God-o-Meter is less sure than The San Francisco Chronicle that Janet Huckabee’s stay at Las Vegas’s Hooters Casino Hotel will scare of her husband’s evangelical supporters–this is a couple that upgraded to a “covenant marriage” a few years back–but it’s enough to knock Huckabee down to 8, a rare dip for the Baptist minister.

What happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas – especially if you’re the wife of a presidential candidate. Just ask Janet Huckabee, who attended a middleweight prize fight this past weekend in Las Vegas – where she stayed at the Hooters Casino Hotel.
That eye-opening combination – a title bout in Sin City, which celebrates gambling, drinking and all things wild, along with a hospitality chain favoring buxom waitresses in low-cut garb – could potentially shock the armies of evangelical conservative Christians who have made her husband, the former governor of Arkansas, the only remaining GOP opponent to party front-runner John McCain.
But Janet Huckabee, whose husband is also a former Baptist minister, said in a telephone interview Wednesday that her recent brief excursion to root for boxer Jermain Taylor, a longtime friend and fellow Arkansan – and her stay at a hotel that she said wasn’t exactly her first choice – was supposed to be a rare respite from the often-brutal presidential campaign trail….
“I had a room at the MGM Grand,” she said, but canceled it when she believed she wouldn’t be able to make the fight. Plans changed, and “a friend had two rooms … it was the only thing, quite frankly, that was available because the fights were in town.”

8