A significant amount of media coverage has focused on the religious beliefs of the Republican candidates for President (especially Romney’s and Huckabee’s). But Richard Cohen turns the spotlight on Democrat Barack Obama’s church in a column in the Washington Post. Here’s the heart of it:

The Iowa caucuses are over, and Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are the winners. A couple of items are worthy of note after tonight’s results. First, Obama emerges as the first viable African American candidate for President in the history of the United States. At least he seems viable, and that’s a big deal. Second, Huckabee, who was outspent 20 to 1 by Mitt Romney, came out of no-wheres-ville and is now a front-runner for the Republican nomination. (I’m wishing I would have taken the trouble to shake his hand when I saw him last summer and snapped this picture.)

Today the Iowa caucuses will be meeting to choose their nominees for president. There have been many predictions as to who will come out on top. I don’t think any of the ones doing the predicting have any clue about what will really happen. I remember that four years ago, many of the prognosticators saw Howard Dean as the inevitable winner of the Democrat caucuses in Iowa. Boy were they wrong. After finishing a disappointing third place, Dean put an exclamation point on his defeat with a rare display of . . . Hmm. . . Shall we say, jubilance?

The Iowa caucuses are next week, and Peggy Noonan has a word for Iowans to consider before they select their candidates. Noonan thinks there are “reasonable” and “unreasonable” candidates on both the Democrat and Republican sides. She defines a “reasonable” candidate as follows: “a candidate who does not appear to be obviously insane. We’d like knowledge, judgment, a prudent understanding of the world and of the ways and histories of the men and women in it.”

George Will’s recent column about Mike Huckabee gives us some pertinent information as we size-up the race for the Republican nomination for president. Here’s a piece of George Will‘s broadside against Huckabee: “Huckabee’s campaign actually is . . . a comprehensive apostasy against core Republican beliefs.”

Jeffrey Bell writes in The Weekly Standard that social conservatism is far from being dead. In fact, he argues, it remains a potent force in American politics. He writes: “Social conservatism continues to exist as a mass movement that cares very much about its core beliefs. Supporters of this movement may have some unusually tough decisions to make in the 2008 presidential cycle, but anyone analyzing American politics under the premise that social conservatism will soon disappear–or that these days it amounts to little more than an eccentric sideshow–is very likely to be proved wrong