I’m kind of digging the Republican primary race. My take on it is that it should go on for as long as possible, and the fringe candidates are only helping. Normally, the standard GOP murderers’ row of whackos scares me, but this year I think it’s all to the good. I’m shamelessly rooting for an internecine religious war, and they’re going out of their way to provide one. My reason, of course, is that the crazier they look the better the chance the public will finally wake up to what the Republican party stands for, and the longer they claw at each other the more money they spend and the more damage they do to the eventual front-runner. Even if that turns out to be Giuliani (as it likely will), letting the religious nuts work themselves into a frenzy, only to be disappointed when none of their candidates gets the nod, will have the effect of keeping them from the polls in disgust in the general election. And if one of the nutsos does get the nomination (very unlikely), the others will have spent so much time fracturing themselves along denominational lines that the same thing will happen to a large degree. Either way: a Democratic victory, a GOP schism, and the harsh light of publicity on how crazy, how dangerous, and how vicious the religious right is.

From that hopeful perspective, the current campaign has been surprisingly rewarding, and the Iowa straw poll was almost a gift.

The three weirdest religious candidates dominated the poll, with the no-hope Romney leading and Huckabee making a surprisingly strong showing for second place, just ahead of Brownback. Noam Schreiber (link above) sees this as Huckabee’s path to victory. First, he notes that Huckabee paid for poll entrance (it costs $35 to vote in the straw poll - who would pay on their own?) for far fewer supporters than Romney or Brownback, but wound up getting more votes than he paid for, while both the other two got fewer - and most of the defectors seemed to come from voters who’d heard Huckabee’s red-meat-whacko speech about abortion, guns, and gays.

[I]t’s hard to overstate the significance of Huckabee’s performance here. Combined, Huckabee and Brownback–the field’s two leading social conservatives–outpolled Mitt Romney today 33 to 31.5. If, as the results suggest, Huckabee emerges as the lone standard bearer for this group, he’ll probably end up with a block of support to rival Romney’s. . . . It will be interesting to see what he can do with the fundraising boost he’ll enjoy after today. On top of that, there seem to be a lot of social conservatives currently supporting Romney because he’s running as the most conservative of the top-tier candidates. Now that Huckabee has demonstrated his viability, it’s not hard to imagine him peeling off a decent number of Romney’s conservative backers.

(Bizarrely, Schreiber reports that the press is all pro-Huckabee because “he can banter with the best of them”. That’s hard to believe. BooMan has a good take on this, by the way.)

But, even if Huckabee does have traction on the religious right, the other two aren’t going to give up easily. Romney, in particular, is in this for the long haul - he’s got the money and the delusional confidence to ensure that he’ll never have to quit, and will never be willing to.

What this means is there’ll be a three-way race between Romney, Huckabee, and Brownback for whacko-of-the-year, with Romney carrying a 10-pound handicap because he’s Mormon. H & B will be running neck-and-neck “whisper campaigns” (that phrase has already become a Romney campaign slogan, by the way - and there’s more to come!) for nomination as the only “real” Christian in the bunch, but Romney is better-looking, hugely rich, and better at pandering. That basically means H&B are competing for the right to challenge Romney in the long run - Schreiber is probably right that one of them will drop out soon, though why everyone thinks it’ll be Brownback solely on the basis of this poll I don’t know. Romney can’t win because the evangelical right will drop him like a Latter-Day hot potato, and the other two can’t win because (a) they’re the crudest kind of scary wingnut and people are finally getting tired of that, and (b) Romney will have them flogged and keelhauled before he finally throws in the towel. But I do think we’ll have at least two of them, and almost certainly Romney, in the race at least until the nomination is sewn up - and if they run strongly enough, they can keep Giuliani from sewing it up for a long time, thus giving the religious right more time to learn to hate him.

I see good times ahead.