KCCI confirmed Tuesday that some Iowa Republicans have received automated phone calls from Sarah Pac, governor Palin’s political action committee.

The calls asked Iowans several questions including whether they have a favorable opinion of Palin.

Some Iowans received the calls over the weekend as did some voters in New Hampshire.

Right now the Iowa Republican Party’s website is running about as slow as Fred Thompson on a good day, so we’re going to have to find our results elsewhere.

TPM is doing a live update, and of course all of the networks are as well.

[Update: Well the networks are calling it already for Mike Huckabee. That didn't take long did it?]

In Iowa, it’s going to be Romney by a nose with Huckabee right behind him, and McCain not too far off, but a decisive third.  And it’s going to shake out a similar way in New Hampshire, with Romney taking it, but McCain not far behind him again.

Based on this prediction, you might conclude that I think Romney is going to run away with the nomination, but that’s uncertain.  What is certain that after a pair of “first in the nation” contests that prove indecisive, Iowa and New Hampshire, at least on the GOP side, will prove they’re no longer the testing grounds of presidential politics.  States like Wyoming, Florida, and Michigan are already in full-on revolt against the current primary system, and the chorus they are building will only get louder after 2008.  With a pair of narrow margins of victory for one candidate in the two states, Iowans and New Hampshireans will show that they are just as conflicted about the candidates as the rest of the country, and not the decisive, sound-minded judges of political character that we have assumed them to be.

But don’t take my word for it, look at what the campaigns themselves are doing.  The most recent evidence is the anti-Mormon smear campaign against Mitt Romney in South Carolina uncovered by CNN.  They reported yesterday on the phony holiday greeting sent to South Carolinians by “the Romney family” that plays up the Mormon faith’s history of polygamy.

What the tactic says is that while we’re a couple of weeks out from South Carolina, the campaigns are convinced that there will be no decisive victory in the Hawkeye or the Granite States for the Republican field.  It’s going to be a bruising two months, especially for the Republicans, and the winner is going to have to marshal limited momentum into deft organization as February’s “national primary” day speeds forward like a mack truck.  While it’s going to be fun to watch, it’ll be bad for those Iowa and New Hampshire power brokers grasping to hold onto their current positions.

I spent some time a while ago insisting that Huckabee wasn’t a frontrunner. Now he is one, but only in certain respects. If you’ve read today’s NYT piece on Huckabee and the Republican race, you will have been reminded of one of the key disparities between Huckabee’s campaign and that of his major rival: organization. Mitt Romney has been building his Iowa machine with great steadiness and care over the past year. Romney’s organization, in Iowa and in general, is what has made a frontrunner out of a man who would otherwise be no more apparent a choice for the nomination than the already-forgotten Tommy Thompson. And a key part of that organization will come into play on January 3.

As the Times notes:

Mr. Huckabee has been ramping up his organization in Iowa, but it still remains far behind Mr. Romney’s. The campaign recently doubled the office space at its headquarters in downtown Des Moines; it now has 17 paid employees in Iowa, up from 3 over the summer. The campaign is broadcasting commercials in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and is preparing its first mailing in Iowa.

But the campaign remains bare bones in many ways. It has not had the money to do any polling. The campaign predicts that it will have precinct captains in the major caucus precincts, but not in all of them. Mr. Huckabee’s Iowa state director, Eric Woolson, got a BlackBerry only about a month ago.

Jonathan Martin has explained what Huckabee’s organizational deficiencies mean in terms of his key constituency:

The caucuses are still “an organizational exercise when you get right down to it,” Woolson adds, dropping the bar another notch. “And Romney has been here for a long time with a lot of people and a lot of money.”

Spin aside, every Iowa Republican contacted for this story cites Huckabee’s utter lack of a campaign structure as his most formidable obstacle to win.

“There’s no such thing as any Huckabee ground game that I see at all,” observes Failor.

Televangelist Pat Robertson maximized the Christian community in Iowa to finish a surprise second in 1988, Failor notes, but he did so with a 99-county organization that had been built over many months.

“The church community is excitable, energizable and movable, but if you don’t have apparatus to move those people on caucus night it doesn’t matter,” Failor says. “It’s all about organization – always has been and always will be.’

It’s instructive to compare Martin’s analysis of Huckabee’s Iowa organization with his piece on Romney’s.

Huckabee’s surge may be coming just late enough in the game to hit the polls at its peak. But everything now rides on the expectations game. If the enthusiasm cools just a little over the next two weeks, if the churches Huckabee’s counting on for his ground game can’t quite deliver, if Romney’s disciplined organization really is worth a few extra points on caucus day, then the story of January 3 could be of Romney surging and Huckabee fading.

But if I may offer an alternative idea, it might be more interesting to wonder who this development helps. And I think the answer could be Rudy Giuliani.

New York City’s former mayor and the Hamptons’ favorite visitor has all but given up on winning any of the first wave of primaries/caucuses. His staff announced in November that Giuliani will enter the February 5 “national primary” with a lead in the total number of delegates because he will win Florida, a large state with a winner take all primary. Once Giuliani wins Florida on January 29, they say, he will have a higher delegate total going into the Republican National Convention than any of his opponents who win the first set of races. And he’ll build on that momentum to seal the deal on February 5 when 22 states will pick their candidates.

Huckabee’s gains could help Giuliani work this strategy out. While Huckabee is leading in the polls in Iowa, no one is predicting he’s going to run away with January’s early Republican contests. The real impact of this development is that Huckabee may weaken the three “frontrunners” other than Giuliani, that is Romney, McCain, and Thompson. The four are competing for the moniker of “real conservative” much more than Giuliani ever has, and Huckabee’s rise is most likely taking away from their votes.

So what scenario could come to pass? Huckabee, McCain, or Romney could jostle for victory in Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina with none winning a decisive victory. Giuliani will head into Florida, where polls show him doing fine, and win the first decisive victory of the campaign. Ultimately, that’s what Giuliani’s people may be hoping for.

But don’t worry: Huckabee is getting drawn into the sights of his opponents. The misty eyed gazes at Huckabee, the “gee, there still are some honest Republicans out there” carpet the media has rolled out, these things will soon get vacuumed up by the desire for a bad story to go with the good.

Take a look at this laundry list of Huckabee’s transgressions ginned up by the San Diego Union Tribune:

Used campaign funds to pay himself $14,000 for being his own media consultant.

Used campaign funds to pay himself $43,000 for use of his private plane while attempting to hide what the payment was actually in return for.

Used an account set up to cover operational costs of the governor’s mansion to pay such obviously personal expenses as fast-food and dry-cleaning bills.

Set up a nonprofit organization that paid him $23,500 without disclosing the source of the money.

Attempted to take $70,000 of furniture with him when moving out of the governor’s mansion.

Took more than 130 gifts worth more than $300,000 – while suing to overturn a law that made him disclose the gifts.

We could go on in this vein, but space is limited. The bottom line: Mike Huckabee has an awful lot of explaining to do. And neither voters nor the national media should let the man Arkansas journalists call the “Huckster” get away with pretending that tough questions over his tawdry ethics record amount to mudslinging.

That may be all the anchor Huckabee needs to get knocked down a peg or two. And for a man who never got that high up the ladder, that might be enough.

“It would be nice if Romney won,” said Doug Gross, an attorney overseeing Romney’s Iowa campaign. “If he finishes in the top two, he’s fine.”

Now that Huckabee has launched himself to the top of the heap (and if he follows through, it would be kind of an indictment of the notion that money rules in politics), it’s time to take a substantive look at his record and his proposals. I’m dubious that the media will actually do this. For example, perhaps the most prominent soundbite to come out of the YouTube debate was his statement that “Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office” when asked about his support for the death penalty. This was actually a massive cop-out.

…what reporters didn’t note is that Huckabee was dodging a direct question on the very area — the intersection of religion and policy — on which he is building his campaign. The man whose ads call him a “Christian Leader” and who says his faith “defines me” wouldn’t answer a pretty simple question on how his faith affects his opinion on a policy issue.

But the press stood up an applauded. So witty! So clever! Ah, that Mike Huckabee, what a lovable guy!

In fact, it’s this tendency to focus on Huckabee’s personality instead of his policy that is masking one of the most insane ideas to appear in this cycle – his “fair tax” proposal.

“Abolishing the IRS”, of course, is the purported effect of enacting the “FairTax” proposal Huckabee supports. This would replace the income tax with a national sales tax. But you would still need a bureaucracy to enforce the sales tax! Business owners aren’t going to be willing to hand over 30% of the cost of goods sold [the tax rate you would need to have a revenue neutral sales tax] just because they’re a bunch of really swell people. In addition, a sales tax of that magnitude is terrible economics. The FairTax idea is beyond silly, and in the unlikely event that Huckabee is the GOP nominee, right-of-center economists will be committing professional malpractice if they don’t rise up en masse to debunk this malarky. Bruce Bartlett provides a good template: “In short, the FairTax is too good to be true, and voters should not take seriously any candidate who supports it.”

Huckabee takes a complex problem (the byzantine tax code) and applies a simple solution that would actually be unbelievably regressive and essentially shovel more money to the rich and powerful, as well as open up a huge expansion of the black market trafficking in untaxed goods. There’s no justification for it, which is why it has been roundly denounced any time a politician, like Steve Forbes, brings it up. Because Huckabee is an amiable politician with some rhetorical gifts, he’s getting away with a batshit crazy idea as his main campaign plank.

Monday: NRO’s Matt Hemingway writes a piece examining the possibility that Romney’s campaign was indeed responsible for the calls. Hemingway finds that Western Wats, the company making the calls, has had ties (including, apparently, a common phone number) to Target Point, a consulting firm that Romney’s campaign employed to the tune of $720,000. He also expands on the story that Western Wats dialer Amanda Earnshaw had maxed out to Romney, reporting that three members of Earnshaw’s immediate family have also donated the maximum to Romney’s campaign. Hemingway interviews Republican operatives (including scumbag Roger Stone), who all find the notion of Romney push-polling himself perfectly plausible. Hemingway notes a number of possible mitigating factors: after all, Western Wats has a lot of employees who presumably donate to a variety of candidates, and a lot of campaigns have employed Target Point. Still, he says:

The Romney campaign, ultimately, has the power to clarify any misconceptions. If there is a relationship between the two firms, then [Target Point president] Alex Gage and Target Point should immediately clarify the extent and nature of the work that it has contracted out to Western Wats to end speculation and exonerate Romney.

The Romney campaign responds through NRO’s house Mitt sympathizer, Kathryn Lopez. A spokesperson denies that the Romney camp had anything to do with the calls. Meanwhile, Gage responds in a letter to NRO:

To set the record straight: TargetPoint Consulting has absolutely nothing to do with the calls in question. To be even clearer: TargetPoint Consulting has NEVER and will NEVER conduct a push-poll. TargetPoint is in the business of promoting Governor Romney, not manufacturing fantasy plots that involve smearing him.

NRO’s Jim Geraghty is unimpressed, even resorting to the C-word:

I still think that if anyone tried to hide behind a Clintonian parsing that they had denied involvement in the “push poll” but not the “message testing”, and that the calls in question were the latter and not the former… well, their names would be mud. [...]

Again, considering the damage the calls do to both the obvious target (Romney, for the Mormonism questions) and the possible secondary target (McCain, since the calls allegedly praised him), the obvious fact that would turn suspicious eyes to Giuliani (Western Wats worked with the Tarrance Group, which is working for Rudy), the damage done to whoever this trail leads back to, and the near-certainty that this would set off a firestorm in GOP circles, etc., the perpetrator is, I suspect, someone not familiar with how toxic push-polling is, or someone who doesn’t care.

And Hemingway notes that Gage never exactly answered his challenge:

I’ve read TargetPoint’s response numerous times and it doesn’t invalidate my story or address the specific nature of their relationship with the firm that allegedly made anti-Mormon calls against Romney. I’ll report more as I ask more questions.

Redstate says it doesn’t blame Romney himself, but pretty much takes for granted that Romney’s people were behind the thing — for which they are reprimanded:

And as for Alex Gage and the Romney associates who are apparently behind these efforts: in a campaign where the faith of your candidate has been respected by the overwhelming majority of voters and activists, you’ve managed to create out of thin air the kind of bigoted attack that cheapens the process and expects the worst of the American people. Nice strategy, folks. We hope you’re happy.

William Reston of Race42008 emphasizes this quote, wanting Republicans to be “clear of the stakes” in the dispute:

Which brings me to my question, if it is revealed that elements within the Romney Campaign are responsible for these calls, what happens to Gov. Romney’s campaign?

These calls were specifically designed to frame Sen. John McCain for the crime. That fact cannot be forgotten. Whoever wrote the questions phrased them in a specific manner that would incriminate the Arizona Senator. This is also telling of the fear that the author of the script must have regarding McCain’s chances in New Hampshire.

Reston observes that, if Romney’s campaign is indeed behind the calls, it traps the candidate in a classic bind: either he’s too incompetent to keep his staff from going off the reservation, or he was aware of the calls, in which case he’s in “Watergate territory.”

So here we are… It’s either complete absolution or utter destruction now for Mitt Romney’s candidacy.

Romney’s supporters have been pushing back against the accusations, but more questions are being raised, this time about two of the women who appear in news stories reporting on the original push poll. In those reports, the women are described as essentially ordinary citizens who happened to receive push-poll calls. But they are in fact connected to the Romney campaign.

Who are these women? Redstate reports that Marshan Roth, described in this article about the calls as someone who was “leaning toward backing Romney,” in fact gets paid $500 a month by the Romney campaign. And Rose Kramer, described in this piece as simply a “Romney supporter,” is paid $1,000 a month.

Interestingly, Erick emerges from these revelations with a new, self-professedly “off-the-wall” theory about the whole affair:

What if a campaign conducted a legitimate poll (push polls don’t last 20 minutes), asked about the Mormon issues in the polling, and Romney supporters who happened to get the call ran to the media screaming about them being push polls.

Kevin Madden of the Romney campaign confirms a part of this theory, telling Geraghty that it was he who, in fact, put Roth and Kramer in touch with the media, after they had contacted the campaign to report receiving the calls (Madden, apparently, did not properly disclose their relation to the campaign). That doesn’t prove that Romney is not connected to the original push poll, but it does at least lend Erick’s theory some plausibility.

What’s not in doubt is that Republicans have long used barely-concealed appeals to voter bigotry to seek political advantage. They’ve done it from the days of the Southern Strategy to the McCain “black child” rumors in South Carolina to the endless harping about immigrants this time around. The more socially unacceptable the bigotry, the more they try to disguise their use of it. Every GOP candidate and every GOP operative is aware that anti-Mormon bigotry is in play this cycle. They may not yet be clear on exactly how far they can push it. The current scandal suggests that they know not to get too close to it — but neither is it going away.

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s image as 9/11 mayor took a double hit Monday as he lost a key endorsement from the Sept. 11 commission chair to a rival, and New York firefighters and families of victims of the terrorist attacks took their campaign against him to New Hampshire.

Tom Kean, chair of the 9/11 Commission — and a Republican for Rudy’s neighboring state of New Jersey — kicked another hole in the 9iu11iani story yesterday, endorsing John McCain for president. “To the extent that we’ve been less vulnerable to attacks that we suffered on 9/11, it’s in a large part due to the extraordinary leadership of John McCain,” said Kean.

The idea that McCain has singlehandedly kept America safe for the last six years is almost as laughable as the notion that Rudy Giuliani is in some way qualified to be commander in chief because he happened to be around during the World Trade Center attack, but if Rudy can’t lock up the 9/11 commissioner — who is, again, from New Jersey — it just doesn’t look good at all.

Adding to his woes, the firefighters who have been going after Rudy for some time now, over what they consider to be his failures before, on and after 9/11, are thinking about forming a 527. They held a town hall yesterday in New Hampshire, reporting that voters were “shocked” by what they had to say.

In the hypothetical Giuliani vs. Clinton matchup, we keep hearing about Hillary’s high negatives and Rudy’s high positives. What we hear much less often — and this is not meant as an endorsement of Hillary — is that her numbers really have nowhere to go but up. And Rudy’s, as we’re learning, have nowhere to go but down.

Sen. John McCain soon will consider opting out of the Jan. 3 Iowa presidential caucuses to take the sting out of a probable fifth-place finish there.McCain skipped Iowa in 2000 while nearly seizing the presidential nomination from heavily favored George W. Bush. But when McCain was the early front-runner for 2008, it was decided he would contest the state this time.The rationale for leaving Iowa now would be total concentration on the subsequent New Hampshire primary. Although McCain defeated Bush by landslide proportions in New Hampshire eight years ago, he did so with overwhelming support from independents who are likely to vote in the Democratic primary this time.

And if they don’t vote in the Democratic primary, they have other options on the Republican side, like Ron Paul. The dynamics are completely different from 2000, but for McCain, the result is likely to be the same, despite the media’s best efforts.No word on whether McCain will drop out of the Arizona primary, where he’s trailing Rudy Giuliani even though it’s his home state. Because that would be even more embarrassing.

On the Sean Hannity radio program, pollster John Zogby said that Texas Congressman Ron Paul could end up surprising the field – and “embarass a lot of the frontrunners” by wildly exceeding expectations taking 15 to 18 percent in the New Hampshire primary.

An incredulous Hannity asked, “You don’t see any chance he wins this thing, do you?” Zogby said no.

So you have Huckabee as the insurgent second-place threat in Iowa. You have Ron Paul poised to surprise in New Hampshire. Rudy Giuliani will be laying low until February 5. While the expectations game can take unpredictable turns, the one constant in all this seems likely to be Mitt Romney, who has been slow and steady right from the beginning. You think he minds sharing the spotlight with the novelty acts, if by mid-January he’s the only one of the frontrunners to be running at the actual front?