George Will has a scathing hit-piece on both Edwards and Huckabee in today's Washington Post: 

(Huckabee) and John Edwards, flaunting their histrionic humility in order to promote their curdled populism, hawked strikingly similar messages in Iowa, encouraging self-pity and economic hypochondria.

Yikes.  Will reserves particular loathing for Huckabee, newly appointed standard-bearer of the social conservative movement that elected Will's favored Republicans for the past 30 years:

Huckabee says that "only one explanation" fits his Iowa success "and it's not a human one.  It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people."  God so loves Huckabee's politics that He worked a Midwest miracle on his behalf?  Should someone so delusional control nuclear weapons?

Right, someone so delusional as to think God intervenes on behalf of their political career?

Truthfully, over the past few years, I have, surprisingly, enjoyed and agreed with many of Will's columns.  He was the first prominent conservative columnist to come out against the war (albeit, in his hedging, haughty, still-found-a-way-to-kick-Democrats-teeth-in way).  He has no truck with the neo-conservative movement's attempt to remake the world through permanent war.

But this patronizing of Huckabee's faith speaks to the snobbery that lurks in the bifurcated bowels of the Grand Old Party.  It feels of a piece with Bush counselor Dan Bartlett's observation that Huckabee was too hick a name for him to win the presidency. 

Is the concern really with Huckabee's electability, or more a concern with what he'll do once elected?  A Huckabee presidency, overwhelmingly focused on cultural/religious issues, unconcerned with the limiting of spending, or the raising of taxes to benefit the poor, could snap the conservative coalition of Main Street and Wall Street in twain.

Oh, and Will's column is probably not the best thing I should post to convince my fellow Democrats to support Obama in the Democratic primary.  Why?  George Will likes him.  A lot. 

Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics.  He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee — an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic "fights" against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.

I'll have more to say soon on what Will is getting right—and wrong—here on Obama, and also why I believe Obama is the better choice of both the Democratic and Republican fields.  Stay tuned.