A round-up of this morning's must-read stories--live from snowy Des Moines, Iowa.

REACTION TO ROMNEY'S "FAITH IN AMERICA":

FAITH VS. THE FAITHLESS (David Brooks, New York Times)
BOLDNESS, WATERED DOWN (E.J. Dionne, Washington Post)
ANSWERING CRITICS--AND KENNEDY (Michael Gerson, Washington Post)
WHAT IOWANS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT MORMONS (Naomi Schaefer Riley, Wall Street Journal)
ROMNEY'S FAITH SPEECH MOVES FEW (Lauren R. Dorgan, Concord Monitor)
DIVINELY UNINSPIRED (David Kusnet, The New Republic)
 

THE BEST OF THE REST:

POLL FINDS HISPANICS RETURNING TO EARLIER PREFERENCE FOR DEMOCRATS (Julia Preston, New York Times)
Gains made by Republicans among Hispanic voters in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 have been erased over the past year, with Hispanics returning to earlier levels of strong preference for the Democratic Party, a survey released yesterday by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington shows. The survey pointed to “a number of potentially worrisome early signs” for the Republicans among Hispanic voters in the 2008 presidential race. Immigration has become a more important issue for Hispanics than it was in 2004, the Pew poll showed, and far more registered Latino voters now say that the Democrats are doing a better job on illegal immigration than the Republicans.

HUCKABEE PLAYS THE RELIGION CARD (Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post)
Huckabee has exploited Romney's Mormonism with an egregious subtlety. Huckabee is running a very effective ad in Iowa about religion. "Faith doesn't just influence me," he says on camera, "it really defines me." The ad then hails him as a "Christian leader. Forget the implications of the idea that being a "Christian leader" is some special qualification for the presidency of a country whose Constitution (Article VI) explicitly rejects any religious test for office. Just imagine that Huckabee were running one-on-one in Iowa against Joe Lieberman. (It's a thought experiment. Stay with me.) If he had run the same ad in those circumstances, it would have raised an outcry. The subtext -- who's the Christian in this race? -- would have been too obvious to ignore, the appeal to bigotry too clear.

HUCKSTER (Jonathan Chait, The New Republic)
When Huckabee first declared his intent to run for the presidency, he was generally dismissed as a naive country bumpkin who had no business in a national campaign. His articulate speeches and rapid ascent in the polls have won him a second look, and he is now lauded in such places as The New Yorker, which called him "curiously unthreatening." Alas, when you look closely at Huckabee's platform, it turns out that everybody pretty much had it right the first time around. At the broadest ideological level, Huckabee is a conservative, happily paying tribute to the genius of the marketplace, the need for self-reliance, and other conservative standbys. And, yet, his attachment to laissez-faire dogma is so tissue-thin that it can be blown to bits by the slightest brush with actual experience. Often this leads him in humane and intelligent directions, such as when he expanded children's health insurance. But it can also lead him to embrace simplistic statism, such as his crude protectionism and wholesale embrace of agriculture subsidies.

MCCAIN'S NEW HAMPSHIRE GLIMMER (June Kronholz, Wall Street Journal) 
With one month to go before the Jan. 8 primary here, polls show the presidential hopeful regaining some of the ground he lost during the summer because of his support of an immigration bill and his campaign's collapse amid disorganization and poor fund-raising... The Arizona senator's message isn't much different than it was eight years ago -- strong national defense and fiscal conservatism, which have earned him a reliable core following. But coupled with his dramatic personal story, that message seems to be getting some new attention as voter disenchantment with Washington grows.

RON PAUL'S ROOTS (Christopher Hayes, The Nation)
This gets to the paradox at the heart of the Paul campaign: he's the candidate least likely to hedge or obfuscate, the most apt to spell out in sharp detail his underlying principles--and yet he's also something of an ideological cipher, attracting the support of everyone from hipstertarian kids on Northeast college campuses to John Birchers in Texas. "You have this weird group of people," says Lindsey. "You've got libertarians, you've got antiwar types and you've got nationalists and xenophobes. I'm not sure that is leading anywhere. I think he's a sui generis type of guy who's cobbling together some irreconcilable constituencies, many of which are backward-looking rather than forward-looking." But even if the Paul campaign doesn't point the way toward some lasting, powerful, paleo-cosmo libertarian coalition (and, really, let's hope it doesn't), he is at least providing libertarians with a long-awaited Kumbaya moment. "There are personal animosities that will probably never heal," says Raimondo. "But, you know, maybe Ron Paul can unite us all."

THE CLINTON RESISTERS (Robin Abcarian, Los Angeles Times) 
On paper, they look an awful lot like Hillary Rodham Clinton. They are professional women of a certain age -- politically active Democrats, liberals, unabashed feminists who remember what it was like to be told they could not become firefighters or university department heads, let alone president of the United States of America. They are women of accomplishment who have bumped up against glass ceilings, sometimes breaking them, while managing marriages, raising children and trying to make the world their version of a better place. They have waited a long, long time for a plausible female presidential candidate. You'd think they'd be rushing to support Clinton. But they can't stand her.

GETTING OUT THE COLLEGE VOTE--WHEN CAMPUSES ARE EMPTY (Scott Helman, Boston Globe)
For a presidential campaign trying to mobilize young voters for the first-in-the-nation primary, University of New Hampshire students are typically sitting ducks. They congregate in dorms, dining halls, and the student union. They pack The Bagelry at lunchtime and sip coffee at Breaking New Grounds. But not this year. UNH students will soon disperse to decompress, see family, and nurse New Year's hangovers. When they return from winter break, the Jan. 8 primary will have come and gone, unlike elections past, when Granite State campuses were in session and buzzing with activity... Some election specialists and campaign officials believe the early voting dates may lower turnout among college students, but the candidates are trying to counter that by using text messaging and social networking sites like Facebook to stay tethered to their supporters.