycle, in an attempt to negotiate the pesky complexities of how voters respond to negative ads -- on one hand, they're widely considered to be effective, on the other, they can also backfire on the candidate who goes negative -- some of the candidates, particularly on the Republican side, have employed some innovative methods to attack their opponents without appearing to do so.

Mitt Romney's patented method, employed in Iowa against Huckabee and in New Hampshire against McCain, involves praising his opponents before "drawing contrasts" with them. McCain, in response to Romney, then aired an ad that cited the stinging words from 2 newspaper anti-endorsements in order to call Romney a "phoney." But perhaps the most brazen of all of the Republican ad tricks is Huckabee's stunt from earlier today in which he declared that he had shot a negative ad against Romney but then decided against airing it...but then proceeded to show it to all convened reporters and bloggers.

From Iowa Independent:

A day after calling Mitt Romney "desperate" and "dishonest", Mike Huckabee cancelled a negative commercial aimed at his chief rival in the Republican Caucus.

Then he showed the commercial to the press and even encouraged them to tape it if they wanted to.

Huckabee said that he had anticipated holding the press conference, which was scheduled yesterday, to unveil a commercial he made over the weekend that criticized Romney's record on abortion, taxes and other issues.

"We prepared it, sent it to the stations, (and were) supposed to start running it at noon today," Huckabee said. "This morning, I ordered my staff to pull the ad; I told them I do not want it to be run. If it was run at all, it would be until the stations pulled it off their schedules."

Jane has more at FDL:

It raises the question -- does Huckabee not have enough money to run the ad? Is this a cheap way to get the message out there, and still make a claim to have (ahem) clean hands?

Perhaps a little of both but the latter requires that the press buy into Huck's holier than thou spin on why he pulled the ad and as Marc Ambinder notes:

Most reporters did not.

They started to laugh.

As you might imagine, this didn't stop some reporters from recording the ad as it played. You can see a bootleg version at The Page.

Mitt Romney continued his "he's a good guy, but..." attack ad series that he began in Iowa against Mike Huckabee with a new "contrast" ad going after John McCain on taxes and immigration in New Hampshire. It begins:

John McCain is an honorable man, but is he the right conservative for the future?

...and ends:

For the future there is a big difference.

Care to guess where Romney's going with the "future" formulation? I like John Dickerson's take:

Taxes and immigration have nothing to do with the future, particularly, but the framing is a not-so-subtle jab at McCain's age. In his closing-argument stump speech, Romney is trying to identify himself with the future. "No one votes for yesterday; they vote for tomorrow," Romney said Thursday in New Hampshire. "Elections are about the future, the future of our families, the future of our country."

Watch it:

John McCain had an impressively rapid response ad ready to go, citing the Union Leader's "The Romney Backlash" and Concord Monitor's "Mitt Romney Should Not Be President" Romney anti-endorsements. For someone who has been as loathe to "go negative" as McCain has been, this ad is a master class in how to attack without seeming to -- use others' words to do it.

Watch it:

So who wins this grudge match? My instinct is McCain. His ad goes right for Romney's throat accusing him of being phony, but the thing is, everyone knows that. It's not exactly news. Romney's ad leaves me a bit cold but does succeed in reminding conservatives of why they don't like McCain (and it gets in that nifty subliminal age rap.) The reason I think McCain might just get the better of Romney by a hair with his ad is that it appeals to a broader group: moderate Republicans and independents who vote in the Republican primary, aka McCain's core constituency. For McCain, this ad isn't about shoring up his conservative credentials (the basis of Romney's attack,) it's about reminding people who the most principled candidate is. McCain further benefits from not having attacked first (it's a response ad) without putting him on defense. Right now Huckabee and Obama are very much on the defensive and it's not an attractive quality in a candidate (I would argue, it may actually be worse than being perceived as a negative campaigner.)

The battle between these ads reveals a major tension that exists between the two candidates fighting for New Hampshire, and I expect, ultimately fighting for the nomination: is it more important to agree with the guy on the issues (Romney) or are integrity and honesty more important in a candidate (McCain.) Right now, the LA Times/Bloomberg poll shows these qualities in a dead heat for 2nd place among likely voters' priorities (10% and 11% respectively.) Interestingly, the top priority listed is "experience/track record" with 16%, which reveals yet another rift in the race: foreign affairs experience would appear to go to McCain while Romney impresses on handling domestic affairs. Romney's continued overall lead in New Hampshire can at least in part be explained by the fact that Americans are more and more concerned about domestic issues as a new AP/Yahoo News poll released on Friday (taken Dec. 14-20) confirmed; the extent to which Benazir Bhutto's assassination will impact this dynamic, of course, is yet to be seen.

...and he does it oh so painfully...

Frontpage of NYTimes.com:

Huckabee Sees Pakistan as Reason for Border Fence

Yep, it's as cringe-worthy as it sounds.

Mike Huckabee has had a string of foreign policy gaffes, the most recent of which was his apparent ignorance to the fact that Musharraf had lifted martial law in Pakistan. On the domestic front, Huckabee clearly sees his biggest vulnerability among Republican voters as immigration, since after waxing compassionately at a debate about treating the children of illegal immigrants like human beings, he embraced the endorsement of Jim Gilchrist of the Minutemen and tried to portray himself as tough on immigration.

So, what happens when Mike Huckabee desperately tries to prove he's credible foreign affairs AND tough on illegal immigration all at once?

You get this train wreck:

On Thursday night he told reporters in Orlando, Fla.: "We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there's any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country."

...we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities except those immediately south of the border," he told reporters in Pella. "And in light of what is happening in Pakistan it ought to give us pause as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders." [...]

"The fact is that the immigration issue is not so much about people coming to pick lettuce or make beds, it's about someone coming with a shoulder-fired missile," he said.

Wow. Not only did Huckabee in one fell swoop eclipse Tom Tancredo in the immigrant fear mongering department but he also showed his continued ignorance, as it was revealed later that, as NY Times informs us:

In fact, far more illegal immigrants come from the Philippines, Korea, China and Vietnam, according to recent estimates from the Department of Homeland Security.

How could Huckabee make such a mistake? FoxNews reported that Huckabee cited the CIA as a source but later clarified that it was in fact a Denver Post article.

So not ready for prime time.

Can we stop pretending that this guy has a shot at the nomination, please and focus on the ones most likely to win this thing, Huckabee's current lead in Iowa notwithstanding: Romney and McCain? As I see it, we should all be doing what we can to ensure it's the former.

By now, you've probably seen Mike Huckabee's new "Christ" ad. I actually think this ad is quite effective; even though he frames Christmas in overtly religious terms, I don't think it's necessarily alienating to those like me who are proud to be a part of the secular left. I'm actually far more offended by Mitt Romney's anti-secularist rhetoric, leaving out the faithless from the groups of Americans he hopes to lead and then on Meet The Press equating religion and morality as though you can't have the latter without the former. Huckabee comes across not as a crazy cook imposing his views on me but rather expressing his views in a warm and, may I say, politically pitch perfect manner. Of course this is why he's so dangerous, but interestingly, the most pushback Huck is getting for this ad is from an outspoken conservative religious leader.

Catholic League president Bill Donahue said Huckabee went beyond wishing people a joyous holiday. Donahue said he was especially disturbed by the cross-like image created by a white bookcase in the background of the ad, saying he believed it was a subliminal message.

"What he's trying to say to the evangelicals in western Iowa (is): I'm the real thing," Donahue said Tuesday on Fox News Channel's "Fox and Friends. "You know what, sell yourself on your issues, not on what your religion is."

This is yet another example of Huckabee getting attacked from the right because he threatens their power; he's gotten it from all three legs of that stupid conservative stool Romney's always talking about: the econocons, the neocons and now the theocons. It almost makes me want to come to Huck's defense, the enemy of your enemy and all that. Almost.

As for the white cross subliminal messaging, Donahue may be onto something. I actually didn't notice it the first time (I saw shelves) but watch the ad below, how can it not be intentional?

And as if you needed one more thing to reluctantly like Huckabee for, his response is pretty good too:

"If we are so politically correct in this country that a person can't say enough of the nonsense with the political attack ads could we pause for a few days and say Merry Christmas to each other then we're really, really in trouble as a country," Huckabee said. [...]

Huckabee said the bookshelf is just a bookshelf and shrugged off the controversy: "I will confess this: If you play the spot backwards it says, 'Paul is dead. Paul is dead.'"

As a sidenote, notice that the ad has more than 500,000 views in just one day. I'll be curious to see how the other Republican candidate videos have done; something tells me Huckabee wins the GOP YouTube primary hands down.

Speaking of the spectacular fall of Rudy Giuliani, both the Real Clear Politics and Pollster averages of the national race for the Republican nomination show Mike Huckabee climbing to within 3 points of Rudy Giuliani. Add to this Giuliani's current tie for distant 3rd in Iowa, his falling behind McCain into 3rd place in New Hampshire and his possibly having fallen into 4th place in South Carolina and we just may have a flameout of monumental proportions on our hands. So what's happened to the former front-runner? Two things out of his control and at least two that should have been within it.

First of all, Hillary Clinton began to lose her aura of inevitability. As you can see by looking at the InTrade market trends, Clinton peaked as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination on around Nov. 21, three weeks after the fateful Philadelphia debate. At that time her shares were trading at $72 (equating to 72% chance of winning the nomination.) Now they're trading at $55 a share.

Exactly one week after Clinton's shares began to fall, Giuliani's shares peaked at $46 and since then have dropped to the current price of $37; in that exact same period, Huckabee's shares rose from $8 to $16 a piece. Giuliani made the mistake of largely hanging his nomination hat on the ability to beat Hillary Clinton in November. When the threat of a Hillary Clinton nomination waned, so did most of the rationale for a Giuliani candidacy, which freed up Republican voters to go with their hearts, not with their heads. The result: the Huckabee surge.

Another problem for Giuliani has been the increased level of interest in domestic issues among the electorate and a reduced focus on foreign threats. Surprisingly, there really hasn't been much fearmongering over terrorism in this primary race on the Republican side (Tom Tancredo's ridiculous mall bombing ad notwithstanding.) Giuliani has even downplayed it in his ads, going up late in the cycle with ads that focused on his supposed success turning New York City around; this strategy has been echoed by McCain whose initial focus on his war hero status has given way to a fiscal restraint message. The political zeitgeist has turned on Giuliani in just about every way one could imagine, including from a media perspective. A few weeks ago there was a series of really bad news stories for Rudy, culminating in his less than stellar Meet The Press appearance of a week ago.

Of course, this didn't all have to mean the end of Rudy. As the reputations he'd cultivated as 9/11 hero and the anti-Hillary candidate waned in importance, what remained as the smoke cleared could have been a strong candidate who had a compelling message of why he should be president; he had neither. In addition, his over-reliance on his national lead and his relative neglect of the early states are now biting him in the ass. A few weeks ago I wrote that conventional wisdom had it that Giuliani needed to leave Iowa in 3rd place and New Hampshire in 2nd to have a chance; right now neither of those things appears likely.

And to top it all off is the latest poll out of Florida, which has always been the one state that showed Giuliani way ahead of the pack and, for a while there, holding steady. Not so in the latest Rasmussen Reports survey, which finds Giuliani dropping into 3rd with 19% behind Huckabee with 27% and Romney with 23%. This is the first Florida poll to show Giuliani in anything but first place, and his RCP average is still 13% ahead of Huckabee, but if this at all a sign of things to come for Rudy in Florida, the claim that Giuliani can hold out until Florida and run the table on February 5th, ie that Giuliani's lead would prove to be "momentum-proof," is about to be challenged severely. If Rudy collapses in Florida, any credible claim to a path to the nomination simply disappears.

Can Giuliani turn things around? Not too likely if today's coverage of his flailing campaign in New Hampshire is any indication. Here's The AP's take on his New Hampshire event today:

He's not giving up on New Hampshire yet. He returned for one public event on Monday and told an audience at a town hall meeting he hoped they would give him a boost "right here in New Hampshire, where you've got one heck of an important primary coming up."

"I'll be spending some of my Christmas holiday here in New Hampshire, which I really look forward to. Maybe you'll even get a chance to see me ski," he said. "We'll be here and we'll be working really hard to get your vote."

And here's First Read's:

If the Giuliani campaign was interested in playing down talk that the candidate is struggling in the early nominating states and not taking New Hampshire particularly seriously, it had a funny way of showing it.

Giuliani came to New Hampshire Monday, but had only public event (he also had a retail stop in Barrington but didn't alert the national media). Speaking to employees of Goss International Company, he seemed tentative and spent only half of his normal hour at the town hall (he was running late, campaign officials said, because of weather delays). After taking the last question, Giuliani seemed unclear what to do next, taking a long pause and outstretching his arms before transitioning to ask the attendees for their vote, which he has rarely done on the campaign trail.

All of which is to say that I think Jerome is right on with his prediction that InTrade will have Giuliani's chances of winning the nomination down in the single digits once the early states vote. Along the same lines, the reluctance that InTrade's traders appear to have in expressing as much confidence in a Huckabee nomination as his polling numbers would appear to merit, indicates to me that Romney right now is in the best position to win the nomination, even if he loses Iowa.

It's been interesting to see Huckabee rise in the polls despite the utter contempt in which the corporatist Republican Party establishment holds him. Now he aims to alienate the very serious neocon wing of the party as well.

In an essay in Foreign Affairs Magazine Huckabee rails against Bush's foreign policy, saying, in its most striking passage:

The Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad.

In the extensive piece he calls for modesty when dealing with international affairs, diplomacy when dealing with our enemies and frames energy independence as a national security concern. Nope not very serious at all.

The heat from the right is already coming.

Rightwingnuthouse calls the essay an "embarrassment" and Race42008 uses terms like "dangerous" and "naive" to describe Huckabee. Predictably Fox News got to the real issue behind the right-wing's pushback against this sort of rhetoric: that the attack on Bush sounds like "John Kerry said it during the 2004 campaign" and that it gives "comfort to their political enemies."

Romney repeated this line of argument in his rapid response to the essay today:

"I can't believe he'd say that. I'm afraid he's running from the wrong party," Romney said to a gathering of about 100 supporters in a restaurant here. "I had to look again -- did this come from Barack Obama or from Hillary Clinton? Did it come from John Edwards? No, it was Governor Huckabee."

Romney even went so far as to defend Bush directly.

"I'm the last person to say that this administration is subject to an arrogant, bunker mentality that is counterproductive here and abroad," he said. "The truth of the matter is this president has kept us safe these past six years and that has not been easy to do."

There is great discontent among the Republican Party towards Bush but being a foreign policy hawk isn't why; if anything they're pissed off he hasn't been tougher abroad. So I really don't see what this gets Huckabee except some new rounds of ammunition to be used against him by his rivals. But one thing he's doing here is setting himself up, credibly, as the change candidate of the Republican field. Imagine if he does win the nomination, what a rebuke to the Bush years and to the "serious" and "responsible" conventional wisdom of the Republican establishment this would be.

This is turning out to be a fairly monumental and very entertaining fight for the soul of the Republican Party. Romney is trying to position himself as the defender of the party's more traditional principles, which is appropriate I suppose since neither the party nor Romney seems to really stand for anything at all. Huckabee standing for something, anything, is clearly quite attractive to Republican voters right about now.