I COME NOT TO bury Mike Huckabee. Mike Huckabee has buried himself. Over the next week, the Republican party in Iowa and elsewhere will decide that Huckabee may be a swell fellow, but he's not of presidential timbre. I predict this decision will be made en masse. Huckabee's support will likely crater in Iowa.
But here's the fun part--no one will see it coming. Because of the holidays, there will be scant polling between now and the caucuses, and what polling there is will be of dubious reliability. (Paging ARG!) If Huckabee is going to lose a point or so a day between the end of last week and January 3, we won't know it until the results from the caucuses are in. If Huckabee declines to a distant second or perhaps even third place as I am now fearlessly predicting he will, it will catch the voting public by surprise. When they tuned this race out before the long Christmas weekend, the media told them Huckabee was a sure thing in Iowa.
Huckabee's support will have to go somewhere. The logical recipients are Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson. While Iowans may not love Romney, they do respect him. Unlike Huckabee, he has impressed them as being of presidential timbre. And Thompson, at last, is running well in Iowa. He's surging.
A stunning second place finish will get Thompson a moment in the spotlight. If he uses it well, he could emerge as the anti-Romney and make things interesting with a win in South
Carolina. That goal will be more viable if McCain manages to tarnish the luster of Romney's Iowa victory in New Hampshire. There may yet be life in the Thompson campaign.
But the immediate aftermath of Iowa will belong to Romney. It will be his moment to either seize the nomination or blow it. The best moment of the campaign for Romney so far came when he gave his long-awaited religion speech. The substance was interesting, but far more impressive was Romney's delivery. For once he wasn't selling, but rather speaking seriously about serious issues.
When Mitt Romney hits the national stage (likely shared with Barack Obama) on the night of January 3, much of the country will have heard only the following narrative regarding him: Flip-flopper, phony, insincere, plastic. That's why he has to make sure to give a serious speech that night, one that eschews applause lines for substance.
On Friday night, I posted an excerpt from Ronald Reagan's legendary "A Time for Choosing" speech. For those of us who remember Reagan only as a happy old man, the sobriety and gravity of that speech are bracing. That speech made Ronald Reagan. He had been a second rate movie star. After that speech, he became the GOP's philosophical lodestar.
Mitt Romney can overhaul the public's perception of him. January 3 may likely be his big chance.
Dean Barnett is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
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