Charles Krauthammer:
I'd thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN-YouTube
debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, "Do
you believe every word of this book?" -- and not one candidate dared
reply: None of your damn business. Instead, Giuliani, Romney and
Huckabee bent a knee and tried appeasement with various interpretations
of scriptural literalism. The right answer, the only answer, is that
the very question is offensive. The Constitution prohibits any
religious test for office. And while that proscribes only government
action, the law is also meant to be a teacher. In the same way that
civil rights laws established not just the legal but also the moral
norm that one simply does not discriminate on the basis of race --
changing the practice of one generation and the consciousness of the
next -- so the constitutional injunction against religious tests is
meant to make citizens understand that such tests are profoundly
un-American.
Michael Gerson:
Huckabee's main appeal has been his homespun decency. But his behavior
on immigration has been a kind of politics-as-usual so blatant it is
actually unusual. Huckabee is managing to compromise his most
distinctive virtue at the very moment the attention of the public is
focused on his candidacy. ... [I]t is worth recalling a quote from Thomas More in "A Man for All Seasons." More's protege, Richard Rich, has compromised his convictions to be appointed attorney general for Wales. "For Wales?" asks More. "Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . . But for Wales?" The question now comes to Mike Huckabee, who knows the biblical reference: "For Iowa?"
With Rich Lowry's scathing "Huckacide" column in National Review today and two Huck-bashing pieces in the Post, doesn't it feel like the backlash against Huckabee has reached a critical saturation point? Does this start to show up in the polls?
--Eve Fairbanks