Blast Magazine Washington reporter Heidi Buchanan, a former congressional intern and 2004 alternate Vermont delegate at the Democratic National Convention, will be providing blog coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign starting next week.

Moving forward from their victory in Iowa, both Illinois Senator Barack Obama and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee face the challenge of translating their early success into momentum which will sustain their candidacies through the remainder of the primaries.

Senator Obama won the Democratic Iowa Caucus’s on Thursday night with 38% of the vote. In second place, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards came out with 30% of the vote with Edwards having a slight edge over Senator Clinton in third place with 29%.

On the GOP side, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee won with 34% of the vote with former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney taking second place with 25% of the vote. Former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson and Arizona Senator John McCain tied for third with 13% of the vote.

Both winners are widely seen as the "likable" candidates out of the wide playing field of presidential hopefuls. However, historically Iowa has not been a reliable predictor of the eventual nominees. In recent New Hampshire polls for instance, Governor Huckabee has been polling in the single digits behind Senator McCain

The next primary in New Hampshire will bring the candidates in front of a different electorate. Whereas in Iowa, Huckabee relied heavily on his Evangelical beliefs, religious values tend not to be as important to New Hampshire voters. It’s an open question whether Huckabee can broaden his appeal beyond the self described Evangelical and born again Christians responsible for his rise to the top tier in Iowa.

Ultimately, the most important factor that Iowa serves is to narrow down the field of candidates in the race — by the end of the night two Democrats, Delaware Senator Joe Biden and Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, ended their bids for the presidency, and no doubt several other may follow suit in the coming days.

Blast Magazine staff writer John Guilfoil contributed to this report.

This was Blast’s live coverage, updated throughout the night of the Iowa caucuses.

In the Iowa Democratic caucus, Barack Obama has won over former senator and vice presidential nominee John Edwards and Senator Hillary Clinton. Clinton is likely to finish in third place in a 37, 30, 30 close race.

In the rural , 95 percent white state, Obama has made a broad statement going forward.

The Associated Press has called the Democratic poll for near 9:30 p.m. Thursday.

This is terrible news for John Edwards, who many feel needed a win in Iowa to maintain his strength in the Democratic race. He has little funding left, and won’t get much of a bonus after barely sneaking away with second place.

Blast Magazine has learned that Senator Chris Dodd (Conn.) will drop out of the race. Senator Joe Biden also announced near 11:30 p.m. Thursday that he would leave the race.

On the right side of the aisle, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has won the Republican straw poll.

NBC and CNN called the race shortly after 9 p.m. Thursday.

Huckabee beat out former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney by nearly 10 percentage points.

Fred Thompson finished third while John McCain was down in fourth.

Rudy Giuliani is not campaigning in Iowa.

Huckabee was outspent 15:1 in Iowa. “People are more important than the purse,” he said during his victory speech.

“Tonight the people of Iowa made a choice, and their choice was clear; their choice was for a change,” Huckabee said.

Huckabee will certainly find financial support in the coming days leading up to New Hampshire — whether his momentum will propel him remains to be seen.

Blast Magazine staff writers Heidi Buchanan and John Guilfoil contributed to this report.

Click here to view all videos and the full transcript from Mike Huckabee’s appearance on The Tonight Show.

In a controversial move, former Arkansas Governor and current Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee left the campaign trail the night before the Iowa caucuses to appear as Jay Leno’s guest on The Tonight Show for its return to live broadcast Wednesday.

Acknowledging the ongoing writers strike, the Governor’s campaign explained that the decision to appear was made only once they were, “…assured that no replacement writers were being used in the show’s production.” because, “Governor Huckabee believes that the writers deserve to be fairly compensated for the sale of their work.”

Huckabee said he would like to been seen by the American people as the, “…guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off.” A view apparently shared by some political bloggers who have taken to referring to him as “Awshucksabee.” He is a former Baptist minister, and explained to Leno that he entered the political arena when he realized that decision makers were making policy “without knowing real poverty.”

Adding to his down home image, Huckabee is also known for his rock band “Capitol Offense” who performed in Des Moines at a January 1, 2008 fundraiser where he cajoled former Congressman and current MSNBC morning anchor Joe Scarborough to join him on guitar. In a moment reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s famous campaign appearance on the Arsenio Hall Show, Huckabee even accepted an offer to join Kevin Eubanks and The Tonight Show Band for a brief set.

Generally, the conversation between Leno and Huckabee avoided policy specifics, with the exception of a brief description of his Fair Tax proposal. Which is essentially a national sales tax in which everyone would pay 23 percent of what they consume — food, gas, sales however, the poor — below a certain threshold would be “untaxed” by getting a rebate. Huckabee said his plan would free people up to earn what they want.

Governor Huckabee also explained his decision to pull his first attack ad two days ago, minutes before a press conference with major media outlets seated only to then showed it to the media anyhow because he didn’t want them to think it didn’t really exist when it did. He cited that his conscious got in the way of dissing Romney, who has spent $8-9 million on negative ads in Iowa and New Hampshire against his two biggest opponents — Governor Huckabee and Senator John McCain. Huckabee pulled his own attack ad because he claimed in front of Leno he wanted to “stick to his message” which is to “stay positive” and talk about what the country needs, rather than what’s wrong with the other guys.

One Republican Party activist — not affiliated with a specific candidate — said the decision to appear on the show highlights Huckabee’s confidence with his current standing in Iowa. However, he noted, it is reminiscent of former Governor Howard Dean’s ill-fated decision in 2004 to leave the campaign trail during a similar time frame in favor of a joint appearance with former President Jimmy Carter.

Huckabee, sticking to his message, ended the evening on a positive note. When Leno asked which candidate he’d like to see on the Democratic side, Huckabee noted that all the Democrats were “sincere” however, there is a fundamental difference in their politics but he “respected anyone running for president.” He did note, that it seems as if Senator Barack Obama and him share a similar value in horizontal politics that is, politics is not just about left, right, liberal, conservative, Democrats and Republican but rather values vertical politics — where the candidate wants to bring the country up and not down, forward — not backwards.

Transcript:

JAY LENO: Folks, up until a few weeks ago, my next guest was an also ran with a funny name in the Republican campaign. He still has a funny name, but now he’s near the top in the national polls. He’s neck in neck with the Mitt Romney in Iowa, and the caucus there will be held tomorrow. Please welcome Mike Huckabee, ladies and gentlemen.

(Applause.)

JAY LENO: Thanks for coming.

MIKE HUCKABEE: Wonderful to be here. Thank you.

JAY LENO: This is what I find fascinating about American politics. I kind of follow this kind of stuff. So I’ve known who you are for a while, but you literally, in the last couple of months, have come from nowhere with hardly any money. Explain how this happens.

MIKE HUCKABEE: I’m just trying to keep from going back to nowhere as fast as I can.

(Laughter.)

I’ve seen a lot of this. People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off. I think that’s part of what’s going on right now.

(Applause.)

JAY LENO: Right. Now, tell us about your background. I know you’re from Hope, Arkansas.

MIKE HUCKABEE: Yes, born and raised there.

JAY LENO: Also, of course, President Clinton did you know each other
growing up?

MIKE HUCKABEE: We didn’t know each other growing up. He’s 9 years older, and he had moved away when he was like 7 years old and went to Hot Springs. When he ran for President, somehow it just didn’t sound right to say, “I believe in a place called Hot Springs.” So he talked about his birth place.

(Laughter.)

You can understand that. We all understand that.

JAY LENO: Now, your first career was as a Baptist minister. How long did you do that?

MIKE HUCKABEE: About 12 years.

JAY LENO: How did you become how did get into that line of work?

MIKE HUCKABEE: Well, I mean, the honest and serious answer is that I just saw life and a perspective in the church that I think very few people get to see. You see every single social pathology that’s out there. Nothing is abstract to you. You put a name and a face on everything, and I really began to believe that so many people making decisions that affect the way we live, the way our future would be governed, didn’t have a clue about how people were really struggling.
It became evident to me that there were a lot of folks making decisions that didn’t understand poverty, hunger, or disease. They didn’t understand the challenges that people had in their families, and for my own three children, who were small at the time, I decided I don’t want to spend the rest of my life complaining about what “they” are doing.
And I finally thought it’s time to get out of the stands and on the field and get my jersey dirty.

JAY LENO: You also played in rock band.

MIKE HUCKABEE: Yes.

JAY LENO: So it’s this is like TV Baptist minister during the day,
playing White Snake at the KitKat Club at night. Doesn’t that seem

(Laughter.)

JAY LENO: Some of your congregation (making rock music sounds.)

MIKE HUCKABEE: I never played with my teeth or anything like that. So it wasn’t totally bad. I started playing guitar when I was 11 years old. I was like so many kids that came out of the ’60s that wanted to
play guitar more than anything. When I finally got a guitar my
parents got a guitar from JCPenney, ordered it from the catalogue. I
got it Christmas 1966. They paid $99 for whole rig guitar,
amplifier. It took them a year to pay it off. My parents barely made enough money to pay the rent. We lived in a little rented house. It was a big sacrifice for them, but I played that guitar until my fingers
nearly bled and until their ears nearly bled. It was

(Laughter.)

JAY LENO: And they said, “Son why don’t you become a minister?”

(Laughter.)

MIKE HUCKABEE: I think they were hoping for me to do anything, and obviously, I wasn’t good enough to make it as a professional. So I had to find something else to do, and that looked like it was mostly indoor work and no heavy lifting. I thought it would be a pretty good way to go.

JAY LENO: Do you think you could sit in are you good enough to sit
in with our band later?

MIKE HUCKABEE: No, but I’d like to do it anyway.

(Applause.)

JAY LENO: I think you first got elected about the time I took over this show, about ’92?

MIKE HUCKABEE: Well, ’93 was the first year. I ran in ’92 and lost an election. Then I ran in ’93 for lieutenant governor, and I won and reelected in ’94, became governor from the position of lieutenant governor when my predecessor resigned and then reelected twice and served ten and a half years as governor.

JAY LENO: Because when I first met you, you were living in a trailer in Arkansas.

MIKE HUCKABEE: My wife wanted me to tell you it was a manufactured home.

JAY LENO: Yes.

(Applause.)

Why were you living in a trailer? Were you trying to put on the airs and impress public constituents?

(Laughter.)

MIKE HUCKABEE: You know, it was a triple wide. A lot of people only have a single wide trailer, but we had a triple wide. It was pretty significant. Actually what was going on was the governor’s mansion was
undergoing renovation. There were a lot of things the wiring and all
this stuff had to be redone. So we had an option to go out and rent this very expensive place or find alternative housing arrangements. We decided to move in a triple wide manufactured home on the grounds of the governor’s mansion. We knew we were going to take a beating.

JAY LENO: We had a million jokes about it.

(Laughter.)

Thank you. You supported the monologue for weeks with that.

(Laughter.)

MIKE HUCKABEE: The big line was they said, “I’m sorry. I’m running
late today. I was on the interstate and got behind the governor’s mansion.

(Laughter.)

JAY LENO: Well, we actually interviewed that was the first time I
met you. You looked a lot the different then. Here he is. We’re talking seven years ago.

(Clip shown.)

(Applause.)

JAY LENO: When we come back, I want to ask you about that triple wide jacket you had on there.

(Laughter.)

We’ll take a break and come back with Mike Huckabee when we come back.

(Applause.)

(Break taken.)

(Mike Huckabee is playing his guitar with the band.)

JAY LENO: Nice job.
Before I ask you about news, I want to ask you about the triple wide jacket. You lost quite a bit of weight. How much weight did you lose?

MIKE HUCKABEE: About 110 pounds.

(Applause.)

JAY LENO: Congratulations on that. What was your secret?

MIKE HUCKABEE: The legislature kept eating my lunch every day.

(Laughter.)

No. My doctor sat me down. I faced a health crisis in 2003, and he basically told me if I didn’t make a lifestyle change, I was entering the last decade of my life. Then he described it. He said to me, “Here’s what’s going to happen.” And when he described it, that’s when I decided I needed a new exit strategy. So I really changed my lifestyle. I started eating differently, got rid of the fried foods and sugars. You know, I’ll tell you something, when you grow up in the South, everything is fried. I mean, you don’t eat anything unless you fry it.

JAY LENO: Fried water.

(Laughter.)

MIKE HUCKABEE: That’s right. You know, it’s very difficult to do that.
If you don’t fry it, you put sugar on it. It’s just the way we eat.
And between that and not exercising, which I did not do, it really caught up with me. I was in a health crisis. So my life was kind of representative of like a lot of people in this country that just don’t take care of themselves. We don’t have a healthcare crisis as much as we have a health crisis, and I was the epitome of it.

JAY LENO: So that’s terrific.
Now, you and Romney seems to have gotten into fisticuffs lately. What’s
going on here? You guys are neck and neck and seems to be getting

MIKE HUCKABEE: Oh, it’s politics. I mean, that’s what politics is about. I tell people that, if you can’t stand the sight of your own blood, don’t run for anything, just buy a ticket and watch it from the stands.

(Laughter.)

Because this is a full contact sport. No doubt about it.

JAY LENO: On Monday, you had a press conference. You were going to release an attack ad which seemed a little unusual for you. Why were you going to do that?

MIKE HUCKABEE: We had been hammered. We had been outspent 20 to 1 in
Iowa. 20 to 1. And that’s tough. And we had been hammered

JAY LENO: How much did you spend?

MIKE HUCKABEE: Oh, I think probably 3 to $400,000.

JAY LENO: And how much did Romney spend?

MIKE HUCKABEE: 8 or 9 million. So I mean, you know, it’s a substantial difference. We just kept getting hammered with negative television ads, negative radio ads, and mail pieces. And finally, decided “We had better answer this, or somebody is going to believe all this stuff.”

JAY LENO: So they work negative ads.

MIKE HUCKABEE: Well, they seemed to.
Then he started hammering John McCain over in New Hampshire. John McCain may be a rival of mine in the presidential race, but I have nothing but respect for him. He’s a great American hero. I think he’s a great American and a wonderful man, and a great guy

(Applause.)

JAY LENO: So you were going to do an ad.

MIKE HUCKABEE: Right. So we put together an ad and taped the tape, got it all ready. We were going to release it at a press conference, and Monday I just didn’t feel right. We had gotten where we are by being positive and talking about what this country needs to be rather than
what’s wrong with the other guys, and I just said

JAY LENO: As you were making it did you feel like

MIKE HUCKABEE: I needed to go take a shower or something like that or give Romney a shower maybe. I don’t know.

(Laughter.)

You know, at the time you think this is what we have to do. You don’t
like it, but you think it’s necessary, and at the end you just think

JAY LENO: So then you get a little conscience saying not to, but then why show it to the press at the press conference?

MIKE HUCKABEE: Well, they were very cynical about it, but the point is, if we hadn’t shown it, they would have said, “You didn’t have an ad.
You’re just bluffing us.” If I had really wanted to be disingenuous what I would have done is run the ad for three days and then said, “Oh, I have a conscience now. I think I’m going to pull it.”

JAY LENO: You did that very well. “Oh, I have a conscience.”

(Laughter.)

That was a real good political

MIKE HUCKABEE: I hope I have a conscience, which would be very unusual for politics to have a conscience.

JAY LENO: I know. Now, you have some interesting positions. I was not aware of this one until just this week when I started to research you a little bit. You want to dismantle the IRS. Everybody cheers that.

(Applause.)

Everybody loves that idea, but what is your alternative? You do away with the IRS, then what?

MIKE HUCKABEE: We would have a consumption tax rather than a tax on productivity.

JAY LENO: Value added?

MIKE HUCKABEE: It really wouldn’t be a V.A.T. It’s a simple like a sales tax at the point of retail sales. Let me tell you why that’s different. You, first of all, eliminate the underground economy. So
everybody is paying drug dealers, prostitutes, gamblers all those
people pay like the rest of us.

JAY LENO: There must be some legitimate work in there.

(Laughter.)

Boy, you really are in politics.

(Laughter.)

Now, what about a poor person goes and suddenly how much is this tax?
23, 24 percent?

MIKE HUCKABEE: It’s 23. But here’s the thing. Every person receives a “prebate” of the taxes that they would have on the level of the poverty, which means that what you really do with this fair tax, which is what it’s called, is you untax the poor. They don’t pay taxes, which means it’s really a progressive tax system. That’s why I love it because it would take the people least able to afford the taxes, and it virtually untaxes them.

Here’s what it also does. It frees people up to earn as much as they want. You don’t get taxed on income, savings, investments, capital gains, or debt.

I met a guy in New Hampshire. This is an interesting point. He’s working a second shift at a machine shop, trying try to help his daughter go through Cornell. She’s in grad school. $54,000 bucks a year to help her out. And he’s working a second shift. My first thing was, “Thank you, Lord. My daughter is not in grad school at Cornell because that’s a lot of money.” But then he tells me, “I’m now in a new tax bracket because I’m working a second shift, and the additional taxes I’m paying almost takes away what I’m getting on the second shift.”
What we’ve done is we’ve told him that, if he really, really works hard, we’re going to make it really hard for him to help his daughter. Here is how he can get his daughter some help: Quit both shifts, stop working, and he could then qualify for his daughter to have some federal assistance. That’s nutty.

We ought to have a system that encourages people to work, to think about the small business guy that sketches out the idea on his kitchen table.
He wants to go into business for himself, but his greatest competitor is not the guy across town or across the country. His greatest competitor is his own government that makes it real difficult for him to fill out the paperwork and pay the taxes.

(Applause.)

JAY LENO: Now, quickly the Democrats also seem to be gaining in
Iowa. Let’s say you win. Who would you want to win on the Democratic ballot? Who would you want to run against?

MIKE HUCKABEE: I still want them all to drop out, and let me have a clear shot all the way to the White House.

(Laughter.)

JAY LENO: So you’re realistic about this.

MIKE HUCKABEE: Yeah, frankly, I think there’s some Democrats that I
think they’re all sincere. I think there’s a fundamental difference between us in terms of whether we think taxes ought to go up or down, whether government ought to be more or less involved. Look, I have respect for anybody that runs for president. I have a great respect for Barack Obama. I think he’s a person who is trying to do in many ways what I hope I’m trying to do and that is to say let’s quit what I call “horizontal politics.” Everything in this country is not left, right, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican. I think the country is looking for somebody who is vertical, who is thinking, “Let’s take America up and not down,” and people will forgive you for being left or right if you go up.

(Applause.)

JAY LENO: I know you’ve got to get back to Iowa.

MIKE HUCKABEE: I do.

JAY LENO: I love Iowa. Thank you, sir, Mike Huckabee.

Emeril Lagasse is next.