Romney and Religion

"What's really telling about this is that you can almost see the gears turning in his brain when he came up with this answer. Obviously he had to say 'no,' because he knows that the Republican base would go nuts over the idea of a Muslim in his cabinet. But he can't just say that, can he? So his Bain-trained analytic mind went searching for a plausible excuse and the first thing that popped out of the wetware was a numerical explanation: (a) minorities deserve cabinet positions in proportion to their population, (b) one cabinet position is 5% of all cabinet positions, (c) therefore only groups with at least 15 million members are 'justified' in getting one, (d) Muslims aren't even close to that, so (e) no dice. However, since they do make up about 2% of the population, they certainly qualify for 2% of all the lower level positions.

"Any Tammany Hall ward heeler would understand the logic, but even Silent Charlie understood that this kind of thing wouldn't fly at the presidential level, and that was nearly a century ago. Maybe Mitt should have stayed quiet too."

But Huckabee isn't staying quiet, as the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder notes by quoting from an interview that Huck gave Salon:

" You know, I just don't think that's an appropriate issue for me to get into, the nuances of the Mormon faith. And it is not the sole criteria by which I think a person should be judged fit or unfit for the presidency, any more than I think people ought to necessarily make it the defining issue for me. I am very comfortable answering questions about my faith. I am probably the only candidate that has been subjected to this sort of detailed questioning about faith. I don't think Romney has even been. And my faith is a pretty mainstream view of the world and of the Bible. But I accept that as part of the whole process. I just think all of us should be prepared to answer questions regardless of what our views are, and let people sort that out. But that's why I don't feel comfortable in saying, 'Let me tell you what this guy believes.' You know what? I don't know what he believes. Even if I knew what his church believes, I don't know that I can say what he believes until he expresses it.

"What Gov. Huckabee is telling Salon's Michael Scherer is that Romney's religion can be a criteria by which people judge him, and that he believes that Romney ought to be subjected to questions about the content of his religious faith -- questions that Huckabee asserts have not been asked before."

Now for some horse-race stuff. Reacting to a survey showing Hillary Clinton losing to several Republicans a year from now, the New Republic's Jason Zengerle rightly questions the genre:

"I think these new polls just show the bankruptcy of the whole electability argument--which was the larger point of my story. Take, for instance, the fact that of all the Republican contenders in the polls Mike cites, Mike Huckabee does the best against Hillary, beating her by 5 points. Does that mean Huckabee is the most electable Republican? No. It just means that right now he's the least known Republican candidate--and one who's riding a favorable wave of national press to boot.

"If Huckabee were to get the GOP nomination, you can be sure that his unfavorable numbers would skyrocket--partly because more people would then know more about him, and partly because of the currently polarized state of American politics (in which half of the electorate is almost guaranteed to hate someone who represents the other half).

"Hillary is probably more sensitive to these sorts of electability polls than any other candidate--since the chattering class has decided that electability is the biggest question of her candidacy--but I'd imagine that the folks in Hillaryland are far more concerned about her dwindling (or vanished) leads over Obama and Edwards in Iowa and New Hampshire than they are about her standing vis-a-vis Rudy/Romney/McCain/Huckabee."

TPM's Greg Sargent suggests the whole premise is bogus:

"Two polling firms -- Zogby and Gallup -- released surveys of the presidential race that offered strikingly different conclusions. The Zogby poll found that Hillary is trailing five leading GOP candidates in general election matchups. The Gallup Poll, by contrast, found that Hillary, and to a lesser degree Obama, has a slight to sizable lead over the top GOP contenders.

"A couple of other things that distinguish these two polls: The Zogby one is an online poll, a notoriously unreliable method, while the Gallup one is a telephone poll. And, as Charles Franklin of Pollster.com observed yesterday, the Zogby poll is completely out of sync with multiple other national polls finding Hillary with a lead over the GOP candidates. The Zogby poll actually found that Mike Huckabee is leading Hillary in a national matchup. The Gallup findings were in line with most other surveys.