November 3, 2007

How Huckabee Could Win the Nomination

Charles Mahtesian has an excellent article at The Washington Post called "How Huckabee Could Rock the 2008 Vote". In it, Mr. Mahtesian, editor of the Almanac of American Politics, lays out a convincing blueprint for how Huckabee could win the Republican nomination:

"Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly," A.J. Liebling once famously noted. "They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch." But in the case of Mike Huckabee, the opposite might be true.

The farther this Baptist preacher-turned-presidential candidate gets from Little Rock, the more appealing he becomes. From the Manhattan studios of Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" to the Values Voter Summit in Washington, from the straw poll in Ames, Iowa, to a jam session with a high school jazz band in Concord, N.H., Huckabee has blended his faith and social conservatism into an appealing package -- one that's true to his evangelical roots yet somehow unthreatening to more secular audiences.

He has even charmed the national media (no mean feat for an antiabortion Christian conservative and former president of the Arkansas Baptist Convention). More to the point, he has surged into second place among Republicans in Iowa, where his 19 percent support in the most recent American Research Group poll places him behind only the front-running Mitt Romney, who has 27 percent. In March, the former Arkansas governor's support was so low it registered as an asterisk. Not anymore.

Huckabee is for real -- a man poised to go further on the national stage than any other candidate produced by the Christian conservative movement.

Read the whole thing here...

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