The Huckabee Factor

How far can Mike Huckabee take this thing?

That's the question after the debate here. Rudy Giuliani and John McCain insiders tell me they'd be glad if the former Arkansas governor won the Iowa caucuses, because that would humiliate Mitt Romney, who has invested so much time and money there. Well, after the debate and a chat with Huckabee, here's my advice to the mayor and the senator: be careful what you wish for.

In a breakout performance, Huckabee matched his surge in the Iowa polls, and elsewhere, with a confident, easygoing performance at the CNNYouTube debate. He shrewdly stayed out of the Rudy-Romney eye-scratching ("You never try to stop a dogfight," he said afterward), eloquently defended his support for college scholarships for illegals ("we are a better country than that"), and, when asked "what Jesus would do" about the death penalty, came up with the laugh line of the evening. "Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office," the ordained Baptist preacher said.

Tongue in cheek, Huckabee even offered Rudy help on whether each word of the Bible is literally true. (The former New York mayor, who once considered the priesthood, did fine.)

Huckabee is no rube; he is a practiced, focused politician with communications skills that are equal to or exceed those of any of his rivals, Republican or Democrat. His serious weakness—and it is a big one—is his utter lack of foreign policy or military experience or exposure. In the end that may be fatal. In the meantime, he is complicating the calculus of the race.

This is the complex bank-shot phase of the campaign. In this extraordinary multicandidate field, with five legitimate contenders (counting Fred Thompson) and perhaps a sixth (Ron Paul), each has to carefully calculate the consequences of attacking or buddying up.