I have a post up at Greg‘s place exploring whether or not Rick Santorum‘s remarks about sharia presage the “stealth jihad” conspiracy theory becoming an element of the GOP presidential primary. Steve M. points to a Gallup poll that shows the most some of the party’s committed culture warriors, Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Santorum himself with the highest “Positive Intensity Scores,” a measurement based on “the difference between strongly favorable and strongly unfavorable opinions among those who are familiar with him or her.” Basically this tells you how much GOP primary voters actually like their potential candidates.
George Will recently wrote an admirable column dissing Huckabee and Gingrich for latching onto the “Kenyan anti-Colonialism” thing, but in it he also identified the only “five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon – Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.”
Note that none of Will’s more policy oriented picks even cracked the top five candidates in Gallup’s measurement of positive intensity scores, although Romney and Pawlenty are close behind Santorum.
