Keeping the Faith

Mike Huckabee spent his last Sunday on the campaign trail in Iowa in a familiar spot: in church, next to his wife Janet, with a Bible in his hand. But the Southern Baptist minister wasn't the one delivering the sermon this time.

Sitting in a pew at Cornerstone Family Church in Des Moines, Huckabee was merely a parishioner, a man being ministered to on the eve of perhaps the most important week of his life. The pastor's sermon could not have been more fitting. Titled "Pressing Toward the Mark," it was a Biblical message about perseverance in the race of life. "Have you ever felt like giving up? Of course you have!" the pastor, Dan Barry, intoned. "That's why you've got to press on … Stay in the game!"

The sermon applied to the other race Huckabee's running, as well. The GOP upstart, who told reporters after the service that he had prayed for "strength for the week," has endured a thrashing in recent days—over his foreign policy pronouncements and his record back in Arkansas.

He's given his critics some choice openings. Speaking after the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto last week, Huckabee strangely tried to link the story to the threat of illegal immigration, a huge issue among Republican voters in Iowa. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney and other opponents have been running attack ads around the clock on Iowa's TV and radio stations, trashing Huckabee's record on pardons and taxes—charges that Huckabee's campaign, still limping financially and lacking a strong organization, has been largely unequipped to answer.

If the polls are to be believed, the negative advertising is having an effect. According to the latest MSNBC/McClatchy/Mason-Dixon poll out last weekend, Huckabee's numbers in Iowa are slipping. According to the survey, Romney now leads Huckabee 27 percent to 23 percent in the state—though that lead remains within the survey's 5 percent margin of error. Compare that to the state of play just three weeks ago, when Huckabee led Romney 30 percent to 20 percent. One of the key factors in Huckabee's slip: his edge over Romney among self-described born-again Christians has dropped from 23 percent to 1 percent.

If he's worried about the new numbers, Huckabee isn't showing it. While Romney, Fred Thompson and all the Democratic presidential hopefuls spent much of the day Sunday crisscrossing the state wooing voters, Huckabee had no public events, aside from the impromptu church visit and a sit-down on "Meet the Press." His tentative public schedule for the week, released late Sunday night, is just as leisurely. On Monday he's scheduled to hold a news conference and celebrate New Year's Eve with supporters, but the rest of the events are photo-ops, including a haircut and a run at a local park. On Wednesday, the day before Iowans vote, he's scheduled to appear at just two town halls in the state before traveling to California to appear on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno."