John McCain’s primary hopes seem to have been only mostly dead. His uptick in New Hampshire has spilled over a bit to Iowa.

On the other hand, if he can put together surprise victories in these early primaries, there is simply no way to overstate the deep well of adoration, tacit support and general desire to fluff that McCain will be able to draw from within the Washington press corps. And even those core Republicans who’ve never been crazy about him will breath a elemental sigh of relief that they’ve got a candidate of stature, experience and ability rather than a freak, a goof or a Ken doll.

Perhaps his opponents will take a page out of the Bush play book and rehash the South Carolina smearing of McCain by suggesting to uninformed voters that McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi child is an illegitimate black child.

Meanwhile, Jerome Armstrong at MyDD suggests that Obama v. McCain is about the worst case scenario for Democrats in the Presidential election cycle.

A McCain vs Obama race would be the worst case scenario I could imagine for us. Why? Because the talky-centrists like Jonathan Alter from Newsweek and Joe Klein from Time that Obama panders too, who now come to Obama’s defense to attack the progressive Krugman, would soon say: “Obama’s great but he’s too young and inexperienced, let’s go with McCain.”

I also fear the inroads to Latinos that McCain would make. He’s their only candidate that isn’t a wall-builder and hater toward illegal immigrants, and that would hurt Obama the most.

What a fascinating thing. The love of McCain by the chattering classes is viewed as a formidable (and apparently obvious) asset of McCain’s.

Via Jerome at MyDD, a graph showing the progress of the Republican primary candidates in the polls:

Giuliani looks stronger than he probably is. His problem is that his poll numbers look pretty bad in initial primary states. His appeal to voters nationwide is liable to take a beating if he does poorly in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Jerome’s analysis goes on to mention the enormous fund raising success experienced by Ron Paul. Will that translate into votes? Possibly. But, I see him as this cycle’s Howard Dean — darling of the Internet and able to raise huge amounts of money very quickly, but ultimately not able to translate that support into votes in the real world. Regardless of who comes out on top, it should be a nice dust up. Look at all of the trend lines gathering at about the same level. No front runners. Just a free-for-all. I’d love to see (in either or both primaries) a convention that actually meant something and wasn’t just a scripted coronation.

Update A post by Devilstower at Daily Kos shows just how much use some of these polls and predictions are. In particular, consider a graph of the Iowa Electronic Markets, billed by some as a good predictor of political races, from 2004:

Until the votes in Iowa were counted, Dean was a juggernaut and Kerry was roadkill.

Update 2 The Hoosier Pundit has some observations about the Republican primary from the perspective of a devoted Republican. On Romney and his very conveniently timed conversions on matters of importance to conservatism: His conversions are to be welcomed, but (as one of his opponents memorably put it) I would prefer that they came on the road to Damascus and not the road to Des Moines.

David Mizner at MyDD seems to think there are some favorable dynamics at play in the Democratic primary for John Edwards. Edwards is more or less tied in the polls with Clinton and Obama in Iowa. He’s further behind in New Hampshire and elsewhere at the moment, but Mizner argues that the debate in the Democratic primary is headed toward a frame that is quite beneficial to Edwards: who and how to effect change. As Atrios put it:

Obama: The system sucks, but I’m so awesome that it’ll melt away before me.
Edwards: The system sucks, and we’re gonna have to fight like hell to destroy it.
Clinton: The system sucks, and I know how to work within it more than anyone.

Mizner argues that these various approaches flow naturally from the prior history of the candidates. Hillary has been involved with politics her whole life and therefore wants to work within the system. Obama’s background is in community organizing and so he wants to form coalitions. Edwards’ background is in adversarial litigation and so he wants to fight.

For a generation of Democrats who are tired of Democratic leadership that comes off as a bunch of passive, spineless wimps cringing at the feet of their Republican overlords and begging for scraps, the idea of a fighter is appealing. (I know, I know — how can he fight with good hair?). To many of us, that’s what was so appealing about Howard Dean — not his liberal message (which, by the way, if you paid any attention, wasn’t very liberal; unless staying out of Iraq and getting out of Iraq as soon as possible is somehow “liberal”) — but rather the fact that he wasn’t going to back down from a fight. Bipartisanship is fine if both sides are playing the game. But, with a Grover Norquist style of bipartisanship akin to “date rape,” you have to arrange to negotiate from a position of strength. Perhaps if the process had been more adversarial, our information might have been better when Congress was deliberating on whether to authorize the invasion of Iraq.

So, as the saying goes, “interesting . . . if true.” Edwards still has to be considered quite an underdog at this point.

Bonnie Erbe of the Scripps Howard News Service has a column in the Evansville Courier Press on Mike Huckabee. She describes him as a knuckle dragger. The basis for this harsh assessment was his endorsement of Southern Baptist teachings about the role of women in marriage. Wives are to “graciously submit” to their husbands.

Says Erbe:

Husbands who believe they sacrificially “love and lead” their wives clearly do not view their wives as partners in life but as servants. Wives who “graciously submit” to their husbands are most often not submitting graciously, but because they have neither the economic wherewithal nor the education to be economically self-sufficient.

Leo over at Opening Arguments rightly flags this AP story as a crucial snapshot into the minds of the Presidential candidates. It’s a report on the coffee preferences of the candidates.

Unfortunately, Leo is just wrong, wrong, WRONG, when he asserts that cream AND sugar is the right answer. My personal preference is for cream only. But, I consider this a moral failing on my part. Everybody knows that manly men drink manly things and, therefore, the true choice is black: black as my soul.

Edwards has taken a major hit in my estimation, not drinking the stuff at all. Is he one of those Diet Coke & Tab freaks? When we come to Romney, we realize this fluff piece by the AP is little more than a thinly veiled attack on his religion — he doesn’t drink the stuff (Mormons and caffeine go together like fish and bicycles.) Huckabee (f**k me!) puts Splenda in his. I don’t even wanna talk about that.

Advance Indiana gives a run down on the Presidential candidates. For those of you who don’t read Advance Indiana regularly, first: you should; second: it’s written by Gary Welsh, a devoted Republican who is gay. He runs down the list of GOP candidates and discusses why, for the first time in his life, he can’t see himself voting for the Republican presidential candidate. Huckabee’s benighted views on HIV are appalling (think quarantine); Romney is running hard from himself; Giuliani is scandal plagued; and Thompson and McCain have been limping through their campaigns.

Just a little drive-by attack by your local blog host on a comment made by Mitt Romney this morning. “Attacking someone’s faith is unAmerican.” Oh, I beg to differ, Mr. Romney. I’m not sure there is anything quite as American as attacking Mormonism. The history of the Church of Latter Day Saints is practically one attack by Americans after another. I’m pretty sure that President Buchanan went so far as to send troops to Utah to deal with Brigham Young.

The Democratic primary fight in Iowa is “tight as a tick.” John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton are essentially in a 3-way tie. Several polls have the three candidates polling at levels within the margin of error of one another. Given how tough it is to poll in Iowa, this probably means it’s anybody’s race. The interesting thing will be how secondary candidates’ supporters peel off to support the primary candidates — in the Iowa caucuses, if a candidate doesn’t get above a certain level of support, that candidate’s supporters are supposed to go to their second choice among the candidates that did get more than the threshold level of support. I seem to recall something from 2004 about Edwards and Kucinich striking a deal whereby Kucinich supporters ended up going over to Edwards.

So, Mitt Romney gave a speech on religion. But, it didn’t really seem to be a speech about his religion. It was kind of a universalist, love thy neighbor kind of thing. For the moment, it seems to be well-received, but ultimately, I don’t think it will do him a lot of good.

He wasn’t losing ground in Iowa to Huckabee because people had doubts about whether he believed enough in the good things Jesus had to say in the Sermon on the Mount. He was losing ground because he is a Mormon. That means that his religion’s miracles are weirder than other religion’s miracles.

At the end of the day, I think Romney has a better chance of appealing to a non-religious guy like myself who doesn’t regard Jesus coming to America and turning Native Americans’ skin red as a curse for not believing in the right God as inherently less credible than, say, a Virgin Birth or transubstantiation of wine and bread into Jesus’ blood and skin.

I think Republicans benefit from the general truthiness that they’re the party of religion. I think all of that falls apart the second folks start comparing the teachings of Jesus to Republican policies. I also don’t think they can benefit from a close examination of the particular articles of faith that distinguish one religion from the next. If they go too far down the road Romney started down, basically suggesting that the particulars of the religious differences don’t really matter, that might get fundamentalist hackles up since they purport to believe that every word of the Bible is very important. Suggesting that faithful Mormons will be made Gods of their own planets might to beyond the ability of fundamentalist Christians to live-and-let-live. And, of course, if they go the other way and start arguing about whose faith is actually true, the whole religio-political house of cards implodes.

Should be interesting to watch.

Update Doghouse Riley, as per usual, has a good take on Romney’s speech.

You just knew this was where he was headed, didn’t you? “Let us come together as a freedom-loving people and really hate the atheists?” The only surprising thing–okay, not that surprising–is that we’ve reached a point where this sort of thing passes for public discourse. I don’t expect Willard to address the real issues involved. I ‘d just like it if someone would either answer the question without tapdancing clogging for an hour, or tell everyone else to go piss up a rope. Anything but Jell-O mold faux-theism. If Romney had pulled a random six items from The Big Book of Really, Really Crackpot Shit Mormons Are Supposed To Believe, Really, and said, “Yes, I believe those, because I’m a Mormon,” I’d consider voting for him. That would have shown some character.