It comes down to this: Is Mike Huckabee electable?
According to the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, social conservatives seem to think so. The lack of an acceptable candidate had even led some writers to conclude that evangelical Christians were no longer a political force. Well, the evangelicals are back with a candidate they can support and the plain-speaking Huckabee is gaining unexpected new strength every day.
That new popularity comes at the expense of Mitt Romney, who has already spent millions on the primaries even before the first vote has been cast. That's what makes the Huckabee's rise in the polls so maddening. By contrast, Huckabee hasn't spent a quarter on expensive TV ads. So what explains the Huckabee surge? How could this be happening?
The wise men around Romney worried. They advised Mitt that the latest polls delivered a hard message. Mormonism had become an important factor in the minds of voting evangelicals. Huckabee, on the other hand, was a Southern Baptist minister. He was "one of them."
So the wise men convinced our former governor that the moment had come for him, just like JFK, to take to the airwaves and confront the Mormon issue head-on. A well-crafted speech might stem the tide and assure hesitant Republicans that Romney was their kind of guy. So, Romney did it. It was a great speech and Mitt delivered it well.
Now comes the bad news. To begin with, JFK already had the nomination when he made his speech. One out of every four Americans is nominally a Catholic anyway. Besides, even the great Protestant fear of the pope is much less than the anxiety about Mormonism which emerges out of a distinctively complicated tradition with some aspects taken from outside the Bible.
Secondly, the speech itself held a porous kind of logic to evangelicals. Sure enough, evangelicals would be alarmed to have the president influenced by either the Vatican or Utah. Still, they don't want a president so removed from faith and morals that his personal conviction doesn't play a role in shaping public policy. In fact, that's the whole point!
Rudy's social positions scare the daylights out of real conservatives. Fred Thompson's lackluster campaign looks like what he's really running for is vice president. That won't happen if Huckabee from Arkansas gets the nod. One Southerner is all that the ticket needs or wants.
So what about the McCain factor? Well, it can't be denied that McCain is a genuine American hero, but one gets the feeling that his time has come and gone.
Huckabee knows that he can't win on the strength of American evangelical voters alone. Christian evangelicals make up only 14 percent of the vote. However, he can probably depend on a rapidly growing traditional Catholic vote that shares that same kind of socially conservative thinking. More good news for Huckabee is that a recent Fox poll suggests that 80 percent of Americans would be more comfortable with a Protestant in the White House.
What this comes to even calls for a dramatic shift for Democrats. The Dems had been counting on an unpopular war and an unpopular George Bush to sweep their candidate, whoever it would be, into the White House. More importantly, Democrats had hoped to swap the pesky subjects of abortion and same-sex marriage for the more advantageorus issues immigration and crime. Now all of these things are back on the table.
What's interesting to many observers is that the Democrats aren't thrilled with their candidates either. So it is that the Huckabee phenomenon has changed the political landscape on both sides of the aisle. Now it's Mike Huckabee that's going to have to convince people of other faiths to support him.
Publicly, of course, most people in this country will tell you that they don't like the intrusion of religion into politics. Privately though, religion matters, and it matters a lot.
Frank Mazzaglia can be reached at fmazzaglia@aol.com
