The magic number on Tuesday

Hillary Clinton is not the only candidate hanging in there, against the odds.

Mike Huckabee is still around, and looks to be…for a while longer.

“You can beat me but you can’t make me quit,” he said, talking to reporters following a speech before hundreds of locals and Baylor University students.

Clearly, Huckabee is not going to quit. And he hasn’t been ‘beaten’ at this point, and won’t be next week, either.

Even if McCain were to win each of the combined 256 delegates up for grabs in Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont and here on Tuesday, he’d still fall short by some estimates of the 1,191 pledged delegates needed to clinch the nomination. And 1,191, Huckabee reiterated Thursday, is “the magic number.”

“That’s when you have to recognize somebody else has secured the nomination,” he said. “That hasn’t happened yet.”

While he’s still in it, he knows he has a platform and a microphone. He’s saying the right things to social conservatives. And he’s funny.

“Let’s win Texas and let’s absolutely just shock the daylights out of [television newscasters] and make them stand there for about two hours just blubbering all over themselves trying to figure out…” he declared, drowned out by applause.

Speaking of the MSM, there’s some concern among them that Huckabee’s draw in Texas will have other consequences. Like rewriting evolution out of textbooks.

Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister who expressed his support for creationism while serving as governor of neighboring Arkansas, has been pressed several times during the presidential campaign for his view of teaching evolution, but has evaded the issue. “It is interesting that question would even be asked of someone running for President of the United States,” Huckabee responded in a presidential debate last June. “I am not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth grade science book — I am asking for the opportunity to be President of the United States.”

Which raises an interesting point. On this issue and others, the liberal media have tried to instill fear in Americans about what a social or moral conservative president would do to this country. Their clear message is that a president can change the culture, the textbooks, the fabric of American life by imposing his ideology on laws and institutions and even family structures.

So by extension, that reasoning implies that a liberal president would impact the culture as dramatically by imposing his or her ideology and values on the courts and doctors and families.

Why don’t we hear their reports about that?