Too far? The debate rages in the comments to the headline item. It’s being interpreted by some, I think, as a veiled swipe at the intelligence of evangelical voters, who made up 80+% of Huck’s support, or even rural voters. VP doesn’t say a word about either, although I admit to cringing at it just because it plays right into the type of identity politics Huckabee’s worked so hard to cultivate and which our own resident evangelical incisively exposed last night. Like I said when Coulter attacked him for being “easily led,” he’s trying to fuse religious, class, and regional grievances into some sort of “simple folk vs. the elites” movement. Every time an “elite” hits his supporters for being stupid, it’s more grist for the mill to allege that what those elites really find stupid is Christianity or farmers, as opposed to pretty much everything he’s said about Pakistan in the last two weeks.

The irony is, while it’s true that most of Huck’s supporters last night were evangelical, it’s not true that most evangelicals were Huck supporters. From what I hear, a little more than half broke for other candidates. We have plenty of evangelicals commenting here, first and foremost among them my esteemed co-blogger, and the Hucka Hucka burnin’ love is nowhere to be found. It bears reminding people of that, since the more his supporters are falsely equated with Christians in the public mind, the easier it is for him to disingenuously spin attacks on him as attacks on Christianity or Christmas or whatever. Which isn’t to suggest I’m accusing VP of attacking religious voters, merely that making it an issue of intelligence is the wrong “frame,” as the nutroots like to say.

I’m going to import the headline comments. You can take it from there.

Update: Here’s why it’s going to be hard to keep the Christian vs. Huckabee supporter distinction intact. The better he does, the more the media (and people like Dobson) will spin it as Christian empowerment.

Update: “So we’ve got Huckabee with Jesus as his running mate versus, it seems, the Second Coming of Jesus Himself. I guess religious voters are going to have a hard time deciding here.”