So instead of just plowing ahead and hoping his money, his name recognition, and the weakness of the field delivers the 2012 presidential nomination, Mitt Romney’s going to his native state of Michigan to do a Great Big Speech on health care. The presumed goal is to shake off the terrible weight of his own Massachusetts health reform plan, which at present looks likely to doom his presidential campaign.
From advance reports, however, it appears Mitt is basically just trying out some refined talking points, but no new position:

A Romney adviser tells ABC News that he will address his own record on health care reform but that it won’t be a major focus of his speech. While Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has apologized for his past support for legislation to enact a “Cap and Trade” system to cut down on carbon emissions, calling it a “clunker”, don’t expect Romney to do the same on health care reform. Look for Romney to continue his federalism defense: the plan he enacted was right for Massachusetts, but not for the entire country.

Gee, b’lieve we’ve already heard that defense.
Romney will also talk about what he would propose to replace ObamaCare, and looks like he’ll tout the usual Republican “ideas” of giving individuals tax credits to buy private policies and going after medical malpractice suits.
I guess he knows what he’s doing, but if indeed he says nothing new, you have to wonder why he’s going to the trouble and expense of just drawing more attention to his greatest handicap.
As Dave Weigel points out, Romney’s Great Big Speech during the 2008 cycle, dealing with religion, wasn’t terribly effective in reducing voter concerns about his Mormonism. But it did give him an excuse to stop answering questions about it, so maybe that’s his tack here: “I already addressed that issue in Michigan in May.”

On the eve of Newt Gingrich’s formal announcement of his presidential candidacy, it’s worth reading Matt Bai’s assessment of Newt’s legacy:

[I]f Mr. Gingrich is looking for hopeful historical comparisons, the more apt one might be Richard Nixon. Unlike Mr. Reagan, who even in his lower moments retained a certain celebrity appeal, Mr. Nixon was humiliated and all but exiled after publicly self-destructing in 1962. He then retreated to the sidelines and watched as his party disintegrated, leaving a vacuum of leadership and gravitas on the right that enabled Mr. Nixon to make one of the great comebacks in political history.

Remember that Nixon’s comeback came after the self-immolation of George Romney, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the forced retirement of Lyndon B. Johnson and a powerful third-party regional candidacy by George Wallace. If Newt’s scenario for the presidency requires those kind of events, he might as well wait on the Rapture.

So House Speaker John Boehner went to Wall Street (the Economic Club of New York, to be exact) and delivered a speech announcing that he won’t support a debt limit increase unless it is connected directly to spending cuts that equal the amount of increased debts. Tax increases, of course, are off the table.
Dave Weigel explains exactly how that shifts the debt limit debate to the Right:

The inside-outside game continues. Boehner gets to play the reasonable moderate who merely wants a debt limit increase with huge spending cuts or caps that House Democrats say they won’t accept. The Michele Bachmanns of the party get to keep opposing any increase, ever, for any reason. The White House stands pat and settles for whatever Republicans and the Senate Democrats who are up in 2012 — McCaskill, Klobuchar, the Nelsons — come up with.

Meanwhile, Sen. Jim DeMint, who is sitting athwart a critical 2012 presidential primary state and has a large Tea Party following, has issued his own demand that anyone who wants to run for president has to endorse a balanced budget constitutional amendment–and apparently, a version that limits federal spending to a fixed percentage of GDP–as a precondition for a debt limit increase.
Barring some significant defection of Senate Republicans willing to support a tax increase–or at least a “tax reform” package that actually raises revenues by closing off loopholes–the only way out of this box is some sort of gimmicky “agreement” that provides future procedural mechanisms to force deficit reduction without specifically identifying the means for achieving it. But Boehner’s speech didn’t seem to leave much room for that option. And his taxes-off-the-table line increases the deficit reduction target necessary to satisfy his demand, since current deficit estimates include expiration of the Bush tax cuts.
Ezra Klein suggests it’s the rejection of procedural solutions to the immediate crisis that could trigger a real crisis:

Boehner’s got a big [deficit reduction] number, but it’s not, over time, an impossible number. All of the major long-term budgets cut and raise more than $2 trillion over the next 10 years, so Boehner’s demands, though impressive in the abstract, are actually in the center of deficit-reduction consensus. What’s more questionable is his timetable. It’s very unlikely that Congress will be able to cut a multi-trillion dollar deal on deficit reduction before early-August, when the Treasury runs out of financial gimmicks to delay a default. And if Boehner and the Republicans won’t accept fiscal rules as a downpayment on deficit reduction, that leaves us with few options save for a series of hard-to-negotiate, short-term increases in the debt ceiling — which is to say, an extremely extended period of uncertainty for the market.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal editorial board has laid out the new economic conservative talking point that financial markets really care more about spending cuts than about a debit limit increase:

Ah, but what about the bond markets–won’t they panic as the debt limit draws near and Treasury predicts disaster? We doubt it. Bond holders want above all to know they’ll be repaid, preferably in uninflated dollars, and the best guarantee of repayment will be evidence that Washington has finally donned a fiscal straightjacket.

This is at best a disingenuous bargaining ploy, and at worst (to use a technical term) a lie, but one that will probably be repeated very soon by Republican pols around the country.

Huffpo’s Jon Ward is reporting that Mitch Daniels wants to run for president, and that the only hurdle to his candidacy is his wife’s hesitancy to discuss her decision to leave Daniels and their four daughters in 1993, and then marry another man, and her subsequent decision in 1997 to return to Daniels and remarry him.
Interestingly enough, Cheri Daniels, long known as reticent about direct involvement in politics, is going to be the keynote speaker at a major Indiana Republican Party event this Thursday. It’s a bit hard to imagine her taking on that assignment even as she is thwarting her husband’s presidential ambitions, but you never know.
Meanwhile, Team Daniels took a major shot across the bow today from Rush Limbaugh, who issued a sneering commentary making it clear he interprets terms like “serious” and “gravitas” as applied to Daniels much as I figured social conservatives might do: as “boring” and “moderate.”

In a recent profile of the proto-candidacy of Mitch Daniels, I predicted that the Very Serious People in Washington would begin caterwauling for his entry into the race.
This does indeed seem to be happening, if the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza is listening to the appropriate Republican Beltway poohbahs, which he is certainly well-positioned to do. Last week’s minor-candidate-dominated South Carolina debate seems to have been the tipping point for Very Serious People who want Mitch to get in to stop all the crazy social-issues pandering:

The GOP presidential race has been defined by relative chaos — and weakness — among the field.
That was reinforced at last week’s first presidential debate of the season, which, aside from former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, featured a handful of long shots and no-shots debating such topics as the legalization of marijuana — and even heroin.
Daniels is regarded (and regards himself) as a candidate of considerable gravity, willing to focus on making tough choices about the nation’s financial future even if that conversation is politically unpopular. (At a February speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, he said that “purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers.”)
A Daniels candidacy probably would be taken as a sign that the games are over for the Republican Party, that it is time to buckle down and organize to beat President Obama.
“He will turn a race that is about less serious politics into a race about more serious policy,” argued Alex Castellanos, a Republican media consultant who is not aligned with any candidate heading into 2012. “Daniels is the adult in the room saying the party is over, it’s time to clean house. That contrast in maturity is how a Republican beats Obama.”

Now if I were a social conservative activist, I’d be pretty annoyed with all the veiled suggestions from Washington that my set of issues was for children, while fiscal stuff was for adults. This is why Daniels’ repeated call for a “truce” on cultural issues drives people who get up in the morning to fight abortion or gay marriage absolutely nuts.
But totally aside from the intra-Republican factional implications of the lobbying for Daniels, you have to question the planted axiom that Very Serious Talk about debts and deficits is the obvious way to beat Barack Obama. Daniels is hard to distinguish from Paul Ryan in terms of his thinking about how to deal with what he calls the “red menace” of debt, particularly in his enthusiasm for a massive restructuring of Medicare. This is not popular, and is likely to become much less popular as people begin to understand that “premium support” in the context of Medicare would mean a fixed and limited federal contribution to help pay for ever-more-expensive and hard-to-get private health insurance policies.
I strongly suspect that Very Serious People love Daniels because they think he is serious enough not only to keep the social-issues fanatics in the closet, but to find a way to guide his party in the direction of a deficit reduction compromise involving tax increases, as all “adults” understand will be necessary.
But if Daniels were indeed that sort of magical figure, the last thing on earth you’d want him to do is to run for president. The GOP presidential nominating contest in 2012 is absolutely certain to involve a long series of activist-imposed litmus tests. For Daniels, number one will be renouncing the “truce.” And number two will be an irrevocable, tattooed-on-the-skin promise to never, ever consider tax increases, even if the world is crumbling. That’s just the way the game is played in the GOP, particularly ever since George H.W. Bush agreed to a bipartisan deficit reduction package in 1990.
If Daniels does decide to run (and he could make an announcement as early as this week), the Gravitas Lobby will fill the air with as much excitement as it is possible to convey with respect to such a sober and adult proposition. Whether this excitement is communicable to the actual nomination campaign trail, where the people that Pew calls Staunch Conservatives are totally in charge, is a truly serious question.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
For Mike Huckabee, the decision of whether to run for president has got to be excruciating. On the one hand, he’s done quite well in both primary and general election polls without lifting a finger. He has a very clear path to the nomination based on his demonstrated strengths with socially conservative voters in 2008. And the GOP has moved in his ideological direction since then, making his “insurgent” persona far more of an asset than a liability. On the other hand, he’s got more than a few powerful enemies in elite Republican circles and he’s doing what he seems to love most–hosting a regular television show–while making real money for the first time in his life. He’s also young enough, at fifty-five, to wait for 2016 to run.
In the meantime, Huckabee is doing his very best to keep his options open: putting together a organization-in-waiting, quashing rumors that he’s definitely taking a pass on 2012, staying in the limelight with the occasional controversial statement, and getting around the country–and the world–with some regularity. He’s even reported to be meeting with potential 2012 fundraisers, thereby addressing his greatest weakness in 2008. But while there’s an element of truth to his claim that residual name identification from 2008 gives him more time to decide than a relative unknown candidate like Mitch Daniels–not to mention more free media opportunities from his perch at Fox–his base of conservative activists is getting restless, and Fox itself is said to have given him a May 31 deadline to get off the fence or give up his show. Several members of the 2008 team that engineered Huckabee’s shocking upset over Mitt Romney in Iowa have already taken their talents elsewhere, and his reputation as an outsider who substitutes hard work for deep pockets is taking a hit, particularly when compared to Tim Pawlenty, who has been relentlessly organizing in the First-In-the-Nation-Caucus state. In other words, Huck will soon be forced to make up his mind, and if he does jump into the race by early summer, the question remains: What are his actual chances?
Huckabee’s biggest advantage is a crystal clear path to victory in the Republican primary, based on the simple fact that two of the first four states in the nominating process, Iowa and South Carolina, are among his national strongholds. Early polls of likely caucus-goers in Iowa show him running first or second, despite an extended absence from the state. His unique position of authority among conservative evangelicals is critical given that group’s unusual importance in the caucuses. And some key members of his 2008 Iowa team, notably co-chairman Bob Vander Plaats, are still on the sidelines, ready for duty, while others are working for candidates who might be considered Huckabee stalking horses (e.g., Judge Roy Moore, whose main Iowa supporter is Huck’s other 2008 Iowa co-chair, Danny Carroll).
Huck should also favor his odds in South Carolina, where he came very close in 2008 to derailing John McCain’s nomination–and might well have won the state if he hadn’t earlier taken a flier on an expensive and futile excursion into Michigan. It also didn’t help that fellow-southerner Fred Thompson made a last ditch effort in the Palmetto State, taking away votes that might have otherwise gone to the Arkansan. But this time around, with Haley Barbour out of the race, Huck would be the natural 2012 front-runner in the state, particularly if he had already rained on Tim Pawlenty’s parade in Iowa and made a decent showing in New Hampshire. And finally, even if the state of Florida fails to move its primary up into February, Florida’s Republicans are likely to hold a relatively early and critical contest, perhaps immediately after South Carolina. This should also favor Huckabee, who is building a very large house near Pensacola, is now registered to vote in Florida, and whose best-known 2008 backer in the Sunshine State was a guy named Marco Rubio, now everyone’s early favorite for the 2012 vice presidential nomination.
But if Huckabee can chart a credible path to victory, he’s also got more than a few roadblocks he’ll have to contend with along the way. The biggest of such hurdles is the hostility he invariably arouses in elite Republican circles. Huckabee first ran afoul of these groups in 2008, when he refused to defend George W. Bush’s handling of the economy and sounded the occasional populist notes despite his fairly orthodox fiscal positions. His record of budget compromises–including some that involved tax increases–with Democratic legislators in Arkansas was enough to arouse the formidable antipathy of Grover Norquist, who has made enforcing no-tax-increase pledges on state-level Republicans a top priority in the last decade. More generally, a war of words between Huckabee, several major conservative talk-show hosts (including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck), and the Club for Growth faction (which Huck once termed the “Club for Greed”) has left some very bad blood that refuses to go away. The result is that if Huckabee runs in 2012, there will be a bottomless well of money and air-time available for attacks on his Arkansas record–and not just the tax increases he approved, but his exercise of executive clemency powers and the ethics allegations made against him as governor.
A second, and closely related obstacle, is Huckabee’s less-than stellar ability to raise money. His 2008 campaign ultimately raised a total of $16 million (compared to $113 million raised by Mitt Romney), with nearly half of that coming in after he won Iowa. By comparison, one of his main rivals for the affections of Iowa’s social conservatives, Michele Bachmann, raised $13 million in 2010 for a House race. Huckabee appears to be one of those politicians who either hates asking for money or is simply no good at it, and unless he can prove himself adept at the kind of grassroots fundraising methods pioneered by the Obama campaign in 2008, this could be an immediate disqualifier.
The final question dogging a potential Huckabee campaign is whether his love affair with the mainstream media–something that was absolutely crucial for him the last time around–will survive continued exposure to his world view. In the absence of impressive fundraising numbers, Huckabee’s extensive and largely favorable “earned media” in 2008 was a very important asset to his campaign. Like John McCain back in 2000, Huckabee got fawning press through exceptional affability and total accessibility, with some added bonus points for being genuinely funny and playing a passable bass guitar. Perhaps because he was considered such a good-natured long shot, few of Huckabee’s media friends took much of a serious look at exactly why this pleasant and rational-seeming man got most of his actual support from hard-core anti-abortionists and quasi-theocrats–nor did they question whether it was a good idea for an ordained Southern Baptist minister to run for president in the first place. But that could all change with a second, and more seriously regarded, Huckabee campaign. His poorly received remarks during a recent trip to Israel–in which he disparaged a two-state solution and highlighted his belief there is actually no such thing as a Palestinian–could just be just the beginning of a rude awakening for a press corps that’s been thus far taken by the man’s considerable charm.
So it’s by no means surprising that Mike Huckabee is at best ambivalent about putting himself and his family through the ordeal of another presidential race. It is, however, a portentous decision not just for the Huckabees but for the entire Republican field. The major candidate most affected by which way it turns out is probably Tim Pawlenty, the smart-money frontrunner who seems to be staking everything on Iowa and who would likely struggle to become the electable conservative alternative to Mitt Romney in southern primaries if a rival like Huck is around. And ironically, it’s Romney, whose presidential ambitions were fatally damaged by Huckabee in 2008, who might ultimately benefit most from another campaign by his old rival–if that campaign helped to knock out more formidable candidates like T-Paw. But who knows? The man is a true phenomenon, and in a contest of personalities between Huckabee and Romney–or really, between Huckabee and anyone in the field–it would really be no contest at all.

The Pew Research Center has released one of its periodic typology studies (the last was in 2005), and you can expect it to have considerable influence on the language of political analysis in the immediate future. Here’s how the report authors sum up what’s happened to the “clustering” of Americans into relatively coherent groups in the last five or six years:

With the economy still struggling and the nation involved in multiple military operations overseas, the public’s political mood is fractious. In this environment, many political attitudes have become more doctrinaire at both ends of the ideological spectrum, a polarization that reflects the current atmosphere in Washington.
Yet at the same time, a growing number of Americans are choosing not to identify with either political party, and the center of the political spectrum is increasingly diverse. Rather than being moderate, many of these independents hold extremely strong ideological positions on issues such as the role of government, immigration, the environment and social issues. But they combine these views in ways that defy liberal or conservative orthodoxy.
For political leaders in both parties, the challenge is not only one of appeasing ideological and moderate “wings” within their coalitions, but rather holding together remarkably disparate groups, many of whom have strong disagreements with core principles that have defined each party’s political character in recent years.

More specifically, the new typology presents two Republican clusters (Staunch Conservatives and Main Street Republicans); three groups of Democrats (Solid Liberals, New Coalition Democrats, and Hard-Pressed Democrats); and three groups of independents (Libertarians, Disaffecteds, and Post-Moderns).
In general, Pew’s analysis reinforces the generally-accepted belief that Republicans enjoy more ideological coherence than Democrats, but there are some pretty striking contradictions between the views of the Staunch Conservatives who dominate GOP politics these days and at least one of the GOP-leaning indie groups, the Disaffecteds, who support more government help for the needy and strongly dislike corporations. The three Democratic “types” and the Democratic-leaning indie group the Post-Moderns have significant differences of opinion on the importance of the environment and attitudes towards immigrants.
You can wander around in the data presented in this report for days. But the important thing to remember with any political typology is that particular groups should not become obsessive objects of attention. For Democrats, “capturing” indie groups from the GOP, for example, doesn’t matter a bit more than boosting rates among Democratic groups or shaving votes from the Republican margins among GOP groups. Indeed, the Pew report shows that one of the biggest pro-Republican swings between 2008 and 2010 was among Main Street Republicans, whose modest but significant support levels for Obama in 2008 all but vanished two years later.
A vote’s a vote, in other words, but it is very helpful to know how combinations of issues and demographic factors combine to shape the electorate.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It’s hard to recall an essay with which I am more loath to disagree than Sean Wilentz’s May 2 piece for TNR online, which expressed the hope that the killing of Osama bin Laden could spell the end of a “long cycle of outrageous attacks, innuendo, and conspiracy-mongering, the politicized by-product of the war on terror.” Believe me, if this turns out to be true, no one would be happier about it than this confirmed Democratic “centrist.” But alas, the current craziness of our politics, expressed on both sides of the political spectrum–predominantly, however, in a mood of destructive rage on the Right–is attributable to many factors beyond the war on terror or the traumatic events of September 11. Therefore, even if you believe Osama’s destruction signals the imminent end of “the war on terror”–a highly debatable proposition in itself–a host of other incendiary factors show absolutely no sign of going away.
Wilentz attributes the bulk of the current escalation in craziness to the way in which conservative operatives like Karl Rove exploited fears stemming from “the war on terror” for political purposes in the wake of September 11. But much of the passion and paranoia on the Right stems from homegrown issues as old as the failed Goldwater presidential candidacy of 1964: the culture wars against alleged cultural relativism and decay; hostility towards the entire corpus of the New Deal and Great Society, suspicion of “Eastern elites” in both major parties, and nationalist rejection of multilateralism and “limited wars” in foreign policy–all of which sound quite familiar today. Indeed, those who call themselves “movement conservatives” (oldsters remember when “The Movement” carried very different connotations) have continued the same struggle ever since, and now consider themselves on the brink of final victory. They are not about to suddenly devolve into reasonable-sounding, compromise-seeking moderates at this late date. More specifically, a number of strains of paranoia in contemporary conservative politics have little or nothing to do with September 11, but they virtually guarantee the continuation of a savage political climate.
One of the most powerful wellsprings of anti-government extremism is the often-ignored but indefatigable anti-abortion movement. It’s important to remember that this significant faction in today’s Republican Party has millions of adherents who believe, to one extent or another, that America is morally equivalent to Nazi Germany in its tolerance and encouragement of a “Holocaust” that has killed millions of unborn children. These beliefs, in turn, stoke fears that the country’s next plausible step is the implementation of a program of government-backed euthanasia–the probable source of the “death panels” meme about health reform advanced by two of the most prominent anti-choice pols in America, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin. One does not behave “civilly” towards mass murderers; one tries to expose their nefarious designs by hook or by crook.
Closely related to this first group is a parallel and overlapping body of politicized culture warriors who emerged when much of the conservative evangelical leadership abandoned its traditional church-state separatist principles on grounds that “a secular humanist” society had made the free practice of Christianity impossible. In this view, those who advocate, say, marriage equality for gays and lesbians are not civil rights advocates, but persecutors of those determined to obey God’s revealed will, or perhaps in an unholy alliance with Muslim proponents of Sharia law.
Another equally potent source of political paranoia comes from a group of righteous “tax rebels” who view the collection of taxes by the federal government as a form of sanctioned thievery. Since the 1970s, American politics has been periodically swept by wave after wave of tax revolts supported by people who do not simply think federal, state or local tax rates are too high, but that they are being subjected to an immoral redistribution of income benefitting unworthy people, most often the poor and minorities. This group’s anger at “looters” has often expressed itself in conspiracy theories about alliances between parasitical elites and the underclass, a staple of “producerist” protests throughout American history and in other countries as well. And more recently, it has manifested itself in panicked characterizations of modest proposals by the Obama administration–from imposing tighter regulations of the insurance and financial markets to returning the personal income tax to the pre-Bush levels of the 1990s–as part of a far-reaching socialist plot on the part of the president with the aim of destroying capitalism.
Finally, when grassroots paranoia proves insufficient, there is now a professional class of hate-mongers ready and willing to fan the flames. While the smear campaigns against war heroes like Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator from Georgia, and presidential nominee John Kerry might have gotten some of their juice from the “war on terror,” the iron conviction that negative campaigning almost always works has been drummed into a generation of political professionals of every persuasion. Moreover, outrageous politics has been proven to make a lot of money for its purveyors, from direct-mail-genius turned strategist Karl Rove to the many superstars like Glenn Beck created by the Murdoch media empire. And the U.S. Supreme Court’s war on campaign finance regulations has only made it easier than ever for wealthy interests to conduct surgical strikes of immense destructiveness on political enemies, with little or no accountability.
Viewed from this broader perspective, the incidents that strike Wilentz as emblems of a terror-driven political era seem more like examples of a less easily defined series of audacities committed during roughly the same period of time, from the Brooks Brothers Riot during the 2000 Florida recount, to the Terry Schiavo saga, to the viral spread of Santelli’s Rant, to the Tea Party protests of 2009 and 2010. Indeed, it’s also worth remembering that September 11 wasn’t the only traumatic event in recent American history: We’ve seen the first impeachment of a president since 1868, the first seriously disputed presidential election result since 1876, the largest changes in mass media since the 1950s, and of course, the worst financial crisis since 1929. And, given the ideological conformity of today’s Republican Party that has all but removed the internal checks on extremist rhetoric and tactics characteristic of “big tent” political parties, it is only natural to expect such paranoid politics to keep perpetuating themselves.
It would be wonderful if we could soon look back on the politics of the early twenty-first century as a bout of temporary madness touched off by a madman in Afghanistan, and ended by a merciful act of violence in Pakistan. But I’m afraid the craziness will be with us for a while.

In news coverage and commentary on the political fallout of the killing of Osama bin Laden, there’s been something of a sense of rage at the idiots who think this event will re-elect Barack Obama in 2012. But actually, I’ve yet to hear anyone embrace this straw man. As Nate Silver has pointed out, the commentariat may be erring in the opposite direction of dismissing this development as meaningless. And that’s not likely at all, based on the historical record:

Historically, the correlation between a president’s overall approval rating and his rating on foreign affairs is stronger than is the case with his rating on the economy. If you place the two variables into a regression equation, it finds that foreign affairs is the more important component, although both are clearly statistically significant.

Many aspects of a president’s job performance, values and priorities, character traits, and communications skills combine to influence public perceptions, and public opinion research varies in its capacity to measure it all. Single-bullet theories of what decides presidential elections, and what can be disregarded as meaningless noise, are always seductive, but usually wrong.

The first of what will almost certainly be a series of efforts to quickly measure the public opinion “bounce” the president receives from the successful operation to remove Osama bin Laden from this world is now out, from the highly reputable duo of the Pew Research Center and the Washington Post.
And it’s about what you would expect: a nine-point jump in the president’s job approval ratings since April polls, and his highest “favorable” rating (56%) since 2009. His positive numbers among indies went up 10%, to 52%.
The bounce will fade, of course, over time unless it is supplemented by other good news or favorable impressions. But it’s something for potential 2012 candidates like Mitch Daniels and Mike Huckabee to think about while they sit on the fence.