Huckabee Marches On

He's surging in Iowa. It seems to me that the ultimate beneficiary of this is probably John McCain. If Huckabee can beat Romney -- or even come close -- I think it exposes Romney as weak and fatally flawed. Similarly, Fred Thompson seems to have already demonstrated an inability to put together a viable presidential campaign. That leaves Giuliani.

But I think it also leaves orthodox, McCain-hating conservatives a chance to reconsider whether they really think McCain's heterodoxies are worse than Giuliani's. And I don't think they are. Meanwhile, McCain would have a lot of Rudy-esque benefits as a general election candidate but without nearly as much in the way of a track record of scandal and much and bizarre crazy outbursts (though he has some of these too). In particular, for years now he's been the rational, "respectable," face of lunatic schemes of global American military domination. Ramesh Ponnuru's probably the smartest totally orthodox conservative out there and that's how he sees it and I think more will join him if Huckabee succeeds in bursting the Romney Bubble.