Halperin’s Take on Huckabee

7 reasons why it is difficult for Huckabee’s Republican rivals to stop him:

1. Voters seem attracted to the man—not his issue positions, his record, or the quality (or lack thereof) of his campaign apparatus. Taking down Huckabee the Candidate means taking down Huckabee the Man, and that requires the kind of nuclear blast no one is yet inclined to launch.

2. Huckabee is unflappable, unfailingly genial, and willing to pleasantly deny the truth when it suits his purposes (such as claiming that he did not support the quarantine of AIDS patients in 1992).

3. The opposition researchers of his rivals (peddling to Drudge and others as fast they can shoot off emails) can’t decide what might stick to the media wall, so they are engaging in an ineffectual scatter-shot approach. The latest attack has been from the left, trying to paint Huckabee as a religious extremist whose judgment here on Earth is clouded by ideology. The left-leaning media lustily eats that stuff up, but it hasn’t rattled Huckabee so far, and many conservative voters, particularly in Iowa, might actually find his vintage views appealing.

4. Whenever necessary, Huckabee simply acknowledges and repudiates his past statements and says he’s changed his views.

5. All his attackers are flawed messengers on the issues on which they are attacking.

6. December momentum is a hard thing to stop.

7. Paradoxically (and unfairly), the media is still not holding Huckabee to the level of accountability of a frontrunner.