Some teasers from El Rushbo's show yesterday:

"Who is this campaign to be defining who is or who is not a conservative? I never heard of Huckabee in an important ideological way before this campaign got going, and believe me, I know who the conservatives are out there."
. . .
"the Huckabee campaign is apparently very thin-skinned."
. . .
"Again, when I raise questions about public reports regarding any candidate's record or position, what I am doing is comparing the record and position with our founding conservative principles. I am a conservative first. I am not a Republican first. It matters. When I raise questions about, say, about Governor Huckabee's positions on illegal aliens, tax increases, the release of hundreds of criminals via pardon and his rhetoric about our war effort, sorry, I'm trying to develop an understanding of the guy so I can determine for myself whether he is in fact the kind of conservative you and me want as our president."
. . .
"I mean, individuals who have fought immigration for years are not happy with his open borders positions as governor. They're just not. Anti-tax groups are unhappy with his tax increases when he was governor. Conservatives who helped defeat the Soviet Union under Ronaldus Magnus are troubled by his statements about our war effort and his desire to negotiate with Iran, for instance -- and it raised eyebrows among longtime school-choice advocates when the New Hampshire NEA endorsed Huckabee. They endorsed Hillary on the Democrat side; Huckabee on the right. The NEA is not interested in conservatives getting any kind of power anywhere. So it seems to me that it is Huckabee's record that is well suited for the axis of liberalism that he decries."
. . .
"I'm getting the sense that Mike Huckabee doesn't want to debate the issues, and he's relying on other things as a firewall to keep the issues from coming up. Folks, we have to force a debate on the issues, our issues. That has to happen. Conservatism is what unites a lot of us together, you and me in this audience"
. . .
"You know, McCain's starting to look better to me than this guy -- and that's saying something! More I see what Huckster's -- Huckabee's (laughs) record was in Arkansas, there's a lot of liberalism in there. There certainly isn't a lot of Reaganism in there, and I think that the Huckabee campaign is trying to dumb down conservatism to comport with his record,"
. . .
"What we have going on here is identity politics, I think, in a large swath of support for Governor Huckabee. Identity politics is what the left does. . . . Identity politics is: You vote for the Christian. You vote for the black. You vote for the woman. This is traditionally how the left looks at people. We, as conservatives, don't. . . . That's identity politics, or a little strain of it, and that's what's happening in the Huckabee race. The identity of Huckabee is: "Christian, Southern Baptist minister," and that identity is covering and is being translated by supporters as meaning whatever they want it to mean, as opposed to actually looking at how he's governed. Like the pastor who just called and said Huckabee is a light at the end of the tunnel. Pastor, the light at the end of the tunnel is the oncoming train, and you can't get off the track! That's the light at the end of the tunnel, and I think identity politics was a fundamental feature of the Perot campaign as well. . . .If you look at Huckabee in an identity sense and yet at the same time you really think illegal immigration is destroying this country, then your identity association with Huckabee as a Christian likely will make you overlook the fact that he's opposite your belief on illegal immigration. Jimmy Carter was a Southern Baptist and he ran on that and he tried to capitalize on that. He ran on the religious identity, too."
. . .
"If we can choose a candidate who is pro-life and anti-same-sex marriage and good on national security, illegal immigration, taxes, and spending, why shouldn't we choose that candidate?"

Folks . . . these comments by Rush could be race-changing.

See the "good parts" transcripts, links to other commentaries, and some analysis this post over at Iowans for Romney

Jeff Fuller

Timotheus: I wanted to say Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of the loyal MyManMitt contributors and readers. It has been a fantastic year. The caucuses are coming soon. Who needs the Rose Bowl when you have all of this election excitement? When you see your friends and family over the holiday, why don't you see if they aren't willing to contribute something for the last push at the beginning of the year. Romney is so close to victory. Every little bit makes a difference. We are almost there. Once again, Merry Christmas!

Its rare that I do this, but after Mitt Romney talked about his Dad marching with Martin Luther King Jr. recently, people were questioning whether that was true. Here is the entire text of a Politico article today:

Shirley Basore, 72, says she was sitting in the hairdresser’s chair in wealthy Grosse Pointe, Mich., back in 1963 when a rumpus started and she discovered that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and her governor, George Romney, were marching for civil rights — right past the window.

With the cape still around her neck, Basore went outside and joined the parade.

“They were hand in hand,” recalled Basore, a former high-school English teacher. “They led the march. We all swung our hands, and they held their hands up above everybody else’s.”

She remembered the late governor as “extremely handsome.”

Until this week, that was just a vivid memory for a sweet retiree who now lives in Pompano Beach, Fla.

But Basore’s memory became important this week when news accounts questioned the recollections of the late Michigan governor’s son, Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor.

News stories suggested that Romney was exaggerating. It turns out that he may not have attended the Grosse Pointe march, but it certainly happened.

The campaign posted citations quoting one author as writing that “George Romney made a surprise appearance in his shirt sleeves and joined the parade leaders.”

Stephen Hess and David S. Broder also wrote about the march in their 1967 book, “The Republican Establishment: The Present and Future of the G.O.P.”

Basore said she was very angry about how the issue has been covered on cable television.

“This very arrogant guy on TV questioned Mitt Romney, and I marched with them,” Basore said. “I hope that the campaign demands an apology. I want him to publicly apologize to me. That was a personal insult, and an insult to Mitt Romney.”

Basore said she called the campaign, and the campaign supplied her contact information.

Another witness, Ashby Richardson, 64, of Massachusetts gave the campaign a similar account.

“I’m just appalled that the news picks this stuff up and say it didn’t happen,” Richardson, now a data-collection consultant, said by phone. “The press is being disingenuous in terms of reporting what actually happened. I remember it vividly. I was only 15 or 20 feet from where both of them were.”

Mike Huckabee--he dumps the books out of the bookshelves. Peggy Noonan on Huckabee's Christmas ad. He thinks we're dim.

"Ludicrous". Breitbart:

In a brief foray into politics, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday denounced comments by a leading Republican presidential candidate that the Bush administration's foreign policy is arrogant and unilateral.

"The idea that somehow this is a go-it-alone policy is just simply ludicrous," she said at a State Department news conference. "One would only have to be not observing the facts, let me say that, to say that this is now a go-it-alone foreign policy."

Rice went on to lay out our multilateral efforts.

See it over at Iowans for Romney

Plus, Big Jay has joined us as a blogger at Iowans for Romney. He's got some interesting posts up (here and here and here.

Jeff Fuller

Reid Wilson today, on his RCP Blog, Politics Nation:

Two weeks ago, Mitt Romney strode to a podium in College Station, Texas, and delivered a speech fraught with peril. The Mormon candidate, sick and tired of answering questions about his religion, was going to address faith in the public square and get it off his chest once and for all. Romney's Mormonism has been seen as an albatross around his neck, and with flagging poll numbers, a speech actually addressing the issue head-on was seen as a huge gamble that could make, or would break, his campaign.

Two weeks later, polls show Romney has reversed his slide, and while he isn't at the top of the GOP pack again, he's on his way up.

Read on for poll specifics and analysis.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

I'd really like to know which "prominent DC-based Huckabee ally" told Mark Ambinder that...

 "Rush [Limbaugh] doesn't think for himself. That's not necessarily a slap because he's not paid to be a thinker—he's an entertainer. I can't remember the last time that he has veered from the talking points from the DC/Manhattan chattering class. If they were praising Huckabee, he would be too... Also, I have to think that he's dying to have Hillary in the White House. Bill Clinton made Rush a megastar. Having another Clinton back in power would make him the Leading Voice of the Opposition once again."

Really? Rush Limbaugh is part of the DC/Manhattan chattering class?

Hey, if Rush Limbaugh isn't "red state enough" to question Huckabee's conservative street cred, who is?

12/20 02:49 PM

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GeorgeWill/2007/12/20/retro_campaigning Retro Campaigning By George Will Thursday, December 20, 2007 ... On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee's role in the '70s Show involves blending Jimmy Carter's ostentatious piety with Nixon's knack for oblique nastiness. "Despicable" and "appalling" evidence of a "gutter campaign" -- that is how The Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, Mass., characterized this from Sunday's New York Times Magazine profile of Huckabee: "'Don't Mormons,' he asked in an innocent voice, 'believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?'" Imagine someone asking "in an innocent voice" this: "Don't Jews use the blood of gentile children to make matzoth for Passover?" Such a smarmy injection of the "blood libel," an ancient canard of anti-Semitism, into civic discourse would indelibly brand the injector as a bigot with contempt for the public's ability to decode bigotry. Huckabee's campaign actually is what Rudy Giuliani's candidacy is misdescribed as being -- a comprehensive apostasy against core Republican beliefs. Giuliani departs from recent Republican stances regarding two issues -- abortion and the recognition by the law of same-sex couples. Huckabee's radical candidacy broadly repudiates core Republican policies such as free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America's corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and opportunity. And consider New Hampshire's chapter of the National Education Association, the teachers union that is a crucial component of the Democratic Party's base. In 2004, New Hampshire's chapter endorsed Howard Dean in the Democratic primary and no one in the Republican primary. Last week it endorsed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary -- and Huckabee in the Republican primary. It likes, as public employees generally do, his record of tax increases, and it applauds his opposition to school choice. Huckabee's role in this year's '70s Show is not merely to attempt to revise a few Republican beliefs. He represents wholesale repudiation of what came after the 1970s -- Reaganism.

George F. Will, a 1976 Pulitzer Prize winner whose columns are syndicated in more than 400 magazines and newspapers worldwide, is the author of Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball.

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