Okay, I am now freely preparing myself to eat crow. For there is no doubt that my prognostication of Dec. 30, 2007 was incorrect. In fact, Mike Huckabee will not quite have things sown up the nomination in SC on the 19th. Instead, there will be a heated battle between he and Senator McCain for the delegates here.

One advantage possessed by McCain is that he has the endorsement SC senior Sen., Lindsey Graham, who has been a steadfast supporter of his since the 2000 race. Also, SC is one state in which there remains some support for the Iraq intervention. What is the main concern of likely GOP Primary voters here? It is illegal immigration: insightful. (In fact, McCain flooded the state with a mass mailing yesterday, which defends his record on immigration, primarily from attacks leveled at him by non-candidate Romney.) No doubt, illegal aliens, as opposed to the accidental aliens who continue to be studied in Area 51, are the most significant menace to our great country, which commits so much money to support these lazy foreigners that it is becoming more and more difficult to commit the "necessary" $8 billion a month that we send to Iraq.

Nonetheless, the Governor of Arkansas is certainly not entirely out of the running. A full 60% of likely Primary voters identify themselves as evangelical Christians: hence the abundance of Christian goodwill extended to the meek. After all, evangelicals are not concerned with inheriting the earth. Their goal is to take over Heaven so as to impose right thinking from above, as Pres. Bush has attempted to do but failed-his is just not quite high enough on the hierarchical chain. Moreover, in spite of the enormous amount of coverage concerning the dirty (a euphemism if there ever was one) tricks employed by the Bush camp in the last days prior the the 2000 primary, there are likely many here who continue to be scandalized by the fact that Sen. McCain has two black children. In a state where the "Confederate", actually VA, battle flag remains on the State House grounds, this is an offense that overrides any consideration of Christian charity. In the last analysis, McCain is simply not conservative enough, in spite of the fact that he did agree to speak at Bob Jones University last year, something which he refused, on principle, to do in 2000. This was yet another decisive factor in SC, where churches exert an inordinate role over how their congregations vote.

With Romney pulling all of his media buys from the state and not even bothering to campaign here, placing all his eggs in the MI basket, Huckabee is assured a 2nd place showing, at the very least. This will allow him to continue to raise the false idol of political campaigns, money. Thus, he will be able to saturate many of the states that will vote on Feb. 5 with ads, concentrating no doubt on the 5 within the Bible Belt, which would give him 239 additional delegates, upon the reasonable assumption that he carry them all. In short, the race is far from over.

A final note on the Democratic Primary in NH. While Sen. Obama was "upset" by his colleague Clinton, the final delegate tally was Hillary 12, Barack 11: hardly a resounding defeat for him. Far more important is not the fact that he picked up Kerry's endorsement here, in Charleston, yesterday but that he now has in his possession the list of approximately 3 million donors to the Kerry campaign of 4 years ago. This is an invaluable stack of papers. Can Obama still be the ultimate nominee? Yes, he can.