UPDATE, 1/25/08: This morning I received an e-mail from Wead, who advised me that his source, "usually reliable, called back to say 'yikes.'" Turns out Copeland pulled in only (only!) $111,000 in cash for Huckabee, with about a million in pledged donations. Wead has also updated his own post. In his new blog, former Bush family evangelical adviser Doug Wead reveals that last night, Mike Huckabee turned to televangelist and Grassley target Kenneth Copeland for some emergency fundraising, and Copeland delivered. Huckabee's campaign is floundering, Wead contends, because Huckabee failed to perform the essential leg work of meeting with influential evangelical leaders early in his campaign, even before he announced his candidacy, and, to paraphrase, by refusing to suck up to them. Wead, who described the outreach strategy he developed for both Bushes in detail to me in several interviews last year for God's Profits, contends that Huckabee may have delivered a self-inflicted wound to his campaign by declining overtures from prominent evangelicals. Being snubbed, he suggests of this strange-but-true look inside the evangelical movement, led some of these leaders to sign on to other campaigns. Wead also points out the fascinating division between Southern Baptists and Pentecostals, and notes that Huckabee's efforts to reach out to Pentecostals and charismatics (which I reported on here and here) helped him with Pentecostal and charismatic voters but hurt him with Southern Baptists in South Carolina. Pentecostals will vote for a Southern Baptist, but not the other way around, so some Southern Baptists apparently don't like Huckabee's claim to be a "Bapti-costal." Copeland was one of the leaders who did embrace Huckabee, and it appears that he may have more fundraising clout than Chuck Norris:
