Word: romneys
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This much is certain: no candidate in either party has done more with less this year. Lacking Mitt Romney's money, Rudy Giuliani's name recognition and John McCain's chest full of medals, Huckabee has leveraged his opportunities like Archimedes on a good day. His steady, good-humored performances in televised debates gradually lifted him out of the second tier and helped smother his main rival for evangelical affections, Sam Brownback of Kansas. Meanwhile, Huckabee has never lost sight of the core fact of the Iowa caucuses: turnout is minuscule. Because of inconvenient scheduling (on a school night...
...August, the dark horse had enough support to generate 2,587 votes at the Ames straw poll, a fund-raising fandango for the Iowa GOP at which candidates pay to have their supporters attend. Huckabee finished a distant second behind free-spending Romney, while Giuliani and McCain skipped the event entirely. But veteran pols noted that Huckabee's tally exceeded the number of tickets he bought--speculating that people were taking Romney's freebies but casting their ballots for Huckabee...
Huckabee's lack of money--Romney has outspent him in Iowa by about 20 to 1--hasn't hurt him yet, but he will need millions if he hopes to keep going. So he is devoting precious days to raising cash outside Iowa, making it harder to win converts on the prairie. It is the old flaw in the Iowa breakout strategy: How can anyone survive the abrupt transformation from guerrilla to gorilla? One day you're the Lone Ranger; the next, you're in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. Unless you can morph into Patton...
...that brings up another crucial difference between Romney's predicament and Kennedy's. You could call it the fervor gap. Like the Southern Baptists, Mormons are a professing religion: they want to spread the word, win converts, save souls. This isn't a problem for a lot of Americans. But it is a problem for many conservative Christians. Many of them believe that if the G.O.P. nominates Romney - much less if the country elects him as President - Mormons will gain a stronger hand in the all-important business of saving souls. To them, the stakes of that struggle...
...They're also, above all, trying to keep hope alive. "It's amazing he's come so far," says Carter Wamp of Huckabee's dramatic rise in Iowa from back-of-the-pack to Republican caucus front-runner alongside Mitt Romney. "No one expects anything from us," says Raena Davis, acknowledging Biden's low poll numbers. But as befits someone willing to devote herself nonstop to such a cause, she is predicting a surprise strong showing for her man, saying, "I'm more than optimistic. I'm absolutely confident...