The inimitable Democratic advocate and aforetime Michael Dukakis campaign manager, Susan Estrich, was recently quoted on Fox News as saying: “But when the Republicans nominate Huckabee? Honey, I’m dancing at the Inaugural ball.”

Dancing? Honey, if Huckabee is selected by the GOP crack out your limbo poles in January 2009. Buy enough Twister mats for 10,000 socked feet. And tell Howard Dean to stop his childish hoarding and to share his Xavier Cugat LPs with us all!

But exactly how ebullient should Democrats and others be about last night? Howard Dean must be happy because Democratic voters came out in droves. The Obama people, for their part, have every reason to be delighted. True, the Democratic caucusing ritual is so convoluted that its results must always be interpreted with caution.

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Now I esteem Chuck Norris and three-chord Rock as much as the next guy, but I am still a tad skeptical about Mike Huckabee's chances of winning his party's presidential nomination.

It seems doubtful, for example, that he will carry New Hampshire--if only because Evangelicals there do not comprise anywhere near the 38% of Republican voters that they do in Iowa. It is estimated that about 18% of the Republican electorate in New Hampshire is Evangelical (versus, incidentally, a whopping 53% in South Carolina).

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As I think about what lies ahead for the Republican Party the phrase “pier-sixer” keeps coming to mind. What, pray tell, is a pier-sixer? While its precise etymology is uncertain, it may be said with impunity that it refers to some type of horrifically violent, physical altercation.

Having grown up in coastal Brooklyn--fertile ground for those who participate in horrifically violent, physical altercations--I always imagined a pier-sixer as follows: a few dozen beefy Merchant Marines are standing on an abandoned Red Hook wharf in the early hours of a hopelessly cold February night. The Merchant Marines have consumed significant quantities of spirits. And they are kicking one another’s heads in.

After last night’s victory and on the basis of recent Republican history I am now projecting an all-out pier-sixer in the days leading up to the South Carolina primary of January 19th. It is certainly a prize worth fighting (dirty) for: Since 1980 no Republican who has lost the Palmetto State has ever won the GOP presidential nomination.

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At last night’s intermittently entertaining GOP debate in South Carolina, Mike Huckabee was asked about a 1998 USA Today advertisement in which he and 130 other signatories endorsed the Report of the Baptist Faith and Message Study Committee to the Southern Baptist Convention.
One of the lines from the report that Huckabee and others praised a decade ago reads as follows:

“A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”

For months now, bloggers have been mulling this over -- something that the diligent Fox News staff must have picked up on (Though the ad, I as best I can tell, only appeared in USA Today and not The New York Times , as Carl Cameron's question indicated). Huckabee responded calmly, with the demeanor of a professor clarifying a popular misconception expressed by a well-meaning, but utterly misguided, freshman.

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As I ventured into the hotel lobby in Jeddah earlier this week, I was not thinking about the role of women in Islam, but the issue came abruptly into the picture. In my terms I felt pretty well covered in a mid-calf dark red suit with long sleves, but I was quickly conscious of disapproving stares from two hotel porters. One asked me what I was looking for in a way that made it clear I did not belong there.

I knew that women in Saudi Arabia are required to wear the long black robes known as abayas in public places, and I was hoping to find a shop that sold them in the lobby. In the meantime, I thought I would be given a pass in this hotel that catered to Western visitors. It was my temporary home–for me, it wasn't really a public place, was it? The porter's glance told me otherwise.

My abaya search was unsuccessful and I turned to a planned meeting with a colleague (a man) whom I had known for years. We sat down at a café in the middle of the lobby. A waiter materialized instantly, but said that these tables were for men only. There was a "family" section, hidden to one side, where they were willing to serve us. It's been a long time since I felt that combined sense of being unwelcome and disapproved of.

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In light of the responses to Friday’s post, I get the distinct impression that some of you are hankering for a little exegetical action.

A few commentators have argued that Mike Huckabee was absolutely correct when he claimed last Thursday that the Book of Ephesians teaches us that: “as wives submit themselves to their husbands the husbands also submit themselves [to their wives].”

But I am sticking to my guns. His "egalitarian" reading of that Scripture strikes me as extremely problematic. But more to the point, he is evasively backing away from the less-than egalitarian conclusions of the Report of the Baptist Faith and Message Study Committee to the Southern Baptist Convention—conclusions which he enthusiastically endorsed in a 1998 USA Today advertisement. First let's deal with the Scriptures. Then with the SBC report.

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Now that we have examined Mike Huckabee’s views on wifely (and husbandly) submission, it is time to turn to another important issue that came up in last week's GOP debate. Namely, his assurance that as president he would never impose his faith on other Americans. He made this claim in response to a question posed by Carl Cameron--a question that itself raised some questions:

Cameron: Governor Huckabee, to change the subject a little bit and focus a moment on electability. Back in 1998, you were one of about 100 people who affirmed, in a full-page ad in the New York Times, the Southern Baptist Convention's declaration that, quote, "A wife us to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband." Women voters in both parties harshly criticized that. Is that position politically viable in the general election of 2008, sir?

Huckabee: You know, it's interesting, everybody says religion is off limits, except we always can ask me the religious questions. So let me try to do my best to answer it.

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This past Monday, as most of America now knows, Mike Huckabee effectively told the Constitution that it had better get right with God. In so doing, he committed the single most egregious Faith and Values’ blunder of the 2008 campaign.

In a follow-up interview with Steven Waldman and Dan Gilgoff, the former governor of Arkansas conceded that he may have phrased it “awkwardly.” Yet his subsequent responses to their insightful questions did little to suggest he did not mean what he said.

I will get to that fascinating interview next week. But today I want to return to Huckabee’s original words--words which will haunt this relatively young politician throughout his career:

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 that’s what we need to do — is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try 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.

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It was John Edwards, I thought, who made the best impression at Monday's Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate. But the real story emerging from last night is that the Democrats are fielding not one, not two, but three credible, thoroughly electable choices for high office.

If voter turnout in caucuses and primaries is a reliable metric, then it seems that Democratic voters are, shall we say, motivated. My surmise is that the vast majority of Blue-staters will rally enthusiastically around any of these candidates in a general election.

Can the same be said about the fractured Republican base? If John McCain wins the nomination will Giuliani supporters--out of some previously undetected sense of loyalty to the GOP--work phone banks for him late into those autumnal nights? If Mitt Romney gets the nod will Mike Huckabee’s large--though not overwhelmingly large as South Carolina showed us--contingent of Evangelical backers grace him with their ballots?

Yup. It was a great night for the Democrats.

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On "The God Vote This Week," On Faith co-moderator Sally Quinn asks me about the God Talk from Obama, Clinton and Edwards on the campaign trail in South Carolina. Watch it here now.

I should have been prepared for the backlash! I stepped right into the middle of a heated controversy when I co-authored a report for Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs in November about the role of religious organizations in the battle against HIV/AIDS. Just last week, an angry letter from the Gerald Health Foundation in Boston to Georgetown University’s president actually called for the report’s withdrawal, with a litany of accusations.

The complaint? That our report gives insufficient “credit” to promoting abstinence and faithfulness as a central approach to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and that it reveals an “anti-Catholic bias” in its treatment of Church teaching on condoms.

Perhaps nowhere is the role of religion in public policy and service delivery more significant than in the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The storm around the Berkley Center report is a depressing illustration of how hard dialogue can be. And how important.

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Over the past few weeks I have been tracking an intriguing trend: assorted presidential candidates are acknowledging that nonbelievers might actually be decent, patriotic Americans.

The first raising-of-the-glass to the godless occurred a few weeks back. Mike Huckabee, under tough cross-examination by Tim Russert, asserted that “he wouldn't have any problem at all appointing atheists” to posts in his administration. “I probably had some working for me as governor,” he went on to observe. Who knew?

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On "The God Vote This Week," On Faith co-moderator Sally Quinn asks me about Obama's religious fervor, Bush's surprisingly godless State of the Union and Giuliani's impersonation of a nice guy. Watch the show now.

It seems like just a few months ago--October to be exact--I was chatting with a person working for President Bush who was anticipating a plum new job in the Giuliani administration.

Sure, there would be some rough sledding with Hillary Clinton in the fall. She’s a formidable candidate. But in the end, my overconfident Muscatel-quaffing lunchtime chum looked forward to serving another commander-in-chief who would make national security his top priority.

My conversational partner was mistaken. So were those pundits and pollsters who also viewed America’s Mayor as a lock. And as I articulate a few less obvious reasons to explain Giuliani’s stunning plunge let me begin by noting that Giuliani himself erred by accepting his party’s nomination for the presidency in August 2007.

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