Earlier this month I wrote a dispatch from Ames about the significance of Mike Huckabee's surprising second-place finish in the Iowa GOP straw poll. My sage friends over at The Corner sneered at the idea. (See here, here, and here. I believe the subtitle to one of John Podhoretz's posts was "Anybody who says Ames matters must be smoking something illegal.") Now we have our first look at the post-Ames polling and, wouldn't you know, Huckabee appears to have surged into contention in Iowa. According to the latest American Research Group poll, Huckabee's support there stands at 14 percent, up from 1 percent in July. Over the same time, Rudy Giuliani, the fire of J-Pod's loins, has dropped from 22 to 17, and John McCain has fallen from 17 to 5. Fred Thompson has held steady at 13, while Romney has ticked up several points, from 21 to 27, though that's pretty close to where he was in June. Say what you will about the reliability of the ARG polls (and J-Pod, for one, has relied on them to bolster the case for Rudy), but it's hard to believe the methodology could be so flawed as to invent a massive surge of support where very little actually exists... For what it's worth, the Democratic results are also kind of interesting: They show some encouraging movement for Obama in Iowa, and some discouraging movement for him in New Hampshire. (Really discouraging, actually.) Also for what it's worth, Giuliani is down somewhat, and Huckabee is up quite a bit, in New Hampshire. (He's gone from 1 percent in July to 9 percent now.) Update: A colleague points out that a phrase like "fire of my loins" might be a little sensitive, particularly in this post-Foley, post-Craig era. Let me stipulate that I didn't quite mean it in the Humbert Humbert sense. Just that, you know, J-Pod has been known to get pretty excited about Rudy from time to time. --Noam Scheiber