I just watched the Des Moines Register Republican candidate debate, and learned little or nothing, other than that Alan Keyes is running for president again (guess I vaguely knew that, though the Register‘s decision to put him up on the debate stage, even as it excludes Dennis Kucinich from tomorrow’s Democratic debate, is just perverse).
I did find it a bit interesting that the first couple of questions, which focused on fiscal policy, elicited an immediate pledge from Giuliani to repeal corporate taxes, and two separate remarks by Thompson fretting about limitations on defense spending. That’s in case anyone was wondering if the candidates are still appealing to a relatively small sliver of the electorate. It was also illuminating to learn that after all sorts of gloomy talk about the fiscal crisis, only one candidate could bring himself to talk about asking Americans to sacrifice anything at all (and that was Thompson, who of course wants Americans to give up some Social Security and Medicare benefits).
All in all though, this debate was a snore-athon, and I don’t just say that because I’m a Democrat. Looking over at National Review’s The Corner, the boredom level was palpable, despite a general feeling that NR’s newly anointed favorite, Mitt Romney, was the winner. There was also a lot of carping about the debate’s sole moderator, Register editor Carolyn Washburn, who struggled to control the contestants and sounded annoyed much of the time. Best of all was this comment from Kathryn Jean Lopez:

What I don’t get is this is IOWA. Wouldn’t the editor of the DMR be a total political junkie? Wouldn’t she live for this? She looks and sounds bored out of her mind.

Welcome to today’s corporate media, K-Lo: Washburn is a Gannett careerist who was appointed to the Register editorship in September 2005, not an Iowan.

As the participation of actual voters in the 2008 presidential contest grows nigh, polls are rolling out at an ever-increasing pace (here, here, and here, just yesterday).
Put ’em all in a bag, shake ’em up, roll ’em back out, and the Big Picture becomes pretty clear:
On the Democratic side, Iowa remains skin-tight among the Big Three of Clinton, Obama and Edwards, and now NH and SC are tightening up as well. Whoever wins Iowa will almost certainly become the instant front-runner in the other two contests. And with no really clear front-runner anymore, “exceeding expectations” in IA may not be much of a factor. It’s all about win, place or show, and show is unlikely to cut it. Moreover, unless something really strange happens, the non-Big-Three candidates will all struggle to survive Iowa.
On the Republican side, there are now four candidates with a plausible route to the nomination: Huckabee, Giuliani, Romney and McCain. Huck’s got a growing lead in IA and national momentum; Romney’s got a sizable lead in NH and unlimited money; Rudy’s got February 5 plus the possibility that Huckabee and Romney will fatally wound each other; and McCain’s got enduring support in NH and, well, a growing sense that nobody else is broadly acceptable.
It’s going to be a wild ride beginning on January 3.

My last post suggested that Mike Huckabee’s surge is national support is a testament to the power of Iowa, showing that even perceptions of Iowa success have a significant impact on voters elsewhere, in advance of the Caucuses.
At TNR’s The Plank, Jason Zengerle agrees with my Iowa Pre-Bounce hypothesis, but wonders if Huckabee’s high expectations will diminish his actual Iowa Bounce, assuming he wins by a smaller margin than appears likely today. It’s a good if very hypothetical question, though I personally suspect a “Huckabee Wins Iowa” headline, complete with coverage of how he slew the Romney Money Machine, would be more important than the margin of victory.
But via Chris Bowers, there’s an alternative explanation of the National Huckabee Surge I missed, and while its utilization and efficacy is hard to measure, it’s definitely worth noting: Huckabee has access to Randy Brinson’s vast email list.
Brinson, the Alabamian who founded Redeem the Vote, is probably the most under-appreciated power broker in the Christian Right, though Amy Sullivan wrote a profile of Brinson last year, when he was flirting with bipartisanship, probably as a reminder to the GOP about the perils of taking conservative evangelicals for granted. As Sullivan noted, Brinson played a big role in turning out the evangelical vote for Bush in 2004, and now he’s firmly in Huckabee’s camp, along with his email list, which reportedly has an astounding 71 million names.
It’s not clear exactly how much Huckabee has used this list, but it’s certainly a good way for him to spread the glad tidings of his Iowa surge.

Two big new national polls, by CNN, and by CBS/New York Times, show Mike Huckabee now challenging Rudy Giuliani for the national GOP lead.
Think about that for a minute. Huckabee has run no broadcast ads outside Iowa, and precious few even there. He’s barely campaigned outside Iowa. So aside from his televised debate appearances, and whatever random direct mail a GOP voter may have received, his national support levels pretty much have to be based on news coverage of his campaign in Iowa.
There’s a quadrennial debate in political circles about the size and nature of the “Iowa Bounce,” the later benefit a candidate receives for winning or exceeding expectations in Iowa. But what we seem to be witnessing here is an Iowa “Pre-Bounce,” based on perceptions that a candidate’s doing well in Iowa. Stands to reason that the actual, post-Caucus “Bounce” should be even bigger, eh?
And that, my friends, should be as disturbing to the campaign of Rudy “I Can Ignore Iowa” Giuliani as Huckabee’s sudden second-place national standing.

Last month I did a post about the “Left’s Obama Problem,” noting that many progressive bloggers and activists were experiencing cognitive dissonance over perceptions of Obama’s generally sympatico policy proposals, as opposed to his habit of framing his message in a way that seemed to court Republicans and Centrists while dissing the Left itself.
The post earned me a lecture from Matt Stoller, who somehow perceived it as an attack on the Left, and who took umbrage at the idea that progressive ambivalence about Obama might have something to do with matters other than pure policy disagreements.
Since I strongly suspect that Stoller objected less to the message of my post than to the messenger (yours truly), I should report that his OpenLeft colleague, the estimable Chris Bowers, has posted a meditation on Obama today that makes all the points I was trying to make, much more eloquently, with more recent examples, and presumably, with much greater credibility. Check it out.

Via Steve Benen, today’s big thought experiment in the blogosphere comes from Ross Douthat’s observation (which crystallizes a very common feeling) that none of the Republican presidential candidates can win the nomination, since all of them have “near-disqualifying weaknesses.”
If anything, this phenomenon has intensified of late. Giuliani’s social-issues problems and marital record have been massively compounded by a sex-corruption scandal that is not going to go away. The disrespect establishment conservatives had for Mike Huckabee has turned into virulent hostility, and you best believe his own scandal, involving rapist/murderer Wayne DuMond, is going to get pushed into the faces of every GOP voter in IA and NH. The immigration issue keeps getting bigger in GOP circles, making John McCain not just an unacceptable nominee, but an arch-villain. And all the scuttlebutt about Fred Thompson’s lazy streak has been abundantly confirmed by his behavior on the campaign trail; he’s emphatically flunked his candidate audition.
I don’t buy Douthat’s assertion that Romney’s ideological background is as disqualifying a problem as those suffered by his rivals, but do think Romney’s poorly positioned himself for the long haul by building expectations for an early-state sweep. Ironically, the major GOP candidate with the fewest weaknesses could be the first knocked out if he loses both IA and NH.
In any event, the GOP candidate landscape is one that might well invite a strong sense of buyer’s remorse after someone inevitably moves into a strong overall lead. But there are two obstacles to that kind of development. The first, quite obviously, is the compressed primary schedule, which provides relatively few late opportunities for effective guerilla warfare against a prohibitive favorite. And the second is that historically, Republicans don’t seem prone to buyer’s remorse, even if second thoughts might have been completely justified.
In this respect, the two parties have been starkly different. On the Democratic side, the ultimate nominee has undergone a terrible losing streak late in the primary season on several occasions (most clearly in 1976, 1980 and 1984). In other years–1972, 1988, and 1992–the all-but-acknowledged nominee had some late struggles against one surviving rival. And even in 2004, John Edwards threw a scare into John Kerry after the latter had supposedly all but wrapped up the nomination. Indeed, 2000 was the one year in which the Democratic front-runner in a genuinely contested nomination fight just didn’t lose much of anywhere.
Among Republicans, the only serious late challenge occurred in 1976, when Ronald Reagan made it all the way to the Convention, but in the unique circumstance of an appointed president facing the maximum hero of the conservative movement (ironically, the only other modern–i.e., primary era–example of any sort of delayed GOP challenge was in 1980, when George H.W. Bush won a couple of late primaries against Reagan). But by and large, and even in cases of front-runners who looked increasingly weak as general-election candidates, such as Bush 41 in 1992 and Dole in 1996, once the deal went down, GOPers stayed in line. And that was in the old, stretched out primary calendar that made quick kills more difficult.
So what will happen if a candidate emerges from February 5 with a giant delegate lead and a lot of baggage? Given the history, and the fact that any late challenger would probably be similarly handicapped, it’s a recipe for a weak nominee and a discouraged party.

A new Princeton Survey Research Associates poll of Iowa for Newsweek is going to get a lot of attention over the weekend. On the Republican side, it shows Mike Huckabee with an astounding 22-point (39-17) lead over Mitt Romney among likely Caucus-goers. The Democratic results are a lot less dramatic, though they confirm the general CW by showing Obama with a modest (35-29) lead over Clinton among likely Caucus-goers, with John Edwards fading a bit at 18%. Since the last Newsweek/Princeton poll was in late September, it doesn’t provide much in the way of trend tracking, though it’s interesting that Romney led Huckabee in the earlier poll 25-6. (Among Democrats in the September poll, HRC led with 31%, over Obama with 25% and Edwards with 21%).
It should be noted that the subsamples of likely caucus-goers in both parties is so small that the margin-of-error for those results is a very high 7%.
Still, the size of the Huckabee lead in this poll is going to create some interesting dynamics. The poll was conducted on December 5 and 6, but probably doesn’t reflect the media-masticated reaction to a couple of serious Huckabee stumbles, or to Romney’s Big Religion Speech. If the next Iowa poll out of the chute shows Romney ahead or very close, expect a lot of hype about the Romney Comeback.

As a long-time (since the mid-1980s) foot soldier in the uphill effort to get the United States to adopt a serious national service system, I was quite interested in Barack Obama’s Mount Vernon, Iowa speech earlier this week, in which he unveiled a comprehensive service proposal that would represent something between a major expansion and a quantum leap.
Among national service junkies, a distinction is frequently made between government-organized, compensated service, and public support for (typically uncompensated) voluntarism, with Republicans typically supporting the latter (e.g., Bush 41’s “Points of Light” initiative) but not fhe former. Among Democrats favoring some sort of public support for more serious, sustained and focused kinds of service, the main distinction is between those who view service as a relatively minor if valuable resource for dealing with national or community problems, and those who want service to become a quasi-universal experience for Americans, much like the military was for men prior to the abolition of the draft.
Obama’s proposal covers both compensated and uncompensated service; sustained as well as occasional service opportunities; and in its entiretly, moves in the direction of making service a “universal opportunity,” though not a legal obligation.
He’d double the size of the Peace Corps, and more than triple the size of AmeriCorps. (In this respect, the one candidate who outdoes him, and by a big margin, is Chris Dodd, who would expand AmeriCorps from the current 70,000 positions to one million).
At the same time, Obama would encourage voluntary community service among high school and college students, the former by making federal aid to school districts conditional on the creation of service programs, and the latter by linking an expansion of tax credits for college tuition to an obligation to perform 100 hours of service each year.
More interestingly, for those familiar with past national service struggles, Obama appears to favor shifting the College Work-Study program towards service positions rather than part-time employment at colleges, an idea that college administrators have bitterly opposed in the past.
Finally, Obama would create a Social Investment Fund aimed at supporting non-profit community service initiatives.
As noted above, only Dodd rivals Obama at this point in his commitment to national service. Clinton’s service agenda (as does Biden’s) aims at creating a West-Point-style Public Service Academy, though she’d also double the size of AmeriCorps stipends. Edwards, as in the past, is focused on making service a focus of K-12 education programs, and a condition for high school graduation. Richardson’s main initiative is to provide student loan forgiveness for various forms of service. If any of the Republican candidates have a significant service proposal, I can’t find it with a casual search (see this Time article for a quick review of the field on this subject).
It’s anyone’s guess whether service could become a significant issue in the campaign. Back in 1992, Bll Clinton’s campaign consultants weren’t real jazzed about his insistence on talking about national service, until they noticed it had become one of his biggest applause lines in the early primaries. Most Democratic candidates at some point get around to pointing out that George W. Bush lost a big opportunity after 9/11 when all he asked of Americans was to travel and shop. They should also make a point of explaining exactly what they would ask of Americans, and how they would support and organize those who respond to a call to service. Obama and Dodd are to be applauded for doing just that.

About a month ago I wrote about the phenomenon of African-American voters (specifically in SC) who don’t support Barack Obama because they are convinced white folks won’t vote for him, making him unelectable. I theorized that a strong Obama showing in the very pale states of IA and NH might take care of at least part of that problem.
Well, even a rise in the polls among white folks for Obama may be having an effect. As Kate Sheppard points out at TAPPED, the trend lines in the last two Rasmussen polls of SC Democrats show Obama narrowing a long-standing deficit to Clinton in that state, mainly because he now leads her among African-Americans by a 51-27 margin, after trailing her in that voter category 46-45 last month.
John Edwards, BTW, continues to be an afterthought among Democratic voters in his native state, pulling 13% in the latest Rasmussen poll as compared to 36% for Clinton and 34% for Obama.

I’m coming a bit late to the analysis of Mitt Romney’s Big Religion Speech, being in travel purgatory much of the day, but the reaction is almost as interesting as the speech.
Nobody much denies that it was well-staged and well-delivered, but that’s pretty much where the agreement ends.
Hugh Hewitt regards the speech as “on every level…a masterpiece,” a “brilliant exposition of the American political theory of faith and freedom,” and even says anyone who doesn’t agree with him about this “is not to be trusted as an analyst,” a remark whose arrogance matches the hyperbolic tone of his whole post.
Nobody else I read got quite that hyterical in praise, but quite a few folks thought Romney did a good job of threading the needle by avoiding some obvious pitfalls in addressing this subject. He didn’t do a purely anodyne and impersonal tribute to “faith” without any specificity. He didn’t try to make the case for Mormonism. He didn’t (God forbid for a Republican!) suggest that religion should be irrelevant in politics.
At least a couple of conservative commentators were a lot less enthusiastic. The Editors of National Review pointed out that Romney was just wrong in asserting that those who wanted him to justify his faith were guilty of violating the constitutional ban on religious tests for holding office. David Frum quickly catches the contradiction between Mitt’s aggressive confession of belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and his argument that specific Mormon beliefs about the nature of Jesus were somehow off-limits to discussion, and sugggested, accurately I think, that many conservative evangelicals wouldn’t buy it.
On the Left, there’s a lot of justifiable attention being paid to the obvious point that Romney again and again identified religious freedom in a way that excluded the irreligious. “Religion requires freedom, and freedom requires religion,” was one of the speech’s big catchphrases. Thomas Jefferson is surely rolling in his grave.
In that respect, Michelle Cottle at the Plank is very impressed, in a horrified sort of way, by Romney’s phrase, “The religion of Secularism” in deploring aggressive church-state separation. Actually, this has been a hoary meme of the Christian Right for decades, central to its claim that any limitation on government support for religion is itself a form of religious oppression by the Church of Secularism (BTW, Romney hit a lick on another such hoary convention, the identification of the anti-abortion movement with abolitionism and civil rights as essential faith-based crusades for human rights).
And that’s why of all the reactions I’ve read, Ezra Klein’s seems to get at the essential point most directly:

What Romney’s speech today seeks to do is construct a new “us versus them.” Where Huckabee was having some success making the us equal “Christians” and the them equal “Mormons,” Romney is making the us equal “believers” and the them equal “atheists.” The bet is that voters hate “secularists” more than they’re unsettled by Mormons, and that if Romney can set himself up as the foremost opponent of atheists in public life, that will be more important than precisely which version of Jesus he believes in, or how many planets he’ll be given to rule after his death. It’s a speech calling for tolerance, that hinges on a public display of intolerance. It’s classic Romney, and totally disgusting.

Before the speech, I suggested that Romney’s best bet politically was to do everything possible to establish solidarity between Mormons and conservative evangelicals as comrades in culture warfare with secularists and even “liberal” Christians. I also doubted he could pull that off. But it looks like he at least made an eloquent effort in that direction.