Launching a stout campaign for Most Unlikely Analogy of the Year, Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics provides an extended meditation on Fred Thompson as the Bob Dylan of the 2008 presidential campaign.
The idea is that all of Fred’s rather, you know, counter-intuitive conduct on the campaign trail doesn’t indicate a lazy or irresolute geezer who expects the nomination to fall into his lap, but instead a brave rule-breaker who, like Bob Dylan going electric in the mid-60s, may be redefining the genre.
In Cost’s defense, he’s apparently doing a post next week that addresses the down side of ol’ Fred’s campaign style. The current column is entitled “Thompson Goes Electric.” Maybe he’ll call the next one “You Ain’t Going Nowhere.”

In a final note on Family Research Council’s “Value Voters” Summit, Sarah Posner of The American Prospect‘s FundamentaList has this interesting reminder on Mike Huckabee’s performance at the event last year:

At last year’s Values Voter Summit, Huckabee got a pretty stony reception for suggesting that the Christian right work with feminists to combat porn, with gay rights activists to combat AIDS, and with unions to make better workplaces. But this time he came back with all the venom — and stock humor — that sells to the FRC audience. Starting with a joke about the Nobel committee needing to count more chads before finalizing Gore’s prize, Huckabee went on to call for sealing the border to stop illegal immigrants, fighting “Islamofascism,” ending “the holocaust of liberalized abortion,” and preserving “the holy word of God as it relates to the definition of marriage.”

Mike Huckabee may be renowned for the healthy eating tips associated with his own significant weight loss. But when it comes to wowing right-wing audiences, he’s figuring out that a strict diet of red meat is the key to adding political muscle.

A couple of interesting morning reads focus on the Democratic presidential field. The Washington Post, as part of its occasional “Gurus” series, has a feature by Chris Cillizza on Edwards consultant Joe Trippi, with a rather provocative title: “The Dean-ing of Edwards.” The main point of the piece is that Trippi’s influence is attributable to a kindred-spirits relationship he enjoys with Elizabeth Edwards.
And over at the Wall Street Journal, an article billed as being about the hope dark horses draw from the retail politics of Iowa turns out to focus almost exclusively on Joe Biden, though it does mention that Chris Dodd recently moved his family to the state.
Oddly, enough, the piece doesn’t mention one of Biden’s hidden advantages: he campaigned in Iowa in 1988, before his candidacy folded due to a plagiarism flap. Too bad for him he didn’t retain two of his 1988 Iowa supporters: former governor Tom Vilsack and his wife, Christie, who are key cogs in Hillary Clinton’s Iowa campaign this year.

GOPers continue to dominate the political news after a candidate debate in Florida yesterday. Noam Scheiber has a good analysis, which focuses on candidates’ efforts to pursue their own strategies rather than “winners” and “losers” handicapping. Ryan Lizza does a big profile on Mitt Romney for The New Yorker, and stresses the Mittster’s experience as a management consultant as a source of his strengths and weaknesses.
Meanwhile, Robert Novak probably raised some right-wing eyebrows this morning by penning a valentine to Rudy Giuliani, via an upbeat description of his base of support among conservatives in California. And Fareed Zakaria reviews the largely fact-free case conservatives have been making for a preemptive war against Iran, which requires, among other things, a sunny retroactive take on the “rationality” of Stalin and Mao.

E.J. Dionne has a nice wrap-up of the buzz coming out of Tuesday’s special congressional election in Massachussets, in which Democrat Niki Tsongas won a less-than-overwhelming victory over Republican Jim Ogonowski.
The “surprise issue” of the election, says Dionne, was illegal immigration, with Ogonowski getting some traction from attacks on Tsongas for supporting in-state college tuition rates for the children of illegals. More generally, Ogonowski’s efforts to separate himself from Bush and congressional Republicans by posing as an anti-Washington “outsider” are likely to provide a template for Republican challengers next year.
But in the end, Dionne suggests, the Republican could not distance himself from the profoundly unpopular Iraq War and Bush’s S-CHIP veto, and those two issues gave Tsongas her crucial advantage.

So here’s the best evidence yet of the much-discussed possibility that Mike Huckabee could, despite his money problems, emerge as a viable Republican presidential candidate: he’s getting blasted from the Right. The legendary hard-right activist and direct mail wizard Richard Viguerie has issued a fatwah attacking Huckabee as a “wishy-washy Republican”‘ who is unreliable on both economic and cultural issues.
This is interesting in part because Viguerie might have been expected to Like Mike. Viguerie published an article in The Washington Monthly a year ago that advocated a Republican defeat in 2006 as the best possible tonic for the conservative troops that had been ignored in the Bush-DeLay Washington Republican Establishment. As the only presidential candidate (this side of Ron Paul) willing and able to challenge that establishment, Huckabee has some real conservative insurgent street cred. But his sins of omission and commission as Governor of Arkansas–particularly his “compassionate conservative” tendencies–apparently make him unacceptable, to Viguerie at least, as a vehicle for a resurgance of the heartland Right.

Confused by all the numbers about presidential candidate fundraising? Check out this AP summary (discovered via Trapper John at DailyKos), which breaks it all down nicely for all the candidates in both parties.

In a small but significant sign of progress on the intraparty unity front, Markos Moulitsas hands a brief attaboy to DLC chairman Harold Ford for a recent pattern of combative, pro-Democratic appearances on Hannity and Colmes. So, too, at greater length, does the Fox monitoring site News Hounds.

Virginia’s steady transformation from the reddest of red states to one leaning blue has been evident for a good while. But the National Committee for an Effective Congress, in an installment of its “Election Insider” series, has supplied a good summary of the political and demographic trends that have boosted Democratic prospects there, with updates on next year’s congressional campaigns in Virginia.

In case you somehow missed it, Al Gore was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with the UN’s Integovernmental Panel on Climate Change (a consortium of about 3,000 scientists).
Given the timing, like it or not, the Nobel (along with the previous Oscar and Emmy) will create an intense moment of speculation about the possibility that Gore will now jump into or be dragged into the 2008 presidential race. But Chris Bowers today makes a cautionary point that goes beyond the usual efforts to divine Gore’s intentions or handicap his current standing: how seemly would it be for anyone to go quickly from Laureate to Candidate?

The problem here is that if Gore is going to run, any formal campaign announcement would have to take place within mere days of the Nobel announcement, as well as before the actual reception of the award. I just don’t think there is anyway to gracefully pull that off, from a social manners perspective. In that sense, all of the Nobel speculation might have hit the final nails in the coffin of any hope that Gore might run in 2008. How does one say something like this and not seem a little foolish: “the secret Norwegian elite thinks I am the best in the world–now you should too!” How does winning a Nobel Prize help launch a political campaign?

Good question, though one that from all the available evidence, Al Gore won’t have to confront.