This morning's New York Times has an analysis of how John McCain can benefit from Mike Huckabee's win in the Iowa caucuses:
Mike Huckabee’s defeat of Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses jolted a Republican Party establishment already distressed about the state of its presidential field.
But out of the turmoil may rise yet another opportunity for Senator John McCain of Arizona, whose candidacy all but collapsed last year.
If only by default, Mr. McCain is getting yet another look and appears to be in a strong position competing against a weakened Mr. Romney in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.
Mr. McCain is the latest beneficiary of the continuing upheaval in the Republican field that has seen nearly all of the candidates rising at various points. Among them were Mr. McCain, former Senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee and Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York.
Mr. Romney’s defeat in Iowa only underlined concerns that many Republicans had expressed about him, while the success of Mr. Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, gave rise to new worries among the Republican establishment.
“Among the intelligentsia of the party, there is definitely a deep concern about Huckabee getting the nomination because a lot of them think he can’t win,” said John Feehery, a former senior House Republican aide and party operative. “Part of it is self-interested panic since they have their own horses in the race, and none of them are riding Huckabee.”
Mr. McCain, then — after a year in which his campaign nearly collapsed, the Iraq war and a controversial immigration bill eroded his popularity, and he was forced to continue his candidacy on a bare-bones budget — may be in the right place at the right time....Even before the Iowa vote, polls suggested that New Hampshire voters were embracing Mr. McCain and his slightly iconoclastic message the way they did in 2000. At the same time, they were moving away from Mr. Romney.
Advisers to Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney said they believed that Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, was already weakened before Iowa and was now even more vulnerable. Evidence of that could be seen in a furious exchange of attack advertisements between the two men Friday.
Complicating Mr. Romney’s life even more, Mr. Huckabee’s campaign manager, Ed Rollins, suggested he was entering something of a temporary alliance of interest with Mr. McCain against Mr. Romney. Mr. Rollins said Mr. Huckabee would be using the next several days to present what he said would be an unfavorable comparison of their records as governor.
“We’re going to see if we can’t take Romney out,” Mr. Rollins said. “We like John. Nobody likes Romney.”
Perhaps the Huckabee forces are angling for the vice-presidential slot on a potential McCain-Huckabee ticket in the fall.
Rich Lowry suggests McCain's got advantages:
McCain’s comeback has been fueled by the success of the infusion of troops into Iraq that he was supporting long before anyone had thought to call it “the surge.” In his early and fierce advocacy of the surge, McCain did far more to advance the war on terror than any other candidate. It showed keen strategic intuition and put in the best possible light characteristic McCain qualities, especially a cussed willingness to forge his own path.
But Lowry argues McCain's used his firm prescience on Iraq to push a number of other policy apostasies on the party that may weaken him in his quest to recapture the frontrunner's perch.
How that question gets resolved may depend more on how the campaign plays out over the next days and weeks, and less so on the candidates' policy resumes.
Photo Credit: New York Times
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