Then comes the below the belt hit on Mormons, so profoundly off-putting to Republicans who believe in the big tent as well as to evangelicals and Catholics who know the gulf between their theology and that of the LDS Church but who would no more verbally assault their Mormons friends, neighbors and business colleagues than they would any other American different from them on matters of faith. It just itsn't done. "Republican voters will not tolerate attacks on faith," pollster Frank Luntz declared on my program yesterday. I think he is right, and I hope he is right.

Such attacks on different religious beliefs have been part of American history, but aren't part of the American future. The common creed of moral convictions that Romney referred to his his College Station speech on faith now includes as one of its tenets that you do not mock or insult another person's religion.

Buck Mike Huckabee did. To the world's most influential newspaper.

Huckabee ought to have apologized during the Des Moines Register debate, but he didn't, perhaps waiting for the moderator to provide a moment to show some feigned regret.

So he went to CNN immediately thereafter and asked for forgiveness.

Will that put Huckabee's anti-Mormon genie back in its bottle. I don't think so. "That which is said while drunk has been thought out beforehand," goes the old saying. In the modern media world, candidates for the presidency don't say careless things to the New York Times. It was a premeditated aside, an attempt to get a virus into circulation. It didn't work, but it did tell us a lot about Mike Huckabee.