Just a few weeks ago Mike Huckabee was touting how his campaign is "not about high-paid consultants" but about "ordinary people who've come from as far away as Oregon and Florida to get to Iowa, many of whom are coming up there from Southern states where they're having to buy a coat so they can survive going door-to-door, answering phones, getting out material and signing up people for the caucuses." He met with Ronald Reagan's 1984 chief campaign strategist, Ed Rollins, who reminisced, Huckabee told the Associated Press, that "'we were so broke, we were sleeping three to a room in New Hampshire and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.'" Now, Huckabee said of Reagan, "he's the icon, and everybody wraps themselves up in Ronald Reagan . . . . he's the gold standard of the Republican Party. He was anything but that, prior to his election and his term." This afternoon Huckabee is expected to announce that Rollins will be his national campaign chair. No word on whether they are going...

The Romney campaign is angry about Mike Huckabee 's musing in the Chavets piece, "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?" Many evangelicals, as I alluded to in this week's FundamentaList , believe that such a heretical filial relationship is a bedrock of the Mormon faith. Romney hasn't addressed that theological question, but the Mormon church denies it. The Huckabee campaign says "the full context of the exchange makes it clear that Governor Huckabee was illustrating his unwillingness to answer questions about Mormonism and to avoid addressing theological questions during this campaign." So the question remains why, if he admittedly doesn't know much about Mormonism, why he would let that little nugget of apostasy -- so sensational for Mormonism's evangelical critics -- drop at all. --Sarah Posner