While Mike Huckabee seems destined to leave the Republican stage, the extremist assault on the separation on church and state he represents (see here and here) will remain a fixture in American politics for years to come.

So, as Mike Huckabee prepares his return to his Arkansas and his diet of fried chicken and squirrel, here then are Yet Another 10 Moments in Mike Huckabee's Extremism:

21. Huckabee Encourages Televangelist to Defy Senate Investigation
22. Huckabee Wants Americans to be "Soldiers for Christ" in "God's Army"
23. Huckabee Calls for a Faith-Based Constitution
24. Huckabee Wants to Crimalize Abortion Providers
25. Huckabee Vows to Deport All Illegal Aliens
26. Huckabee Equates Homosexuality with Bestiality
27. Huckabee Says the Lord Gave Him Wisdom During GOP Debates
28. Huckabee Gets Scatalogical in Defense of the Confederate Flag
29. Huckabee Compares Search for Iraq WMD to Easter Egg Hunt
30. Huckabee Calls for Taxes on Pimps, Prostitutes and Drug Dealers

21. Huckabee Encourages Televangelist to Defy Senate Investigation
Televangelist and Huckabee fundraiser Kenneth Copeland is among six prominent broadcast ministers being investigated for "improperly using their tax-exempt status as churches to shield lavish lifestyles." But Copeland has refused to turn over documents requested by Republican Chuck Grassley of the Senate Finance Committee, claiming of the material "It's not yours, it's God's."

Recognizing the impact that his "holy war against 'Brother Grassley'" could have on Huckabee's presidential campaign, Copeland gave his friend the opportunity to disassociate himself from the ministry. Unsurprisingly, Huckabee stood by his man and backed Copeland in his defiance of the United States Senate. As Copeland related:

Huckabee "hollered at me on the phone. He said, 'Are you kidding me? Why should I stand with them and not with you? They've only got an 11 percent approval rating.'"

"I said, 'Yeah, that's my man,'" Copeland said of Huckabee.

22. Huckabee Wants Americans to be "Soldiers for Christ" in "God's Army"
That the former minister Huckabee would support a potentially corrupt evangelical pastor over the elected representatives of the American people should come as no surprise. In 1998, after all, Huckabee proclaimed that his political mission was to "take this nation back for Christ."

Just days before the New Hampshire primary, Huckabee used the pulpit of a Granite State church to deliver a sermon urging congregants to join him in his crusade. Despite his own non-service in the military, Huckabee seemed quite comfortable trafficking in martial analogies:

"When we become believers, it's as if we have signed up to be part of God's Army, to be soldiers for Christ," Huckabee told the enthusiastic audience.

"When you give yourself to Christ, some relationships have to go," he said. "It's no longer your life; you've signed it over."

Likening service to God to service in the military, Huckabee said "there is suffering in the conditioning for battle" and "you obey the orders."

23. Huckabee Calls for a Faith-Based Constitution
Not content to merely recruit more troops in his war for souls, Huckabee during the Michigan primary said Americans need Americans must "amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards."

Addressing a crowd in Warren, Michigan, Huckabee declared his personal crusade to amend the Constitution by copying and pasting from the Bible:

"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And thats what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than trying to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family."

In case there was any remaining doubt, that astounding statement eviscerated Huckabee's pretense of upholding the separation of church and state. In December, Governor Huckabee offered this charade on Meet the Press, words which obviously are no longer operative:

"The key issue of real faith is that it never can be forced on someone. And never would I want to use the government institutions to impose mine or anybody else's faith or to restrict."

24. Huckabee Wants to Crimalize Abortion Providers
No doubt, one of his God's standards that Huckabee would like reflected in the Constitution concerns abortion.

But Mike Huckabee doesn't merely support a so-called human life amendment. Appearing on Meet the Press on December 30, 2007, Huckabee said he not only wanted to outlaw abortions, but wanted to criminalize abortion providers as well. As ThinkProgress summarized:

Mike Huckabee said that as President he would seek to "find some way to sanction" doctors "who took money to provide abortions to women if he succeeded in outlawing the procedure." "I don't know that you'd put him in prison," added Huckabee. He said that he would "not support penalizing women who sought abortions even if they were outlawed" because he considers a woman who seeks an abortion to be "a victim, not a criminal."

For his part, Huckabee at least stopped short of the position held by physician and Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn. Coburn has advocated the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions.

25. Huckabee Vows to Deport All Illegal Aliens
Earlier in the Republican primaries, Mike Huckabee came under withering assault over his Arkansas record of providing educational benefits to the children of illegal aliens and his plea to immigrant bashing xenophobes in his party that "we're better than that." In a November debate, Huckabee argued:

"Our country is better than that, to punish children for what their parents did in breaking the law. If that costs me the election, it costs me the election, but somewhere along the line we cannot just pander to the anger and hostility without challenging it."

As it turns out, not so much. Putting Republican primary politics ahead of principle, Huckabee wildly - and abruptly - reversed course. Just six weeks later, Huckabee rolled up a draconian package of measure to combat illegal aliens, including a pledge to deport all 12 million currently in the United States. "Some would say it's a tough plan," Huckabee said, adding, "It is, but it's also fair and reasonable."

26. Huckabee Equates Homosexuality with Bestiality
In his 1998 book, Kids Who Kill, Huckabee laid virtually of all of America's ills at the feet of everyone - and everything - he hates:

"Abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism have fragmented and polarized our communities."

"It is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations - from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia."

His candidate attacked for having equated homosexuality with necrophilia, Huckabee spokesman Joe Carter responded, "No way is he saying that homosexuality is like having sex with dead people. That's not it at all."

Apparently, what Huckabee meant to do was compare same-sex marriage and bestiality. In an interview with BeliefNet, Huckabee joined the ranks of GOP Senators Rick Santorum and John Cornyn in decrying the slippery to man-on-dog or man-on-box turtle marriage:

"I think the radical view is to say that we're going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal."

27. Huckabee Says the Lord Gave Him Wisdom During GOP Debates
In that same interview with BeliefNet, Huckabee provided insight into what pundits of all stripes describe as his excellent performances in the Republican debates. Asked when if there were any moments during the campaign when he felt God's presence, Huckabee replied:

"Oh, absolutely. Especially some times in the debates when I get asked some question and I'm thinking, 'Oh my'...I felt like the Lord truly gave me wisdom and responses that were truly needed at that time."

That the Lord provided Huckabee with crib notes should come as no surprise. After all, Huckabee previously took a phone a cell phone call from God during a GOP governors event and later attributed his meteoric rise in the polls to divine intervention.

28. Huckabee Gets Scatalogical in Defense of the Confederate Flag
That Mike Huckabee pandered to South Carolina antebellum boosters with a ringing defense of the Confederate flag also should have come as no surprise. Huckabee, like Trent Lott before him, had addressed the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor to the White Citizens Councils of Jim Crow days. More important, hewanted to highlight John McCain past troubles on the issue in the run up to the Palmetto State primary.

What was unexpected was that the Baptist minister seemed quite comfortable using a scatological reference in making his unsurprising appeal to the neo-Confederate crowd:

"You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole, that's what we'd do."

29. Huckabee Compares Search for Iraq WMD to Easter Egg Hunt
Throughout the campaign, Mike Huckabee has repeatedly displayed his glaring inexperience on national security and foreign policy issues. In December, Huckabee famously showed complete ignorance of the controversial Iran National Intelligence Estimate. Then last week, Governor Huckabee compared the Iraq war to an Easter egg hunt, with Saddam's WMD mysteriously hidden on the territory of U.S. ally Jordan:

"Everybody can look back and say, oh well we didn't find the weapons. Doesn't meet that they weren't there. Just because you didn't find every Easter egg didn't mean it wasn't planted."

"I think it's more likely that that weapons of mass destruction that we know that he at one time had, he used weapons against the Kurds, good chance they may have gone to Jordan. We don't know where they are."

Asked days later by Fox News' Chris Wallace last Sunday if he had any evidence to support his claim, Huckabee admitted, "I don't have any evidence."

30. Huckabee Calls for Taxes on Pimps, Prostitutes and Drug Dealers
Mike Huckabee has made support of the so-called Fair Tax a centerpiece of his campaign. But faced with an overwhelming consensus that ending the income tax in favor of a national consumption tax would ensure a massive redistribution of wealth to - and tax burden away from - the richest Americans, Mike Huckabee came up with an innovative new sales pitch.

As he told a gathering at the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce in New Hampshire, the key is the windfall from taxing sinners:

"You end the underground economy. Illegals, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, drug dealers - everybody pays taxes."

While Mike Huckabee's most dangerous pronouncements involve his zealous determination to save souls for the next life, his radical tax proposals would surely impoverish them in this one.

For more episodes in the radically reactionary life and times of Mike Huckabee, see:

In much the same way that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, Ralph Nader is once again contemplating a presidential run. Exhuming his vanity candidacy every four years, Nader's interest in the White House increases in direct proportion to his ability to inflict lasting harm on the United States. The only difference this time is that he might have to compete with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg for the nomination of the Narcissism Party.

History is replete with examples of the left and center-left uniting in a common effort against dangers from the right. That lesson, of course, is lost on (or more likely ignored by) Nader and his followers. In 2000, Nader's candidacy was catastrophic. In 2004, the extent of Bush's reelection victory made Nader merely annoying. Now it is just pathetic. With the country at war, facing recession and the composition of the Supreme Court for the next generation now in play, Nader simply can't help himself.

With no relevant experience and an even less relevant agenda, the bombastic Nader has resumed his quadrennial ritual of getting on his high horse and taking the low road against would-be (and should-be) Democratic allies. There are only three certainties with a Nader candidacy. First, this Corvair of progressive politics has shown his proven ability to attract substantial sums of cash from right-wing attack groups like FreedomWorks an Freedom's Watch. Second, to the degree Nader can have an impact, it is to help advance the radically reactionary program of the conservative movement. Last, the longer Ralph Nader tries to play in the political arena, the more lasting damage he does to his already-diminished legacy as a consumer advocate.

Hopefully, Ralph Nader in a rare moment of humility will stay out of the race. If not, he will once again show that he is unsafe at any speed.

In Florida, both JohnMcCain and Mitt Romney laid claim to being Reagan's heir. Speaking after his victory in the Sunshine State contest Tuesday, McCain declared:

"When I left the Navy and entered public life, I enlisted as a foot soldier in the political revolution he began. And I am as proud to be a Reagan conservative today, as I was then."

But from the beginning, Romney has been even more insistent that he possessed the Reagan gene. Over a year ago, Romney addressed the Awakening 2007 conference in Georgia and declared, "My life experience convinced me that Ronald Reagan was right." In August, Romney told a Melbourne, Florida audience that he like the Gipper would score a 10 out of 10 on a scale of conservatism:

"Probably a 10 as well. I'm trying to think in what places we would differ. As I've gotten older, Reagan keeps getting smarter and smarter. I'm a believer in markets, I'm a believer in American freedom, I am optimistic about America's future. I share the same optimism that Ronald Reagan had. I wish I had his good looks."

On a December campaign swing in South Carolina, Romney again played the Reagan card. "I take inspiration from the strength Ronald Reagan talked about," adding, "It was his view that the right way to overcome challenges was for the country to strengthen itself."

Unfortunately, before Mitt Romney launched his presidential bid by running on Reagan's legacy, he launched his Massachusetts political career by running away from it.

As the Boston Globe first reported on January 11, 2007, Romney rejected the Reagan mantle during his failed 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy. Desperate to compete in pro-choice Massachusetts, Romney was not content to declare, "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country." As a YouTube video shows, Mitt made it clear he wanted nothing to do with the Reagan-Bush years:

"I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush; I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush. My positions don't talk about the things you suggest they talk about; this isn't a political issue."

(Romney's distinctly un-Reaganesque history doesn't end there. Mitt, it turns out, was an independent during most of his time in Massachusetts. In 1992, he voted for Democrat Paul Tsongas in the Massachusetts primary so that, as his adviser Eric Fehrnstrom comically claimed, "he got to vote against Bill Clinton twice.")

For its part, the McCain campaign has been quick to denounce Mitt as a Ronnie-come-lately. In December, McCain advisor Mark Salter called Romney's claim that he is the keeper of the Reagan flame part of "Mitt Romney's bizarro world." And on Tuesday in Florida, John McCain himself fired the first salvo at Romney in what will no doubt be a barrage at the Reagan Library tonight:

"Our party has always been successful when we have, like Ronald Reagan, stood fast by our convictions."

No doubt, Mitt Romney will claim that he is merely following in the tradition of Ronald Reagan, who went from FDR Democrat to conservative patron saint within a generation. As Romney has said more than once:

"Now, I wasn't always a Ronald Reagan conservative. Neither was Ronald Reagan, by the way."

That's what a quick inspection of the polls would reveal. Nationally, Giuliani's led the Republican pack with numbers that hovered between the high 20's and mid 30's until the end of November. Similarly, Rudy began his retreat from his New Hampshire (around 20%) and Iowa (mid teens) plateaus around the same time.

Those numbers and that timing would suggest that Giuliani was buffeted by two stories that broke almost simultaneously. First, Rudy suffered blowback from the bitter tone and nasty exchanges with Mitt Romney over immigration in the November 28 CNN/YouTube debate. Second and probably more important, Giuliani's untidy personal life and dubious professional ethics were laid bare by revelations that he used taxpayer funds to pay for covert Hamptons trysts with his then-mistress, now-wife Judith Nathan. Together, those two developments helped undermine Giuliani's aura of invincibility.

That his YouTube debate performance hut Giuliani was clear at the time. The Washington Times reported "Romney, Giuliani Get Testy," while the Washington Post emphasized the bickering that dominated the debate:

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani immediately set the tone for the combative event, using the first question to continue a weeks-long feud they have waged on the campaign trail. Each accused the other of ignoring laws against illegal immigration and distorting one another's record on the issue.

The timing couldn't have been more perfect for former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. Coming just as his nascent campaign was beginning to take off, the debate catapulted Huckabee in the polls. The clear consensus that Huckabee's calm, civil tone won the debate may have been his campaign's tipping point.

Ultimately, though, the almost simultaneous story of the Judith Nathan taxpayer-funded romps (known in some quarters as the "Tryst Fund," the "Shag Fund" or "Sex on the City") was more damaging. It highlighted Rudy's serial marriages and messy personal life, all while crystallizing the picture of his questionable business practices. Ironically, the New York Times reported on December 20 that truth behind the story was less than met the eye, but by then it was too late.

At the end of the day, the man whose national career was jumpstarted on 9/11 saw it come tumbling down during 12/07.

UPDATE: With the Florida results now in, Rudy predictably produced his dismal third place showing. Time is reporting that Giuliani may drop out as soon as tomorrow and endorse John McCain. That report has since been confirmed by the AP.

In his last State of the Union address, President Bush fired one final salvo his war against public education in signature fashion. Not to content to endorse yet another conservative school voucher scheme, President Bush appropriated the name of the very popular Pell Grant program to market it. And by targeting African-Americans with his "Pell Grants for Kids," Bush zeroed in on the one Democratic constituency conservatives believe might support it.

Back in 2006, Democrats steamrolled to a majority in Congress with an agenda that included an expansion of the Pell Grant program of college tuition assistance. Last September, President Bush signed a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. student loan program, a bill that passed overwhelmingly in both houses with only Republicans voting no. Of the bill, which caps student loan payments, reduces interest rates and expands the value of a Pell Grant to $5,400 by 2012, President Bush proclaimed, "I look forward to working with the Congress to ensure Pell Grant increases that are not fully funded in this bill are paid for with offsets in other areas."

If Bush has his way, one of those areas won't be school vouchers. In his speech last night, the President made one final push to start the slippery slope process of defunding public schools in order to subsidize religious and other private schools:

"We must also do more to help children when their schools do not measure up. Thanks to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships you approved, more than 2,600 of the poorest children in our Nation's Capital have found new hope at a faith-based or other non-public school. Sadly, these schools are disappearing at an alarming rate in many of America's inner cities. So I will convene a White House summit aimed at strengthening these lifelines of learning. And to open the doors of these schools to more children, I ask you to support a new $300 million program called Pell Grants for Kids. We have seen how Pell Grants help low-income college students realize their full potential. Together, we've expanded the size and reach of these grants. Now let us apply that same spirit to help liberate poor children trapped in failing public schools."

That private schools do not outperform public institutions (as ThinkProgress noted in response last night) is of no concern to President Bush and his allies advancing the voucher agenda. Needless to say, the White House backed the DC voucher regime Bush mentioned in the SOTU. In 2002, the Bush administration successfully backed Cleveland's voucher program before the Supreme Court, a transfer of public funds to the city's Catholic schools. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush opportunistically proposed a $1.9 billion Trojan horse program of school vouchers for children in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. And last January, President Bush proposed adding $4,000 vouchers to his revised No Child Left Behind bill.

Americans have consistently opposed voucher programs over the past decade. Since 1998, on average 57% of survey respondents have been against vouchers, with only 40% in favor. A 2006 poll saw the number in opposition rise to 60%.

Whether African-Americans and other minority groups support voucher payments to private schools, as conservative groups contend, remains a subject of raging debate. While polls in the late 1990's showed support for voucher programs among Washington DC residents, surveys in 2000 and 2001 showed opposition among a majority of black respondents nationally. And a 2001 Zogby poll revealed that African-American parents favored investments in smaller class sizes over voucher payments by a 7 to 1 margin. African-Americans in California (68%) and Michigan (78%) voted overwhelmingly against school voucher ballot initiatives in their states. Yet the expansion of urban voucher programs continues, with anecdotal evidence of minority support continuously offered by the press and right-wing think tanks alike.

President Bush clearly seems to think so. By targeting lower income and minority Americans, Bush and his conservative allies hope to chip away at the still formidable public support for public schools. And in much the same way he sold policies the Americans opposed with warm, friendly name like "Healthy Forests" and "Clear Skies", President Bush has hijacked the Pell Grants' good name to peddle his latest voucher scheme.

Anticipated to emphasize the slowing economy and the war in Iraq, the goals of the speech are said to be "modest." The President's dual needs to begin rewriting his legacy and badger Democrats in an election year suggest the direction and tenor of the SOTU. Still, we face the annual question: what will Bush cover in his address?

With a nod to Super Bowl week and the odds-makers in Las Vegas, here are 10 things to look for - or not - in George W. Bush's last State of the Union:

1. Ahmad Chalabi. The head of the Iraqi National Congress was a featured guest in 2004, seated just behind Laura Bush. The odds of a Chalabi encore in 2008: 5,000,000 to 1.

2. We're Making Progress in Iraq. Bush's running five-year description of adventure in Iraq is almost certain to reappear tonight. Don't be surprised to hear the President crow about the surge or reprise his pre-election warning of October 31, 2006, "However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses." Odds: 1 to 1.

3. Culture of Life. This talking point has been a fixture for President Bush and the conservative movement since before his election. Odds of Bush giving birth to a "culture of life"tonight: 2 to 1.

4. Making Tax Cuts Permament. Despite last week's CBO report revealing the 2008 federal budget deficit could reach $350 billion once the costs of the stimulus package is factored in, making his tax cuts permanent will be a highlight of the President's speech. The trillions of dollars of new red ink starting in 2009, like finding Osama Bin Laden, will be a problem for the next president. Odds are 1 to 1.

5. Mission To Mars. In 2004, President Bush proclaimed his desire to send American astronauts to Mars. Since then, not so much. The "Mars, Bitches" clarion call will have to be left to Dave Chappelle. Odds of a mission to Mars tonight: 1,000,000 to 1.

6. Freedom is God's Gift. In the run up to the Iraq war, President Bush declared, "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." The Almighty's gift of liberty has been a staple of the Bush Doctrine ever since. Odds of more gifts of freedom from above: 3 to 1. Odds of Republican Congressmen showing up with purple index fingers? 2,500,000 to 1.

7. Conflating All Muslims. Last year, President Bush introduced a now-standard element of Republican war on terror rhetoric, the conflation of all Muslims into a single, unified threat. "The Shia and Sunni extremists," Bush said, "are different faces of the same totalitarian threat." (Among the GOP contenders scrambling to replace Bush, Mitt Romney seems most fond of the unified threat theory.) Odds of Bush equating Osama Bin Laden with Babu Bhatt from Seinfeld: 10 to 1.

8. Terrorist Surveillance Program. With the debate over FISA, domestic spying and telecomm immunity raging in the Senate, President Bush is certain to play the fear-mongering card tonight. Expect an encore performance of the President's Saturday radio address, when he warned, "We need to know who our enemies are and what they are plotting. And we cannot afford to wait until after an attack to put the pieces together." Odds of the NSA listening in on us as we listening to President Bush make his bogus call for telecomm immunity: 1 to 1.

9. Laura Bush's Gang Initiative. In 2005, the President called on First Lady Laura Bush to lead an anti-gang initiative. The odds we'll be hearing an update on Laura's peace deal between the Bloods and the Cripps: 1,000 to 1.

10. The "Democrat Party." After the "thumpin'" his party received in the 2006 midterm elections, President Bush couldn't resist using the term "Democrat Party" to tweak his opponents ("it is clear the Democrat Party had a good night last night"). Despite his 2007 promise to the Congressional Black Caucus to end that adolescent taunt he's practiced dozens of times, President Bush just may not be able to help himself. Odds of a missing "ic" for the Democratic Party tonight: 5 to 1.

President Bush's past State of the Union addresses are available here.

Last week, I described the perils and pitfalls of Mitt Romney's sales pitch to replace George W. Bush as America's MBA President. Now, new developments from the campaign trail suggest that the morphing of Mitt Romney into George Bush is well underway.

The first hints of Romney's transformation came late last year. In the face of eventual Iowa winner Mike Huckabee's critique that "Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad," Romney rushed to President Bush's defense. Saying Huckabee sounded like a Democrat, Romney demanded an apology on behalf of his would-be predecessor. Romney told an Iowa crowd, "We ought to be saying thank you to the president for keeping us safe these last six years," adding on Meet the Press:

"That's an insult to the President and Mike Huckabee should apologize to the President."

As Huckabee found out, hell hath no fury like a Bushie scorned. In Iowa a few weeks later, Mitt Romney proclaimed his love for our troops - and for President Bush:

"We're a nation united that stands behind our fighting men and women. We honor them and respect them. We love what they've done for us, and we also love a president who has kept us safe these last six years."

Fast forward to 2008, and the whispers have started again, this time involving Mitt Romney and another apparent Quiz Show scam. During the Florida Republican debate last week, MSNBC microphones seemed to pick up a whispered answer ("He raised taxes, I'm not gonna.") to Mitt Romney just before he responded to a question about Reagan's social security fix. While the evidence is far from conclusive, as in Bush's 2004 situation, the case of Mitt Romney's mysterious earpiece is not closed.

According the Bill Kristol, Romney's fealty to Bush is paying dividends. While the former Massachusetts despite his full court press has been unable to secure the public endorsement of Jeb Bush in Florida, Kristol suggests other Bushies are backing Romney behind the scenes. Noting that vice presidential daughter Liz Cheney has joined the Romney campaign, Kristol told Chris Wallace on Fox News:

"I think some of the Bush family do support Romney, I think that's pretty clear."

Which probably shouldn't surprise anyone. With his love for the President's Iraq policy, misguided tax cuts and supposed culture of life, Mitt Romney is becoming one of the Bush clan.

Once again, the polls failed to capture the emerging dynamic in South Carolina. Heading into the last two days in the Palmetto State, surveys gave Obama leads as large as 20% (PPP) and as narrow a 3% (ARG). In what was portrayed as a major red flag for the Obama campaign, a McClatchy/MSNBC poll showed Barack Obama capturing only 10% of the white vote in South Carolina.

But as the final results and exit polling revealed, the South Carolina contest did not tighten as election day approached. Barack Obama not only doubled Hillary Clinton's vote (55% to 27%), but defeated her by 52% to 21% among those deciding in the last three days. While Obama took a whopping 78% of the African-American vote, a block which constituted 55% of the total ballots cast. But importantly for Democrats, the media-fed panic over a looming racial schism did not come to pass, as Obama earned 24% among white voters (among whom John Edwards and not Hillary Clinton was the first choice). Among white voters ages 18-29, Obama won outright, with 52% support to 27% for Hillary Clinton.

As I first suggested 8 days ago and amplified on Thursday, Bill Clinton's attack dog politics boomeranged not only on his legacy, but against his wife's campaign. 70% of South Carolina Democrats claimed Hillary's campaign unfairly attacked Barack Obama (compared to only 57% who claimed the reverse). In CNN's exit polling, 58% of voters said that Bill Clinton's role in the campaign was important or very important. Among that group, Obama defeated Mrs. Clinton by 11 points.

In New Hampshire and South Carolina, backlash voting produced very different results. In each case, it seems that voters had largely made up their minds but their support was soft. But when one candidate was seen as being unfairly attacked (Hillary Clinton by the likes of MSNBC's Chris Matthews in New Hampshire, Barack Obama in South Carolina by the Democratic 42nd president of the United States), his or her voters came home. This time, it appears that Bill Clinton helped fuel the backlash.

Facing off in last night's debate just days before Florida's make-or-break primary, the assembled Republican White House hopefuls were, so to speak, untrue to form. While Mitt Romney performed new backflips to extricate himself from the flip-flops that define so him, John McCain tried to evade his past confessions of his ignorance of economics. And once again, Mike Huckabee pretended to disavow the theocratic agenda obviously central to his campaign.

Mitt Romney's latest rhetorical contortion came in response to a devastating New York Times story about the GOP field's shared disdain for him. Asked by NBC co-moderator Brian Williams if his opponents' disregard was fueled by his money, his attacks ads and his tendency to "changes positions with the wind" on social issues like abortion, Romney was more than a little disingenuous in response:

"And when people come after me and say, where do you stand on this or where do you stand on that, I can point to a very simple way to find out exactly where I stand, and that is look at my record as governor.

Every issue that we're talking about in this race that's of a domestic nature, I dealt with as the governor of Massachusetts. And so on the issue of abortion, for instance, I came down on the side of life consistently as governor in every way I knew how I could do that."

As it turns out, not so much. Romney's abortion flip-flop, of course, is the stuff of legend. But one statement he made during his 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign is particularly telling:

"I promised that if elected, I'd call a truce - a moratorium, if you will...I vowed to veto any legislation that sought to change the existing rules...I fully respect and will fully protect a woman's right to choose."

When his close adviser Michael Murphy in 2005 famously said of Romney, "he's been a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly," the Massachusetts Governor again took a position at odds with anti-abortion forces:

''While I've said time and again that I oppose abortion, I've also indicated that I would not change in any way the abortion laws of Massachusetts, and I've honored my promises."

Meanwhile, John McCain struggled last night with statements of much more recent vintage. Given the dark economic storm clouds on the horizon, co-moderator Tim Russert asked Mr. Straight Talk about his 2005 quote, " I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated." In addition to citing a litany of supply-side charlatans including Phil Gramm and Jack Kemp purportedly advising him, McCain replied:

"Actually, I don't know where you got that quote from. I'm very well versed in economics."

Sadly, Russert got that quote from the bible of conservative economics, the Wall Street Journal. Worse still, McCain tooks pain to restate his glaring weakness on economics to the Wall Street Journal editorial board just last week. As the Huffington Post recounted:

At a recent meeting with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Republican presidential candidate John McCain admitted he "doesn't really understand economics" and then pointed to his adviser and former Senate colleague, Phil Gramm - whom he had brought with him to the meeting - as the expert he turns to on the subject.

Not to be outdone by the dissembling of the two leaders in Sunshine State polls, Mike Huckabee once again provided false assurances that as President he would have no desire to impose his religious views upon Americans. Told by Brian Williams that a Bush White House official confided that Huckabee's faith-based campaign gave him a "queasy feeling," Huckabee denied any theocratic intentions:

"My faith grounds me, it gives me a sense of direction and purpose. I don't try to impose it on other people. And I certainly would never use the auspices of government to try to push my faith."

But as I detailed just 10 days ago, that is exactly what Mike Huckabee has in mind. In the run-up to the Michigan primary, Huckabee declared his personal crusade to amend the Constitution by copying and pasting from the Bible:

"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And thats what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than trying to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family."

And so it goes. The Republicans fibbed in Florida on exactly the issues where you'd expect them to prevaricate. Mitt Romney lied gymnastically to avoid his obvious reversal on abortion. John McCain played dumb about being dumb when it came to the economy. And the extremist Mike Huckabee tried to portray himself as something other than the religious zealot he is. As for the other candidates, Rudy Giuliani was true to form as well, seemingly on a glide path to join Ron Paul in lonely irrelevance.

Last week on this site and over at DailyKos, I expressed my disappointment in the "attack dog" role that former President Bill Clinton had assumed in his wife Hillary's campaign. In making his leadership role among Democrats and esteemed position among most Americans subservient to Hillary's nomination, I argued, Bill Clinton had put his legacy at risk:

Perhaps the only development more disappointing than the injection of racial politics into the Democratic primary process has been the descent of Bill Clinton into attack dog politics. It seems that with each passing day, the still very popular former President sacrifices his good name - and the huge reservoir of good will he enjoys among the American people - in the service of his wife Hillary's presidential campaign. Sadly, while Bill Clinton's unseemly and undignified barbs may batter Barack Obama's standing, they also inflict lasting damage to his own.

But what seemed like a lonely place six days ago (judging by the opprobrium in some of the comments) now increasingly looks like the consensus position. Newsweek claimed Ted Kennedy and Rahm Emanuel told the former President to "pipe down." Representative Jim Clyburn told Clinton to "chill" over the weekend. Now, the highest profile Democrat in South Carolina and a key member of Nancy Pelosi's leadership team said, it "may be true" that Bill Clinton had sullied his reputation, adding, "What you say may hurt the other guy but it also may hurt you." And today, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich lamented:

"Bill Clinton's ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife's campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party."

Ben Smith at the Politico may well be right that Bill Clinton's attacks on Barack Obama aren't hurting Hillary in South Carolina. (The breaking news that the Clinton camp is pulling a negative ad in the Palmetto State may suggest otherwise.) But the risk of damage to his own exalted position among Democrats - and most American - is very real.

Note: I don't have a dog in the fight between Clinton and Obama, and would support whichever candidate (John Edwards included) garners the nomination. By way of full disclosure, I assisted Robert Reich's campaign for governor of Massachusetts in 2002.

UPDATE: In the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne details a 1991 WaPo reporters' meeting where then-candidate Bill Clinton praised Ronald Reagan's role in the Cold War, among other things. Noting that "If Obama is a Reaganite, then I am a salamander," Dionne then asks, "Why should either Clinton attack Obama for facing some of the truths that both of them taught their party so long ago?" Even Hillary is apparently getting the message about the burgeoning backlash against Bill. Appearing on the CBS Early Show, Senator Clinton said of her husband, "He said several times yesterday that maybe he got a little bit carried away."

In the run-up to the critical Republican primary in Florida next Tuesday, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is stressing his business background. With the economy turning sour and the GOP candidates predictably turning to talk of tax cuts, Romney is touting his CEO credentials. Unfortunately, history shows that what's good for Mitt Romney's business isn't always good for America. Worse still, Romney desire to be the nation's second MBA president only serves to remind Americans that their experience with the first MBA president - George W. Bush - wasn't a pleasant one.

In Florida this week, Romney made the case that his Harvard MBA, his tenure at Bain, his Salt Lake Olympics experience and his stewardship of Massachusetts uniquely qualified him as America's CEO during tough economic times. The multimillionaire venture capitalist told Florida voters:

"I know how America works because I spent my life in the real economy...I won't need a briefing on how the economy works. I've been there. I know how the economy works."

Earlier in the week, Romney offered the reader's digest version of his resume:

"I've spent my life, 25 years...in the world of business. I know why jobs come and go."

As his record shows, Mitt Romney is all too familiar with why jobs go - out of state, out of the country or just go altogether.

In 1994, Romney's career as a vulture capitalist boomeranged against him in his Senate race against Ted Kennedy. The tale of SCM, a northern Indiana-based stationery company purchased by Ampad, a firm owned by Romney and a group of investors, came to dominate the campaign. As the New York Times recounted, in that instance in the vulture capitalist label was well-earned in the subsequent crackdown on the workers there:

Management has shed 41 of 265 blue-collar jobs, cut wages, tripled some workers' health insurance payments, abolished most of their seniority rights and junked the prior management's union contract, which had two years to run.

Romney's record in Massachusetts also loses some its luster upon closer inspection. While his campaign this week boasted of creating 57,600 jobs during Romney's tenure from 2003 to 2007, Northeastern University economist Andrew Sum pointed out that Massachusetts' performance lagged well behind the national average. As Reuters reported:

"The state lagged the U.S. average during that period in job creation, economic growth and wage increases.

As a strict labor market economist looking at the record, Massachusetts did very poorly during the Romney years, he [Sum] said. "On every measure you've got, the state was a substantial under-performer."

Romney's claims regarding the state budget are also largely chimerical. Like President Bush, Romney took credit for halving a budget deficit based on a wildly inflated initial forecast. The $3 billion shortfall Romney predicted January 2003 never materialized, as rising capital gains tax receipts alone trimmed the deficit to $1.3 billion.

One of the more fascinating legacies of Mitt Romney's private sector background concerns one of his favorite bogeyman, Iran. As I noted last February ("Romney, Cheney in Deep with Iran Investments"), in early 2007 Romney launched a high-profile campaign calling on state pension funds (in Democratic states, of course) to divest their holdings in firms doing business with Iran. Unfortunately for him, his old company was one of them.

On February 22, Romney sent letters to Democratic leaders including New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, Senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton as well as state comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli urging a policy of "strategic disinvestment from companies linked to the Iranian regime." But as the AP quickly discovered, Romney's former employer (Bain & Co.) and the company he founded (Bain Capital) have extensive links to recent Iranian business deals. Apparently missing the irony, Romney responded by saying of his Iran disinvestment PR scheme, "this is something for now-forward."

While Fox News is only too happy to promote Mitt Romney as the next MBA president, Americans are still suffering through the leadership of the first one. As I documented at length in 2006 ("Cheater in Chief: Bush as the MBA President"), more telling than President Bush's failure as our business leader is his personification of the MBA cheating culture itself. From working connections and claiming credit for the work of others to fudging the numbers and outright lying, George W. Bush is the picture of the MBA gone bad.

Which, as it turns out, is all too often the finished product of America's business schools. A 2006 Duke University study of 5,300 students at 54 institutions found that 56% of MBA students acknowledged cheating, more than those in fields such as education (48%), social sciences (39%) or even law (45%). Apparently, it is our future business leaders, and not the GOP bogeymen the trial lawyers, that Americans should trust least

Remember that the next time Mitt Romney proclaims he will be America's CEO President.

In case panicked financial markets, rising unemployment, surging inflation and a credit crunch weren't enough cause for worry, Congressional Budget Office director Peter Orzag today added the mushrooming federal budget deficit to the mix. Coming as President Bush and Congressional leaders are conferring on a massive new economic stimulus package, the CBO estimated a $250 billion gap in 2008, up from $163 billion the previous year. Now Bush's budgetary sleight of hand, it would appear, is about to fall victim to the rosy scenario.

Back in the 2004 campaign, George W. Bush famously promised to halve the federal budget deficit by 2009. But that commitment, as the Washington Post, CNN and others noted at the time, was premised upon two parallel frauds.

First, Bush's pompous prediction used as its baseline a wildly inflated White House deficit forecast of $521 billion, well above the CBO's estimate and the actual figure of $413 million. More importantly, President Bush conveniently chose 2009 as his finish line, the year before his tax cuts were set to expire. Making them permanent (which he and all of the GOP presidential candidates endorse) would blow another $2.2 trillion hole in the federal budget by 2014. In addition, other required costs (such as the Medicare prescription drug plan) and likely federal tax code adjustments (most notably fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax) would add hundreds of billions more in red ink to the national ledger. And all of that is before the deluge of Social Security and Medicare expenditures looming with the retirement of the baby boom generation.

Nonetheless, when the budget deficit dipped last year to $163 billion, the Bush administration proclaimed victory and vindication. On its web page titled, "Fiscal Discipline: Managing for Results," the White House crowed:

"The deficit has been cut in half three years ahead of the President's 2009 goal. Historic revenue growth and a continued commitment to spending restraint contributed to this reduction."

As it turns, not so much.

While not predicting a recession outright, the CBO report stated the clear impact of the American economic slowdown. "After three years of declining budget deficits," the report concluded, "a slowing economy this year will contribute to an increase in the deficit." As Orzag noted, President Bush and his successors will have few policy choices to addressing the exploding deficit:

"A substantial reduction in the growth of spending, a significant increase in tax revenues relative to the size of the economy, or some combination of the two will be necessary to maintain the nation's long-term fiscal stability."

Alas, the same free lunch philosophy that fueled President Bush's bogus 2004 promise informs the nonsensical prescriptions of his would-be Republican successors. Tax cuts, which GOP doctrine now claims is the universal cure-all for surpluses and deficits, male pattern baldness and erectile dysfunction, are at the center of every Republican economic program. Despite the fact that the Bush tax cuts accounted for half of the federal budget deficit (as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [CBPP] demonstrated), McCain, Giuliani and Romney would make them permanent.

That's a promise Americans can do without.

Over at Media Matters, Eric Boehlert details the backlash that engulfed MSNBC's Chris Matthews over his aggressive and often sexist commentary about Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the New Hampshire primary. But more important than the analysis of the "blog swarm" against Matthews is the prospect that his ham-fisted oafishness helped propel Hillary Clinton to her surprising victory. Chris Matthews may well be the Rick Lazio of 2008.

But his gimmick quickly backfired among New York voters. Women in particular recoiled as Lazio walked over to her podium and tried to intimidate her into signing his gimmick document. That was the turning point in the race which Hillary Clinton ultimately won by 12%.

Fast forward to 2008 and the Lazio effect seemed to once again be at work for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. There, Clinton reversed a double-digit deficit in the final polls to defeat Barack Obama. As I suggested afterwards, "in a nutshell, Hillary's voters originally made up their minds a long time ago, and on Election Day, they came home." While the apparent double-teaming by Barack Obama and John Edwards in the final debate may have something to do with it, Boehlert's piece suggests a backlash by women voters against a different bully: Chris Matthews.

That Matthews had a rich history of badgering Hillary Clinton is beyond dispute. As Jamison Foer documented, Matthews' juvenile and sexist rhetoric towards Clinton predated his final offense that "the reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around":

Matthews has referred to Clinton as "She devil." He has repeatedly likened Clinton to "Nurse Ratched," referring to the scheming, manipulative character in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest who "asserts arbitrary control simply because she can." He has called her "Madame Defarge." And he has described male politicians who have endorsed Clinton as "castratos in the eunuch chorus."

Matthews has compared Clinton to a "strip-teaser" and questioned whether she is "a convincing mom." He refers to Clinton's "cold eyes" and the "cold look" she supposedly gives people; he says she speaks in a "scolding manner" and is "going to tell us what to do."

As the startling numbers rolled in on primary night in New Hampshire, Matthews and his colleagues struggled for an explanation to account for his Hillary Clinton's come from behind victory in the face of polls that universally predicted a thorough defeat. As Boehlert recounts, Air America host and MSNBC regular Rachel Maddow was quick to offer a theory for the massive movement of women voters to Clinton at the polls. Contrary to Pat Buchanan's claim that Granite State voters "body-slammed" the press corps, Maddow argued instead for a Matthews backlash:

"You want to know who they're blaming for women voters breaking for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama? Who they're blaming for this late showing in a big vote for Hillary Clinton? They're blaming Chris Matthews. People are citing specifically Chris as a -- not only for his own views -- but also for as a symbol of what the mainstream media has done to Hillary Clinton."

The rest, as they say, is history. Her campaign resuscitated, Hillary Clinton went on to win Nevada. For his part, Chris Matthews was inundated by a blog swarm and ultimately issued an apology of sorts. But should Hillary Clinton go on to win the nomination, Chris Matthews - the Rick Lazio of Campaign '08 - will have had a major hand in it.

In South Carolina last Thursday, the former Arkansas Governor and Baptist minister used a surprising scatological reference in making his unsurprising appeal to the neo-Confederate crowd:

"You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole, that's what we'd do."

But Huckabee's message was no paean to states' rights or the oft-praised proudly independent South Carolina. The impact of his words is more sinister and simply unmistakable.

"This afternoon, an extraordinary young man named Roland Shepard made what had to have been an excruciating decision. He said he wasn't playing football under a Confederate flag. Six of his teammates then chose not to let Shepard stand alone. And I choose to join them at this moment.

In the history of the South, there's much to celebrate. And that flag is a desecration of all of it. It's a banner of hatred and separation. It's a banner of ignorance and violence and a war that pitted brother against brother, and to ask young black men and women, young Jewish men and women, Asians, Native Americans, to ask Americans to walk beneath its shadow is a humiliation of irreducible proportions. And we all know it."

For all of its coverage of the 2008 presidential horse race, the American media never approached this painfully honest assessment of the supposed "issue" of the Confederate flag. To find an eloquent, elegant and simple examination, Americans instead needed to view an old primetime TV show about sports.

For its part, ABC dropped Sports Night after two seasons. Hopefully, Mike Huckabee's political career will be cancelled before he reaches the White House.

On this celebration of Martin Luther King Day, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney showed once again that he is completely out of his element when it comes to matters of race and ethnicity. First, Romney offered his own rendition of "Who Let the Dogs Out" to a group of African-Americans in Jacksonville. Then that same day Romney, who insisted in the past that "we cannot be a bilingual nation," began running Spanish language ads in Florida.

The typically old-fashioned Romney was relaxed enough to quote from a popular hit single from a few years back.

"Who let the dogs out?" he called out, as he stood there beaming in his shirt and tie. "Who! Who!"

(At least on this score, Romney is in good company. During the '04 campaign, the desperate-to-be-hip Democrat Wesley Clark offer his own pop culture laugher, "I don't know much about hip-hop, but I do know OutKast can make you shake it like a Polaroid picture.")

Of course, this awkward episode was hardly the first for Mitt Romney when it comes to black voters. In July 2006 while describing Boston's ongoing Big Dig project, Romney joined Tony Snow and John McCain in the casual use of the "tar baby" slur. As the Boston Globe recounted:

In his first major political trip out of the state since a ceiling collapse in a Big Dig tunnel killed a Boston woman on July 10, Romney told 200 people at a Republican lunch Saturday about the political risks of his efforts to oversee the project.

"The best thing for me to do politically is stay away from the Big Dig -- just get as far away from that tar baby as I possibly can," he said in answer to a question from the audience.

While Romney apologized for the remark, his spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom offered an improbable explanation. "The governor was describing a sticky situation," he claimed, "He was unaware that some people find the term objectionable, and he's sorry if anyone was offended."

Meanwhile, Romney's cognitive challenges concerning matters of race and ethnicity also surfaced in his courtship of the Cuban vote in next week's Florida primary. There, Romney debuted a new Spanish language ad title "Mi Padre", featuring the candidate's son Craig. In the spot, Romney himself chimes in with "soy Mitt Romney y apruebo este mensaje" (I'm Mitt Romney and I approved this message).

Sadly, the former Massachusetts Governor has been an outspoken advocate of English-only in the United States. As ThinkProgress documented, Romney's past statements make his current Sunshine State pandering more than a little hypocritical:

"English needs to be the language that is spoken in America. We cannot be a bilingual nation like Canada."

"You strengthen the American people by securing our borders and by insisting that the children who come legally to this land are taught in English."

Making matters worse, Romney was one of the Republican candidates who skipped the Spanish language Univision debate in Florida last September. (Only John McCain agreed to attend.) As Cecilia Munoz of the National Council of La Raza put it, "It's not just that they are not coming. It's that some of them are visibly insulting us." It was only after pressure from leading Republicans that the Romney and other GOP campaigns agreed to a rescheduled Univision event in December.

None of which is to suggest that Mitt Romney is an unreformed bigot making base appeals to the Republican base. (In December, Romney told NBC's Tim Russert that he "literally wept" and "could not have been more pleased" when he learned of the 1978 decision by his Mormon church to finally end its prohibitions against black members.) More opportunist than racist, Mitt Romney is just comically awkward and painfully inappropriate.

Or as Isaac Jaffe (played by Robert Guillaume) might have put it on the late, great TV show Sports Night, do you suppose Mitt Romney "could be any more white?"

UPDATE: As the New York Times noted, Romney also showed his street cred by telling a small child wearing a gold necklace, "Oh, you've got some bling-bling here."

In the wake of his New Hampshire and South Carolina victories, the once-and-future GOP frontrunner John McCain is enjoying a charmed life when it comes to the press. Just days after John King's puff piece on CNN, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz offered a glowing review of McCain's accessibility to the press. But as he conveniently continues his retreat from his past positions on immigration and tax cuts as the Republican race heads to Florida, John McCain should be receiving more media scrutiny - not less.

Even before he exorcised his demons in South Carolina on Saturday, McCain claimed to have sworn off pandering to Republican primary voters. Back in April 2000, McCain admitted his flirtation with the Confederate flag-waving crowd in South Carolina was unprincipled - and a mistake:

"I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So, I chose to compromise my principles. I broke my promise to always tell the truth."

Just last week, McCain repeated to Katie Couric of CBS News that his dishonesty over the Confederate flag 8 years ago was the exception to the rule:

"I knew it was a symbol that was offensive to so many people. And afterwards, I went back and apologized. But it was needless to say, by saying that I wouldn't have anything to do with an issue like that was an act of cowardice."

Triumphant on Saturday night, McCain proclaimed such cowardice was so eight years ago.

"In the course of this campaign, I have tried as best I could to tell people the truth -- to tell them the truth about the challenges facing our country and how I intend to address them.

As I have said before -- and you have heard me -- before I can win your vote, I must earn your respect. And the only way I know how to do that is by being honest with you."

Not, it would seem, on immigration and the Bush tax cuts. In each case, Mr. Straight Talk abandoned principled positions of the past as part of his just-in-time pandering process with conservative GOP primary voters.

Nowhere is McCain's turnabout more startling than on immigration. With Ted Kennedy, McCain was the face of the comprehensive immigration reform package that went down to defeat in Congress last year. But as the Washington Times and Tim Russert on Meet the Press detailed, McCain underwent a conversion on the road to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. As the ultra-right Times noted on January 14, 2008:

The Arizona Republican now says that, in the wake of last summer's defeat of "comprehensive immigration reform," he has "gotten the message" that the border must be secured before the status of illegals already in the United States can be dealt with.

The chilly reception McCain's immigration record received among Republican primary voters might just have something to do with his now-perpetual pledge to "secure the borders first." Just last Monday, a crowd in Michigan booed McCain as he spoke about his views on illegal immigration. It's no wonder he grew testy the previous week when Russert dredged up McCain's 2003 assessment that "I think we can set up a program where amnesty is extended to a certain number of people who are eligible." With illegal immigration at or near the top of the list of most important issues for GOP voters in Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada, neutralizing his exposure remains a priority for McCain.

So, too, on the Bush tax cuts. As McCain takes his Straight Talk Express to Florida, he faces the dual prospects of jitters on the economy and a desperate Rudy Giuliani making what could be his final stand in the Sunshine State. And that means fidelity to George W. Bush's tax cuts will be paramount. On Monday, Giuliani threw down the gauntlet, "John voted against the Bush tax cuts, I think on both occasions, and sided with the Democrats."

McCain's response is typical of his Republican primary tightrope walk. The Bush tax cuts he once labeled unfair to the middle class and fiscally irresponsible should now be made permanent.

As the laissez-faire fanatics at the Club for Growth detail, McCain is proof that evolution is reversing when it comes to the Bush tax gambit. In June 2001, McCain proclaimed his opposition to Round 1 of President Bush's treasury-financed redistribution of wealth:

"I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief."

By December 2007, however, that message sounded more like John Edwards than Ronald Reagan, so candidate John McCain needed a different rationale. As by the National Review's Rich Lowry on Fox News if he thought it had been a mistake to vote against the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, McCain claimed in the name of fiscal discipline he would do it all again:

"No, because I had significant tax cuts, and there was restraint of spending included in my proposal. I saw no restraint in spending. We presided over the greatest increase in the size of government since the Great Society. Spending went completely out of control. It's still out of control. Wasteful earmark spending is a disgrace, and it caused us to alienate our Republican base."

Of course, the spending cuts never came from the Bush White House or the Republican Congress. But with a presidential bid in the offing, McCain decided the third time was a charm. As Tim Russert noted on January 6th, McCain not only voted for the budget busting tax cuts the third time around, but now believes they should be made permanent:

SEN. McCAIN: ...unless we cut spending then, then we are going to end up in a - the serious situation we're in today. I will cut spending. And I will continue to support making the tax cuts permanent, which I've voted already twice.

MR. RUSSERT: But you voted the third time for the tax cuts, but there weren't spending cuts.

SEN. McCAIN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. No, but I thought that we ought to keep the tax cuts permanent because if we had increased taxes, which that would have had the effect of, if I had voted in the other way...

John McCain's reversals, of course, are not limited to immigration and the Bush tax cuts. Going back to 2006, McCain courted the same Bush political machine that savaged him six years earlier. More comical, McCain had a born-again experience with the religious right, pursuing a rapprochement with Jerry Falwell and disavowing his 2000 labeling of him as an "agent of intolerance." McCain admitted as much as much ("I'm afraid so") when he acknowledged to the Daily Show's Jon Stewart that he was indeed traveling to "crazy base world."

But in the afterglow of McCain's New Hampshire triumph, the press seems content to level the flip-flopping charge against Hillary Clinton over driver's licenses for illegal immigrants and against Mitt Romney for, well, everything. As for John McCain, Time's Ana Marie Cox insists there won't be a repeat of the media infatuation from 2000, noting, "There's a sense that the first time was so fun and exciting, but this time we're really going to be sober and critical and the dispassionate observers we're supposed to be."

Just let us know when that starts.

With the Nevada caucuses and the South Carolina Republican primary now history, it is once again time for the post-mortem. From the blatantly obvious to the possibly outlandish, here are five observations from Saturday's presidential primary action.

1. The Incredible Shrinking Legacy of Bill Clinton
On Friday, I worried that Bill Clinton's descent into attack dog politics in the service of his wife Hillary's campaign threatened to diminish his reputation and popularity among Democrats in particular and Americans in general. As it turns out, I wrote that piece a day too soon. As the Politico noted Saturday, Bill Clinton claimed in Nevada that he personally witnessed voter suppression by the Cu