He was here today and will be back tomorrow, participating in this event, which I will likely attend with the Knipp kids. (To be clear, this does not imply an endorsement; we’ve also seen Rudy Giuliani, for whom I’d only vote in a general election.)

As for the group of African-American pastors who endorsed Huckabee, their leader, Rev. William Owens, is a down-the-line social conservative and penetcostal who has earned the ire of the right people. The endorsement is unlikely to send many voters Huckabee’s way.

Indeed, his behavior today--spending four hours in the audience at Ebenezer Baptist Church—is odd for a candidate. There were surely not many votes to be won in that audience, and much more attention on the other man from Hope, who was given a chance to speak. If there’s a political calculation here, I don’t know what it is; perhaps the Huckabee campaign doesn’t either. I say this not to blame Huckabee for making the choice he did--so apparently free from any obvious political benefit or calculation that it must somehow be genuine. Some might argue that it dovetailed nicely with the aforementioned endorsement and perhaps served as penance for his remarks about the Confederate flag in South Carolina, but he didn’t have to give up his morning to accomplish that. I await a plausible "political" explanation. (There is, by the way, nothing yet on the Huckabee website about it.)