Huck Will Win
Wednesday, January 2, 2008 3:02 PM
By: Doug Wead

More than a year ago, a minority of political observers, including this author and Dick Morris, were predicting that the Republican nominee would come from the so called second-tier candidates.

It didn’t take rocket science to calculate that with 42 percent of the nation claiming to be born again Christians, and Iowa being the buckle in the Bible Belt, either born again candidates, Gov. Mike Huckabee or Rep. Duncan Hunter, would eventually emerge. But it certainly defied the conventional wisdom of the time.

More than a year ago, national pundits assured us that either Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain, or Mitt Romney had a lock on the nomination with maybe the possibility of an outside, dark horse, challenge from Newt Gingrich or Fred Thompson. There was a problem to this reasoning, a socio-cultural-religious problem.

Giuliani, Gingrich, and Thompson would all be splitting the minority conservative Catholic vote in the GOP, Romney was Mormon, and McCain had already publicly attacked evangelical leaders during his run in 2000, making him the darling of the media but virtually killing any hope of winning a Republican nomination. That left the born againers, Huckabee or Hunter, a simple choice.

There was always a problem for Gingrich and Thompson.

Running for president is a little like building a shopping mall. If you are well connected and have all the money in the world and can get the zoning and building permits that others can’t and can have your workers busy around the clock with big lights allowing work at night, it still takes a certain amount of time to build a shopping mall. And running for president, with trillions of dollars at stake, even with a TV network behind you, takes time.

There are little things that have to be done. Not since the days of Dwight Eisenhower has someone come in late and won and today, even an Eisenhower, may not be able to finesse the arcane party and state rules.

Newt Gingrich wisely tested the waters and backed off. Thompson dove right in and was stunned to find his “Reagan actâ€