COLUMN: 11-14-2007

The news that former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is now running strongly in Iowa is a welcome sign that the Republicans may have a chance at a decent candidate after all. Although he is technically still second behind former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, it's clear that all of Romney's support is purely based on his enormous financing of his own campaign and that very little of the public will actually support him, mostly based on distrust of his flip-flopping or distrust of his religious beliefs. Unlike Romney and the national front-runners (former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuiliani and former Senator Fred Thompson), Huckabee is actually a Republican with a clear history of demonstrating the values that conservatives are supposed to be about. Giuliani is clearly an extreme liberal who has no conservative credentials whatsoever and Thompson is a Hollywood actor who occasionally uses those acting skills to pursue a political career whenever he doesn't have any other work. (He famously stated that politics is for actors too ugly for Hollywood - if that is his view, he clearly doesn't understand public service.) If we can perhaps get a real Republican race going between Huckabee, Senator John McCain, and Congressman Ron Paul, we might have a chance at having a decent candidate who can save American from having an ultraliberal president for at least the next four years.