The day with Romney started out with him making not-so-veiled reference to the Huckabee press conference last night, saying “he didn’t fool the people of Iowa” with his negative ad headfake. I talked to a lot of people at the six Romney house parties he held today, and I think Romney is right. Huckabee did not fool the people of Iowa, because they weren’t paying attention.
The “implosion” that the media cackled about yesterday may be happening, but it’s not because of that press conference. Out of the dozen or so caucus-goers I spoke to today (some Romney supporters, some undecided), no one had even heard about that press conference. And I suspect, even if they did, the MSM’s opinion of Mike Huckabee’s performance isn’t the first thing they’re using to evaluate the candidate. Even more telling, considering how disciplined a candidate Romney is, he didn’t bring up Huckabee’s “going negative” again the rest of the day.
Again, this is not to say the implosion is not happening. A few of the people I talked to today did mention recent Huckabee remarks that had tipped their personal scale to Romney… namely, his “bad mouthing” of Bush: Even if they couldn’t remember the invocation of “bunker mentality,” they remembered that Huckabee had said something bad about Bush: “That was a mistake. He shouldn’t have done that.” Others — far fewer, but still present — picked out his various foreign policy slip-ups: “His comments about the situation over in Pakistan… it doesn’t help if you don’t know that they had already lifted martial law. You need to know that stuff.”
Both of those statements also have a lot more to do with actual issues than whatever it is that happened yesterday afternoon. Is this heaven? No, but it is Iowa.