This recent Soren Dayton post on Mike Huckabee makes a salient point in light of Fred Thompson's recent attacks on Huckabee's tax record:
I suspect that the continual attacks on Huckabee aren't going to be so threatening. First, his voters probably don't care. As Richard Land said about Duncan Hunter, 'A lot of evangelicals are probably sympathetic to his protectionist arguments.' Second, his response that he spent money on school and roads can be pretty compelling to a bunch of Iowa farmers, if he manages to get his message out. And third, I wonder how many of the super-rich Club for Growthers are left? How many i-bankers participate in Iowa caucuses anyways? Now, this has focused on Huckabee's economic message. There is an interesting question about Huckabee's message on moral issues. My gut is that Huckabee follows the breezes in the evangelical community.
Of course, any successful politician "follows the breezes" to some degree. Because a politician's job is to get 51 percent (or a winning plurality) of the people to like him (or her) at any given time. Huckabee's decision to sign Grover Norquist's anti-tax-hike pledge, coupled with his advocacy of the "fair tax," probably will inoculate him from further attacks on the tax issue, primarily because, as Dayton suggests, Huckabee's core voters aren't concerned with supply-side economics anyway. Besides, maybe moralistic Christian-toned reformism is where most of the GOP is headed. Which would mean that the candidate who best represents that political tendency may have an extremely good shot at the Republican nomination.