Even though God-o-Meter reported last week on some second-tier Christain Right endorsements for Mike Huckabee, it is somewhat scandalous that he’s failed to seal up more of the movement’s A-list. What’s a former Baptist preacher who’s rising in the Iowa polls gotta do to get some love from the values crowd? A day after God-o-Meter quoted Tony Perkins as more bullish on Mitt Romney than Huckabee comes a Christian Science Monitor report that Perkins and fellow evangelical activist Gary Bauer were poo-pooing Huckabee at yesterday’s weekly Monitor breakfast for political reporters:

While Governor Huckabee is very good on all the social issues, he has not seemed to find solid footing on the issue of the threat internationally from radical Islam,” Perkins said.
“In a major foreign-policy address a couple of weeks ago that did not get much attention … in the middle of the speech [Huckabee] went after the Bush administration on not aggressively negotiating enough with Iran and suggested that the administration needs to offer economic incentives for Iran to change its policy,” Bauer said. “That just struck me as a very naive approach.

So let God-o-Meter get this straight: Washington’s premiere Christian Right forces are arrayed against Giuliani and are cooling to Huckabee. After Fred Thompson failed to impress lots of social conservatives bigwigs, might all Romney’s lobbying of evangelicals begin paying off soon?

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