I HEART HUCKABEE. I'm a little late to this, but Mike Huckabee's widely noted line referencing the checkered personal lives of some of his GOP rivals (�If Republicans in this election vote in such a way as to say a candidate�s personal life and personal conduct in office doesn�t matter, then a lot of Christian evangelical leaders owe Bill Clinton a public apology�) is, in addition to being amusing, also a reminder: The Republicans haven't really started attacking each other yet. We're of course nowhere near the time of the cycle that, two elections ago, Team Bush went loco on John McCain in South Carolina, but well before that there are presumably going to be some elbows thrown and charges lobbed at one another. I state the obvious merely to underscore that the feasibility of the party's front-runners consisting of a very recently pro-choice Mormon, a pro-choice, gay-friendly, pro-immigration, anti-gun two-time divorcee, and an elderly, sick, very recently near-Democrat has yet to be put to the test by an actual, aggressive, knock-down campaign of any sort. It's genuinely hard to imagine such campaigning not taking its toll on the front-runners, though it would have been hard for me to imagine the GOP backing this lineup this late in the game a year ago anyway, so I can't really pretend to know.
--Sam Rosenfeld
