GOP Race Fluid in Illinois

A fluid race in Illinois for the GOP presidential pick. Giuliani narrowly leads. Most significantly, the Huckabee boomlet hits the polls here, but it may have gone bust (let's hope) by the time Feb. 5th rolls around, and the most reliable voters are split. Tribune:

Three in 10 voters who describe themselves as moderates are backing Giuliani while 30 percent of those who call themselves very conservative are supporting Huckabee. Giuliani holds a 31 percent support rating from voters younger than 50 compared with 18 percent for Huckabee. Among voters older than 50, a consistent voting bloc, support is widely dispersed among the field.

So Romney, or even Thompson or McCain may yet emerge the victors.

One more note-- it's ridiculous to compare Huckabee to Reagan on foreign policy--he has no believable foreign policy at all, he just parrots others' talking points. President Reagan had a sustained, philosophical aversion to communism over the course of two decades--that's one of the reasons he switched from Democrat to Republican, and he was willing to call the USSR an evil empire, put defensive missiles in Europe, and initiate Star Wars.

Until just this week, Huckabee wanted to play footsie with Castro to sell rice from Arkansas and still thinks if we play nice with Islamo-fascism they'll just want to get along. Sure, let's turn the other cheek and get our heads cut off.

As far as nation-building Bush has it right, before Sept. 11th and now. Before Sept. 11th, we would have been viewed as imperialists, as a bossy hyperpower, and anyway, the French were carving out that niche for themselves and Russia was preoccupied with its own issues. Since Sept. 11th we had no choice but to view nations who harbored and sponsored terrorist and/or conventional attacks on us or our allies as terrorist states themselves--first Afghanistan, then Iraq.(Iran always looming large in the background.)

In both cases we were enforcing UN resolutions I might add. And dealing with the asymmetric use of force required us to engage in counter-insurgency operations in those countries, for a lasting peace. True, we need to increase the size of our military so that they and our reserves are not worn out, no one but Democrats disagrees with that, but as far as Huckabee's idea of civilians doing the heavy lifting of reconstruction that is not realistic. Terrorists deliberately target civilians and soft targets.

Huckabee is a silly lightweight on foreign policy, and Republicans would be fools to nominate him. National security may not be everyone's top priority now, with the recent strides of the surge in Iraq, but with a naive, weak president like Huckabee or Obama it would become an issue on day one as hostile countries moved to take advantage of us.

Related post: The Abysmal Huckabee