Huckabee Dials It Down
Tue, 01/22/2008 - 2:16pm
He's going to have to stop eating out so often, and he reminds you to turn off the lights when you leave the room: Huckabee is running out of money.
First was the news that they wouldn't be footing the bill for media transport anymore. Now comes the news that some of his staffers are going without paychecks, which is only slightly better than news that a campaign's paychecks have bounced.
It might seem like this is a smart strategy for conserving money for ads, but measures like this usually mean there isn't really sufficient money for ads in the first place. None of this is a good sign for a Huckabee candidacy hoping to last past February 5.
Campaigns in this very cycle have recovered from stumbles worse than this (Exhibit A: John McCain), but this more or less means that whatever opportunity Huckabee created with his Iowa win has been squandered, or at least hasn't translated into dollars.
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Huckabust
By Patrick M McLeod
Tue, 01/22/2008 - 3:56pm
Unlike McCain's disappearance from the radar last summer, Huckabee's potential financial woes are coming at the worst possible time. McCain flew under the radar long enough to shake off the early criticism of his record and to re-emerge at a time when the party leadership were desperate for a "moderate conservative" flag bearer who wasn't Mormon and on both sides of every big issue in the last decade.
Besides his financial woes, Huckabee's big problem is that he hasn't commanded the whole of the fundamentalist bloc of the Republican base while at the same time he has had miniscule traction outside of the fundamentalist bloc. One thing that might help him in Florida is former Senator Fred Thompson's withdrawal; Huckabee and Thompson received the bulk of the fundamentalist vote in South Carolina.
Given that no one is close to Huckabee's social conservative and Dominionist positions, he seems to be the natural alternative to Thompson for those voters most concerned with social conservative issues. In Florida, that might be enough to make the difference between fourth and third or even third and second.