When Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) was seeking state office a dozen years ago, he took unabashedly liberal positions: flatly opposed to capital punishment, in support of a federal single-payer health plan, against any restrictions on abortion, and in support of state laws to ban the manufacture, sale and even possession of handguns.

No corresponding article notes that Mike Huckabee's conservative views might haunt him, although Allen does note in passing a CNN poll that finds:

In head-to-head matchups -- the first to include Huckabee -- the former Arkansas governor loses to Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York by 10 percentage points (54 percent to 44 percent), to Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois by 15 points (55 percent to 40 percent) and to former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina by 25 points (60 percent to 35 percent).

Of course, our corporate media explains this not as a result of policy, but of differential name recognition.

But Huckabee's double-digit deficits with the leading Democrats likely suggest that the Arkansas Republican still lacks widespread name recognition nationally, according to Keating Holland, CNN's polling director.

Right. Could be. Or it could be that Huckabee doesn't believe in evolution, thinks people with AIDS should be quarantined, and thinks, as Matt Tiabbi put it, "America wouldn't need so much Mexican labor if we allowed every aborted fetus to grow up and enter the workforce."

Huckabee, unlike Bush, isn't playacting with this religion stuff. He's actually nuts. And, while it's true that his name recognition isn't so great, insanity is generally a problem in a presidential candidate (see Ross Perot). A healthy percentage of the population isn't going to give the nuclear codes to a man that thinks the world is 4004 years old. But, back to Obama...he's liberal...that's bad.

“No candidacy of his avowed liberalism has succeeded in the United States in much more than a generation,” said Republican strategist Kieran Mahoney, a national political adviser to former Sen. Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign.

Mahoney said GOP consultants typically have to game out: “Is this a guy who has the nuance and cleverness to hide the fact that he is an unrepentant liberal?”

“That’s the question you have when you’re trying to beat these guys,” Mahoney said. “He’s not even trying.”

Actually, Obama has done several things that have annoyed progressives. He's overhyped the Social Security crisis, he's bad-mouthed the blogosphere, he's stiff-armed secularists, and he's campaigned with a homophobe. So, it's not like he isn't trying to appear moderate. Allen and Smith call his earlier positions 'extreme'.

The 12-page packet giving Obama’s more extreme 1996 views was prepared as part of his quest for the Illinois Senate’s 13th District on Chicago’s South Side.

I'm ready for a fight over whether or not these views are extreme. They're mainstream views among progressives, Canadians, and Europeans. Can you say that Huckabee's views are mainstream?