DETROIT -- The center of the Republican universe has finally been located, somewhere between the Lamborghini display and the General Motors pavilion at the Detroit auto show.

All three leading GOP candidates passed within shouting distance of each other here this afternoon, in an apparently deliberate bit of gamesmanship the night before polls open in the Michigan primary. Mitt Romney gave a press conference in front of a fuel cell-powered GM SUV, while Mike Huckabee peered through the windows of a nearby hybrid. John McCain strolled through the front door to meet Joe Lieberman for a walk-through near the Ferraris. Each one had his own orbiting horde of TV crews, reporters and aides shoving their way through the automotive writers checking out concept cars and 2009 models.

For a moment, the media throngs were in danger of commingling. "You don't pay us to drive you around to Mike Huckabee events, I'll tell you that much," one Romney staffer told the reporters, including me, who had booked seats on a bus following Romney around Michigan all day.

The overlap wasn't an accident. While Romney (whose father, George Romney, was an auto executive before becoming Michigan governor) had always planned to swing by the car show after addressing the Detroit Economic Club this afternoon, McCain added his visit later, ditching his own traveling press corps to zip over to the Motor City from western Michigan. Polls show they're neck and neck here, and Romney has been hammering McCain -- who has been saying some of Michigan's lost jobs aren't coming back -- for giving up on the auto business; McCain, for his part, says he's just being honest. The Romney digs may have prompted McCain to show up here to show he, too, supports the Big Three.

Meanwhile, Huckabee -- lagging behind in polls -- apparently ignored a heads-up from Romney advisors hoping to give the two men a little more clearance than they had. On his own tour of the auto show, he somehow wound his way over to exactly where Romney was talking to the media (though when Romney aides yelled, "The bus is leaving!" to reporters, it must have briefly interrupted whatever point Huckabee was trying to make about how much he loves cars -- especially American ones). No debate ensued, which was sort of a surprise given that the GOP can't seem to go more than a day or two without one.

At any rate, only Romney -- the native son of sorts, even if he was elected governor of Massachusetts -- is staying in Michigan through when the polls close. By then, Huckabee and McCain will have moved back to South Carolina, which votes Saturday.

Mike Huckabee is the funniest Republican contender, the only GOP presidential candidate with a sure grasp of populist rhetoric and the rags-to-riches champion of this presidential cycle. But, up to now, his grasp of the nuances of domestic and foreign policy has been about on par with Mitt Romney's understanding of late fees on a MasterCard bill.

Huckabee's advocacy of a national sales tax seemingly came courtesy of the folks on the Fair Tax bus that dogged Republican candidates in Iowa. Under fire from Romney for being soft on the children of undocumented workers, Huckabee simply lifted a get-tough immigration plan from the Minutemen (the group's co-founder Jim Gilchrist endorsed him) but then could not defend the zigzag contradictions in his record on "Meet the Press." And, of course, Huckabee was the presidential candidate who spent 30 hours without a staffer to tell him (or the curiosity to learn by picking up a stray newspaper) that a new National Intelligence Estimate had revealed that -- whoops! -- Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program after all.

Huckabee's cavalier attitude towards policy ended abruptly Friday afternoon with the announcement that Jim Pinkerton, long one of the smartest idea mavens in the Republican Party, had signed on as a senior adviser to the former Arkansas governor. Pinkerton -- a Newsday columnist, commentator on Fox News and a fellow at the centrist New American Foundation -- earned his spurs as a young policy advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Pinkerton, in fact, in the first Bush administration was pushing a series of policy ideas (billed as the "New Paradigm") which were similar in anti-bureaucratic spirit to the "New Democrat" ideology of Bill Clinton in 1992.

What is most intriguing about Pinkerton is his instinctive grasp of Huckabee's rhetorical fusion of social conservatism and economic populism. In a favorable review of a William Jennings Bryan biography in 2006 in the American Conservative, Pinkerton wrote, "[The] description of Democratic virtues in the Bryan era sounds more like Republican ideals today. And that might explain why the Democratic voters of yesterday are the Republican voters of today. If one were to look at an electoral college map of Bryan's elections, one would see that the red-blue pattern is virtually the mirror image of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections."

While Pinkerton's review did not mention Huckabee (who then was an asterisk as a presidential possibility), the former Baptist pastor is the Republican with the potential to recreate Bryanism (from its little-guy economic concerns to his opposition to evolution) for the 21st century. What Huckabee has lacked is a top-level adviser to layer some intellectual heft and policy realism onto the candidate's make-it-up-every-morning improvisational style.

Of course, Pinkerton -- like anyone who has been composing sideline political commentary for the last 15 years -- has written paragraphs that now seem comically out-of-step with his new candidate. In Slate in 1999, Pinkerton unequivocally declared, "The American electorate doesn't want to hear about God's Law -- certainly not from politicians...Even Republicans don't want to hear from Him through vote-seeking prophets."

Pinkerton was referring to Pat Robertson's 1988 presidential campaign. But Robertson never was a plausible White House contender, even though he finished second in the Iowa caucuses. Huckabee, who won Iowa and finished ahead of Rudy Giuliani in secular New Hampshire, is now vying with John McCain in South Carolina for the role of GOP frontrunner. And Huckabee's claim to be a serious candidate (rather than, say, the Jesse Ventura of the Republican Party) just went way up with the hiring of Pinkerton. Win or lose, Huckabee is going to be a fascinating candidate to watch.

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. -- Poor Ronald Reagan. The 40th president was all but exhumed on Fox News during the first 30 minutes of Thursday night's Republican presidential debate, as each contender in the party's field tried to grab the Reagan legacy for his own political purposes.

It wasn't a surprising tactic. Like much of today's Republican Party, the South Carolina GOP primary is now basically seen as a Reagan creation. In 1980, the Gipper won the primary here on his way to capturing the nomination for president -- and every nominee since, from George H.W. Bush to his son, has gone on to do the same thing.

But Reagan, apparently, is in the eye of the beholder. The problem for South Carolina voters watching Thursday is that depending on which candidate you asked, Reagan's main accomplishment was anything from cutting spending (John McCain) to thinking positive (Mitt Romney) to making Jimmy Carter look like a wimp (Rudy Giuliani). Giuliani was the first to try the Reagan mask on. Then McCain, trying to make himself into the race's front-runner, claimed he helped get the Gipper elected. "I'm proud to have been a member of the Reagan revolution, a foot soldier," McCain said. Huckabee did his part back then, too: "I was a part of it in 1979 and a lot of the evangelicals ... became a part of helping Ronald Reagan to be elected." Romney answered a question about abortion by changing the topic to ... you know who.

Only Fred Thompson went so far as to demand time to lay his own claim to Reaganism. Except once he had his chance, he suddenly started talking about Huckabee instead -- the nastiest moment of the debate by far:

On the one hand, you have the Reagan revolution. You have the Reagan coalition of limited government and strong national security. On the other hand, you have the direction that Governor Huckabee would take us in. He would be a Christian leader, but he would also bring about liberal economic policies, liberal foreign policies. He believes we have an arrogant foreign policy and the tradition of blame America first. He believes that Guantánamo should be closed down and those enemy combatants brought here to the United States to find their way into the court system eventually. He believes in taxpayer-funded programs for illegals, as he did in Arkansas. He has the endorsement of the National Education Association, and the NEA said it was because of his opposition to vouchers. He said he would sign a bill that would ban smoking nationwide. So much for federalism. So much for states' rights. So much for individual rights. That's not the model of the Reagan coalition, that's the model of the Democratic Party.

So much for the 11th Commandment! That was just the beginning of the night for Thompson, who was so vibrant, so energetic, so ... awake that it almost made you think he was running for president. He had one of the night's best laugh lines, talking about the Iranian speedboats that threatened U.S. warships over the weekend: "One more step and they would have been introduced to those virgins that they're looking forward to seeing." (But it didn't seem to take much to get the crowd rowdy, which may have had something to do with the heavy pre-debate traffic in the adjacent bar by those in attendance.) He went after Huckabee every chance he got, a clear indication that the two men are competing for a similar pool of conservative voters in South Carolina. Advisors to every other campaign were surprised to see Thompson get into it so much, but his effort mostly just underscored how little he has been a player up to now. It also cheered McCain's strategists, who are quite happy to have someone else peel votes away from Huckabee.

The other sign of serious political tension came early on, as Romney lashed out at McCain for telling Michigan voters that some of the state's lost jobs are staying lost. Ever the optimist (see Reagan, above), Romney answered the night's first question by saying the U.S. was not heading into a recession and that he would "fight for every single job, Michigan, South Carolina, every state in this country." His aides sent a flurry of e-mail calling McCain a pessimist on Michigan's economy, and afterward, Romney told reporters the auto industry could surely turn itself around. Considering the state has the nation's highest unemployment rate (7.4 percent in November), McCain's "straight talk" might strike most Michiganders as more realistic. "One of the reasons why I won in New Hampshire is because I went there and told them the truth. And sometimes you have to tell people things they don't want to hear, along with things that they do want to hear," he said. "There are some jobs that aren't coming back to Michigan."

On most issues, though, things again came down to Every Other Republican vs. the Ron Paul Revolution. Everyone else agreed that it didn't make sense to second-guess the commanders involved in the Strait of Hormuz confrontation with Iran, who decided not to blow the Iranian speedboats up; Paul, who apparently wasn't listening, accused the others of pushing to start World War III. (That's not to say most GOP candidates seem to mind the idea of war with Iran, but they weren't looking to start it then.) Everyone else lauded the Iraq troop surge -- McCain and Giuliani even tangled over who supported it first -- and praised President Bush for finally paying attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Paul said the U.S. should cut off aid to both sides and get out of Iraq immediately. The Revolution mostly stayed away from domestic issues, though. For that matter, so did Fox News -- the only question about, say, healthcare, was one asking Romney whether he'd sign legislation that extended federal insurance to cover abortion.

The debate concluded with the mandatory segment on immigration. McCain actually got some applause for repeating his new mantra that the government has to prove it can secure the borders before dealing with the 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the country already. That may illustrate that he's got more supporters coming to debates now than he used to, when the issue was hotter, rather than a broad acceptance of his plan. Romney again insisted it would be perfectly feasible to deport millions of people, though he didn't specify how. But he seemed downright pragmatic on the matter compared with Huckabee. "When people say, how will the government round them up? The government didn't round everybody up to get here," Huckabee said. "The government doesn't have to round everybody up to get back in line. That's nonsense. People got themselves here, they can get themselves to the back of the line." Presumably they won't have to pay $2,500 to hire a coyote to smuggle them there. With each day since Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist endorsed him, Huckabee makes less and less sense on immigration -- but that does play well in South Carolina.

Only McCain pointed out that the night's hero, Reagan, had helped create the illegal immigration problem by signing a 1986 amnesty and then failing to enforce the laws that were supposed to go along with it. But unlike last week's showdown, he didn't actually mention him by name when he did it. There are rules in South Carolina politics, though they're not the ones people play by in other states. As far as this night was concerned, the only one that seemed to matter was, "Win one for the Gipper."

After the first third of the Fox debate drew to a close, my quick-and-dirty conclusion was that John McCain and Mike Huckabee had done nothing to jeopardize their position at the top of the Republican pack. Though it must be said that Fred Thompson's line about the Iranian Revolutionary Guard coming within an instant of "meeting those virgins" is a reminder that he was the candidate who had the capacity to make a breakthrough (unlikely at this late date) if he had only had woken up earlier. And, of course, Ron Paul deserves a tip of the hat for suggesting that the Navy came within a hairbreadth of going to war against speed boats.

But the big conclusion from this debate is aesthetic. Patriotism is the last refuge of the desperate. The only candidates wearing American flag pins are those who have so far been big losers and may not be around for the next GOP debate in California -- Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani. Rudy, by the way, is off his game, since he actually answered a few economic policy questions without invoking 9/11.

Consider these very temporary verdicts: My "Roadies" colleague Mike Madden will be offering a comprehensive assessment once the debate is over.

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. -- We've got to stop meeting like this.

Republican candidates are gathering here for their third debate in six nights. There's another one set for Florida less than two weeks from now, and one in California 10 days after that. At this point, it's as if the entire campaign were turning into a high school forensics society; it's possible that the debates have gone past the point of diminishing marginal utility and into a new realm where they actually leave voters less informed than they otherwise would be.

That could change if the Fox News folks can find some new questions or new ways to ask them, but considering they just aired a debate Sunday night -- which covered more or less the same ground as the one the night before -- I'm not holding my breath. Last time Fox News sponsored a debate in South Carolina, in May, the network subjected the candidates and the world to a prolonged hypothetical involving a ticking bomb and torture. (At least "24" is off the air now because of the writers' strike, so maybe they won't feel the need to hype it through the news division tonight.)

But Myrtle Beach seems to be taking the whole thing extremely seriously, so maybe I should, too. The security lines outside the debate site -- already set up six hours before things get going -- seem more befitting a G-8 summit than a meeting of the GOP contenders. Inside, there are metal detectors at each entrance, though I was able to sneak in without emptying my pockets by following South Carolina Republican Party spokesman Rob Godfrey in. Someone has built a sand sculpture of all the candidates across the street from the Sheraton Hotel and Convention Center, dubbed "Mount Myrtle" instead of Mount Rushmore. Mitt Romney's hair is a bit wavier in sand than in real life (Sand Mitt looks more like Doc Brown from "Back to the Future"), but as a project, it's ... impressive.

Some campaign staffers are grumbling a bit about having yet another debate so soon after the last few, and the location -- a three-hour drive from Columbia, where most campaigns have their headquarters -- made it hard for anyone to do much in the way of talking to voters before prep time began. Most campaigns are rolling out of South Carolina for Michigan over the weekend, since there's an election there on Tuesday.

Still, there is a lot at stake for several candidates. John McCain is starting to reconnect with the GOP establishment types he first tried to lock down early last year; a strong performance tonight, followed by a win Tuesday in Michigan, would help his fundraising and momentum a lot. Mike Huckabee is leading in some polls here, and almost always does well in debates. He's banking on support from upstate religious conservatives in South Carolina, and from downscale voters in Michigan, so expect a mix of economic populism and family values from him tonight. Romney -- despite his sand sculpture -- has pulled his ads off the air in South Carolina and Florida and is essentially banking his future on winning his home state, Michigan. Aides felt they had settled on a good message for Romney by the time he finished losing New Hampshire to McCain -- his business experience makes him the best candidate to reshape Washington -- and he'll try to hit that theme again here. (Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani and the Ron Paul revolution will be here as well, but they may not get as much attention from the Fox crew, based on where polls put their support in the state.)

The bottom line, if you're watching tonight? Remember that this is South Carolina, where the winner of the primary has gone on to be the Republican nominee in every election cycle since Ronald Reagan in 1980. The state GOP is proud of its "first in the South" status, and the election is only nine days off, so this debate may get more exposure than most. But also remember, this is South Carolina, so you can expect things to get a little weird. At a warm-up dinner last night to raise money for the state GOP, Ollie North apparently tossed plenty of read meat to conservative activists. If Ollie was just the appetizer, then tonight's debate could be juicy indeed.

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- This is, in many, many ways, very clearly not New Hampshire.

Forget about clam chowder -- I just had a pulled-pork platter with a side of green beans for lunch. There's no snow on the ground. In fact, it's 72 degrees outside. The trees are palms, not pines, and no one cares about the Patriots.

But as I drove into town this afternoon, I spotted one reminder that yes, South Carolina, there is a presidential election going on here: the Ron Paul blimp, slowly gliding its way over the heart of the historic city. In Iowa, Paul was staying at my hotel. In New Hampshire, you couldn't go three blocks without passing hordes of his fans chanting about the North American Union. And now, apparently, the Revolution has moved south.

The more things change ...

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Nothing cures money woes like winning. Hillary Clinton's campaign was feeling so good about fundraising after last night's New Hampshire primary win that officials opened up the weekly call to top donors to the press (though they didn't let us ask questions).

Since midnight last night, the campaign took in more than $1.1 million online, chairman Terry McAuliffe told donors around 4:45 p.m. Eastern. "I guarantee you we are going to beat Senator [Barack] Obama's campaign in fundraising" in January, he said. Clinton raised $24 million to spend on the primary in the last three months of 2007, McAuliffe said.

Clinton aides were panicking about money after losing the Iowa caucuses, but winning Tuesday seems to have shored up the campaign's financial situation. Donors pledged $5 million in new cash in the past 48 hours, McAuliffe said.

Obama, meanwhile, seems to be free of money worries for now, too. His campaign manager, David Plouffe, reported in an e-mail at 11:20 a.m. today that the campaign's online operations took in $500,000 after midnight Tuesday -- despite Obama's losing. Obama raised only $22.5 million for the primary, but he raised an additional $8 million in the first week of January. "We continue to build a grassroots movement that makes us best-positioned to compete financially in the primaries and caucuses coming up," Plouffe wrote.

Both sides will need the cash. The 22 primaries and caucuses on Feb. 5 look like they could be decisive; competing in even a handful of them will cost far more than New Hampshire and Iowa did. Big states with expensive TV markets like California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey are all in play. Each campaign is adding staff on the ground in key states as well.

Salon has confirmed that Maggie Williams, who was Hillary Clinton's White House chief of staff, is definitely joining the campaign as a top-level volunteer to coordinate operations. Williams, who has remained close to the former first lady while building her own crisis-management consulting firm in New York, had chosen not to become directly involved in the presidential effort. But in the wake of Hillary's expected defeat in the New Hampshire primary, Williams is doing what she has done so often in the past -- loyally riding to the rescue. The decision to bring in Williams appears to be a way to inject new thinking into the floundering Clinton campaign while simultaneously calling on the talents of the person whom Hillary has consistently relied on the most.

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Here is my favorite New Hampshire pre-primary statistic: Only 53 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of Republicans said that they have "definitely decided" whom to vote for. These numbers come from the final CNN/WMUR tracking poll that was conducted over the weekend. (The horse-race results themselves were not surprising: Barack Obama is up by nine percentage points on the Democratic side and John McCain has a five-point edge among Republican voters.)

All this brings me to a Big Hunch. And sorry to disappoint Ron Paul fans -- it is not about his subterranean surge.

Today will be the first presidential primary ever (cue the music) in the Age of Broadband. My guess is that in addition to record turnout and record warm weather, we will see a record number of voters scanning the Web sites of the candidates before they head to the polls. When I went via Google to the Web sites of the five major candidates contesting New Hampshire using a local hotel connection, I noted (no big surprise) that they were all overtly appealing to primary voters. For those who want to make their own comparisons, here are the sites of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

I would love to have the numbers for New Hampshire Web traffic at all these sites today compared with, say, tomorrow. My guess is that the major online story from the 2008 primaries will turn out to be not viral videos, social networking or even 2004's trend of Web-based fundraising. Rather, the most powerful tool will be something as humdrum as the Web sites controlled by the candidates. Welcome to America's first home-page primary.

NASHUA, N.H. -- Voter turnout could be even higher than experts are expecting -- today is on course to be the warmest New Hampshire primary in at least 40 years.

If the historical data on Weather Underground is accurate, Manchester polling places have never been open for a primary when the weather beat today's forecast high of 57. It's already that warm in Nashua, about 20 minutes farther south -- people are walking around downtown without jackets, though huge piles of snow that fell last week are still melting slowly into the streets and sidewalks.

The state's top voting official, Secretary of State William Gardner, told the AP he expected a record 500,000 voters to turn out today, though he said the nice weather wouldn't be the reason. It can't hurt, though -- just look at the wild speculation about weather before last week's Iowa caucuses, where turnout hit record levels. The weather stayed friendly then, but it's nothing like today in New Hampshire.

A week ago, I would have said higher turnout would help Barack Obama grind out a narrow victory over Hillary Clinton, but both of those campaigns seem to expect an Obama win that isn't even all that close. On the Republican side, the weather could help expand the electorate beyond the party faithful, who tilt to Mitt Romney, and draw in independents who may back John McCain. Hard to say for sure, of course.

If you're wondering, the coldest New Hampshire primary on record appears to have come just four years ago, when John Kerry won the state and the high temperature was 21 degrees. The primary has moved from mid-March to early January since 1968, but it's still New England in the winter -- warm weather like today's might make people want to write in Al Gore.