Frank Rich had a great opinion piece in the Times today about the rise of Huckabee in national polling. One interesting thing he gets at is the inability of the new media to properly predict and explain the polling turn-around outside of old-school partisan stereotypes. (i.e. he's a baptist minister, therefore it must be the religous right who are bringing him up in the polls.)

Although he didn't come right out and say it, Rich is on to something when he hints that candidates like Obama and Huckabee are going to continue to suprise Washington insofar as they are leaving behind the battle lines that have been drawn by their partisan predecessors.

Bout time.

"The real reason for Mr. Huckabee’s ascendance may be that his message is simply more uplifting — and, in the ethical rather than theological sense, more Christian — than that of rivals whose main calling cards of fear, torture and nativism have become more strident with every debate. The fresh-faced politics of joy may be trumping the five-o’clock-shadow of Nixonian gloom and paranoia favored by the entire G.O.P. field with the sometime exception of John McCain."