Jody correctly notes that Mike Huckabee isn’t getting much credit for his win last night, but I think that’s an analytical mistake. Huckabee is still an underdog. If I had to bet $100 on who wins the nomination, I wouldn’t put it on him.

But Huckabee has done something which people may notice if he does well in New Hampshire (possible) and wins South Carolina (likely). Which is this: Huckabee has created a position which would be strategically difficult for the Democratic nominee to run against.

Don’t be fooled by the current head-to-head polls showing him losing by double-digits to either Obama or Clinton. That’s based largely on name ID. The problem for Democrats is that they are preparing to campaign against a classic Republican: rich, war-mongering, green eyeshade, skull-and-crossbones, etc. Huckabee is a populist who doesn’t fit any of those themes. Should Huckabee win the nomination, Democrats will have to either (a) figure out a new path to insurgency, or (b) come up with their own ideas. Neither of these things is impossible. But as things stand now, you can imagine the way a Democratic nominee would campaign against Romney, McCain, Giuliani, or Thompson.

Populists pose different sets of problems for Democrats.

So what really happened in Iowa? Candidates can’t win the nomination in Iowa, but they can lose it if they expose a colossal weakness (see: Dean, Howard). And the big loser in Iowa was Mitt Romney, whose campaign is now over.

Let’s look at what happened to Romney in the Hawkeye State:

Tom Edsall reports that Romney spent north of $80 million during 2007; more than $10 million of that was on TV ads in Iowa. He campaigned in the state longer than any other Republican. He amassed a giant lead in the polls, which stretched to more than 20 points at times. Despite all of this, he sat in fourth and eventually fifth, place in national polls. His aides kept assuring people that their strategy was to win Iowa, leverage that into a victory in New Hampshire, and that, eventually, his national numbers would follow. But on Thursday night Mike Huckabee beat Romney like a drum, winning by 9 points.

Losing isn’t what’s fatal to Romney—the problem is that Iowa shows that voters just don’t like him. Mitt Romney may be a smart executive, a good man, and many other wonderful things. But he’s lousy at winning elections. As an incumbent governor, he ducked a fight with an unproven Deval Patrick because he knew he couldn’t win. As the heavy favorite in Iowa, spending tens of millions of dollars and more time in the state than anyone else, he couldn’t beat an unknown, under-funded former Arkansas governor. According to Rasmussen Reports, Romney has—by a huge margin—the worst favorable/unfavorable rating of anyone running from either party. If voters don’t like you, nothing else matters.

Romney’s support in New Hampshire, which has always been soft, is likely to splinter now. If he loses New Hampshire, which I’d put pretty good odds on, then my guess is Romney drops out after South Carolina on January 19. He could hang in until Michigan, but by that time, his numbers there will probably have much degraded.

Of course, since Romney can self-finance (he’s already spent $17 million of his own money on the campaign), he can hang around as long as his ambition and ego require.

Hillary Clinton lost, too, although her third-place finish has a (tiny) bright side. First the good news: By finishing a nip and tuck in front of her, John Edwards stays in the race and keeps the anti-Clinton vote split. Then there’s the bad news: Bill Clinton lost both Iowa and New Hampshire in 1992; Hillary has not yet proven to possess his electoral resiliency. This is the first time she’s suffered electoral defeat and it’s not obvious that she must recover.

To make matters worse, I’ve been with Obama in New Hampshire all day and the crowds he’s drawing are very impressive, very smitten, and very energetic. I’ve followed Clinton quite a bit in the last few months and I’ve never seen her draw this type of support.

At the risk of sullying First Things with a matter that wouldn’t make the category of Eleventh Things, I was struck by word this week that Jamie Lynn Spears, the sixteen-year-old kid sister of pop tartlet Britney Spears, is pregnant.

Jamie Lynn announced the news on Tuesday and the celebrity-industrial complex went into overdrive. Some of the stories have been kind to the young lady. Many have not been. There’s a lot of clucking on the blogs about rednecks getting knocked up early and whatnot. That’s fine.

But we ought to pause, for just a moment, and appreciate Ms. Spears for doing something fairly bold for a girl in her position: Not murdering her baby. Spears is the star of a Nickelodeon’s Zoey 101 and, like Hilary Duff and Mandy Moore and other teen actresses before faced the prospect of much work before her, most of it quite commercial and hence, likely to be quite profitable. Having a baby will derail at least some of that; at the very least it will probably disqualify her from the teen ingénue roles that are the bread-and-butter of her class of actress.

One suspects that there were probably a few, perhaps many, forces which counseled Spears to “take care” of the “problem.” It’s not hard to imagine that conversation with a bullying adult from some other side of the business. And while I don’t know that there’s any data on this, again, one suspects that young actresses have routinely faced with this sort of choice for the last eighty years or so. I wonder how many of them chose the life of their baby over financial rewards and business pressure.

Obviously, becoming pregnant while unmarried, and at sixteen, is not optimal. But Spears deserves credit for choosing life. I wonder if the pro-choice feminists will celebrate her boldness and sacrifice.

Whatever else may be said about New Jersey and Gov. Jon Corzine, they should both be given credit for not only abolishing the death penalty but for doing so in the correct manner—through legislative action and not judicial or executive fiat.

This small victory for the pro-life movement is also a good moment to revisit Jody Bottum’s excellent essay on “Christians and the Death Penalty.”

Michael Novak has graciously responded to my post from yesterday about his endorsement of Mitt Romney. He clarifies that he does not mean to suggest that there is a Christian duty to support Romney because his Mormonism has become a subject of the campaign. Phew!

But in his clarification, Novak does suggest that Romney’s Mormonism is not a valid subject of political discussion:

. . . Mormonism is a suitable issue for one’s own decision about whether or not Mormonism is the true religion, which compels one’s own mind. It is a suitable issue, too, for philosophical and theological discussion. But to make the case that of differences of religious faith among candidates is a useful discussion in choosing a President of the United States, one needs to make a number of distinctions and to make explicit a series of assumptions.

It seems to me that the number of distinctions and assumptions needed aren’t all that great. As I noted yesterday, Father Neuhaus summed up why Romney’s Mormonism is a valid question for voters quite nicely here:

I believe that many Mormons are Christians as broadly defined by historic markers of Christian faith. That does not mean that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Christian. It is indisputably derived from Christianity and variations on Christianity, but its distinctive and constituting doctrines are irreconcilable with even a very liberal construal of biblical Christianity. It is, as Rodney Stark and many others have argued, a new religion and, by the lights of historic Christianity, a false religion. It is true that there are Mormon scholars who are working mightily to reconcile the LDS with Christianity, and one wishes them well, but they have their work cut out for them.

It is not an unreasonable prejudice for people who, unlike Alan Wolfe et al., care about true religion to take their concern about Mormonism into account in considering the candidacy of Mr. Romney. The question is not whether, as president, Mr. Romney would take orders from Salt Lake City. I doubt whether many people think he would. The questions are: Would a Mormon as president of the United States give greater credibility and prestige to Mormonism? The answer is almost certainly yes. Would it therefore help advance the missionary goals of what many view as a false religion? The answer is almost certainly yes. Is it legitimate for those Americans to take these questions into account in voting for a presidential nominee or candidate? The answer is certainly yes.

Perhaps Novak disagrees with Fr. Neuhaus on this score.

In a related matter, a friend from National Review writes in to point out that the magazine’s endorsement of Romney did not label him the “‘most viable’ conservative candidate,” as I wrote, but rather the “the most conservative viable candidate.” A fair point, and I’m grateful for the correction.

Over at The Corner, Michael Novak has joined the National Review‘s stampede into the arms of Mitt Romney by endorsing the former one-term governor of Massachusetts.

The National Review editors make the curious case that Romney—who has, by my count, lost at least as many elections as he has won and run away from a reelection challenge from the non-entity Deval Patrick—is the “most viable” conservative candidate.

But Novak’s argument for Romney is even curiouser:

These days, though, it has become imperative for some Christians to come out publicly for Mitt, now that his religion has come under unfair attack. I am no expert on Mormon theology, but I do profoundly admire the good family life and good individuals it keeps sending forth into the world. Those are signs I read clearly. . . .

Someone has to protest, in the name of Christianity itself, that spreading bigotry and hatred for the sake of winning a political campaign is wrong. I for one don’t want to let this issue of bigotry and suspicion pass by without protest—and without open support for its victim. The least Americans can do is speak up for each other on matters of religious liberty.

Perhaps I’m misreading Novak, but it seems that he’s saying that (1) Romney’s Mormonism is not a fair issue for discussion, and (2) the very fact there is some discussion of it creates a positive Christian duty to support Romney.

Michael Novak is a member of the First Things board and someone with whom I disagree with trepidation. But I just don’t understand how he can hold this. His first point seems to be directly in conflict with something Fr. Neuhaus wrote earlier this year. And that second point—isn’t there something very odd about it?

Misuse doesn’t eliminate right use, after all, and the fact that an attack on Romney’s religion creates sympathy for the man doesn’t mean that it creates a reason to vote for him.