Huckabee the Big Winner?

Eric at Classical Values thinks so:

I think the vindictive nastiness turned people off to both McCain and Romney. And there was Mike Huckabee, a mild-mannered populist. Someone who doesn’t talk down to people like Romney, and who doesn’t frighten them like McCain (if only because there’s been no anti-Huckabee hate machine to further frighten those who fear the politics of acrimony).

Huckabee was a protest vote. And I think a lot of the Huckabee voters weren’t so much protesting McCain and Romney as they were the acrimony.

That Huckabee (a Southerner) was dismissed, derided, and laughed at by virtually all the MSM pundits might have been a factor too.

I have to admit, last night I, an anti-Huckabee guy to the core — found myself very soothed by the reassuring cadences of Huckabee’s voice, and the apparent simple humanity of the man, and it was immediately clear what happened. This might be irrational (and of course I am leaving out the Mormon issue — which sooner or later will probably be addressed by someone), but there it is.

The angry anti-McCain chorus (and the response to it) created a backlash, not in McCain’s favor, but in Huckabee’s. I think they wanted to get even with the “sides” — and I don’t blame them even though I recognize that last night’s Huckabee vote was in the long run little more than an act of retaliatory political vandalism.

Read the whole thing.  It’s an interesting take on yesterday’s events.