…that I was flogging Huckabee a year ago as the breakout candidate. I know I told people, but I wish I had something in writing. Better yet, I wish I had a betting slip from Paddy Power or William Hill or Ladbrokes with £20 on it and $BIGNUMBER:1 as the odds. As it is, I said back in September that I’d been saying to keep an eye on the Huck for nine months, back when he was polling around 6% in Iowa.
But I digress.
Mitt Romney is an idiot. Even setting aside the fact that the largest Protestant denomination in the country officially considers him a cult follower (that’s not just talk, that’s Southern Baptist doctrine, and I have the papers from the Watchman Foundation to prove it) – how on earth did he ever think he could be more attractive to the evangelical vote than an ACTUAL SOUTHERN BAPTIST PREACHER?
If Romney wanted to have a prayer (HA HA SEE WHAT I DID THERE), he should have taken a page out of the Gary Hart playbook and run as a technocratic non-ideological managerial-competence type, pointing to the SLC Olympics and his time in Massachusetts as proof that he could change the tone in Washington and be a capable administrator. Sure, maybe you have a rough time getting through the primary, but McCain’s habit of bucking the faithful was working just fine in 2000 until he hit the Rove dirty tricks machine in South Carolina. This year, by the time they get to SC, it might be too late if one guy has already taken Iowa and NH.
Instead, Romney went for the Bush offense: say what they want to hear and try to look inevitable. Since NH was considered an easy get because of his proximity, Iowa became the ballgame, and he dumped an absolutely scatalogically-obscene amount of money into the Hawkeye state. And now, with a month to go, Huckabee’s polling in the high 30s and Romney’s got half that. In other words, Momentum Mitt is sitting on 2-7 and Huckabee’s just flopped a straight.
Looking at the GOP field right now, I don’t see how any of them can possibly win the nomination. Of course, I feel the same way about the Ds at the moment. The 2008 Presidency season is going to make the 2007 college football season look like a Swiss watch.