Huckabee Losing Steam?

I'm not a fan of Mike Huckabee. I think that he, and his campaign, has smartly used his former occupation as a active Baptist minister to make great inroads with the conservative evangelical community - key to success in Iowa. But once you scratch the surface, you find that he is just another politician from Arkansas - holding to his ideals when it's convenient, and sidestepping them when it isn't. Take, for instance, his record as Governor - he raised taxes more than cut them, and was the subject of numerous ethics investigations. While raising money for his personal expenses and Presidential campaign, he spoke on behalf of and accepted honorarium from embryonic stem cell experimenters. And I'm not even going to touch his foreign policy views, which are sophomoric and embarrassing. His mainly positive national media coverage also makes me suspicious - either the mainstream media already know that he's really one of their own, or they are setting him up as an easy foil for both themselves and the eventual Democratic Presidential nominee.

But according to Bob Novak, the glow around Huckabee might be fading earlier than the MSM anticipated.

While public polls show Mike Huckabee leading Mitt Romney in Iowa, a new survey of an oversized sample shows Huckabee slipping and no longer ahead of Romney.

Novak goes on to say that the poll he talks about was commissioned by an unnamed private corporate interest, and does not name the polling firm, so I have no real way of measuring the efficacy of the results (i.e. was it self serving for another candidate). But I've thought for a while that Huckabee was a media-fueled flash in the pan, and this op-ed, coupled with the results from other polls that show Huckabee's lead diminishing or evaporating, leads me to believe that we'll see either a Romney victory in Iowa or a big surprise from a third candidate, namely Fred Thompson. And if Huckabee doesn't win, and win big, in Iowa, he doesn't stand a chance in most of the other primaries - as opposed to the other major GOP candidates, who could withstand coming up short in the caucus.