I'm not sure how he did it, but Mike Huckabee appears to have met the campaign fundraising goal he set for himself. It was a pretty low bar — $1,034,487 million in online donations the first 20 days of November — and his campaign claimed victory about 30 minutes before midnight. According to his Web site tracking graph he's now more than $20,000 past that goal.

If accurate, that means they raised more than $250,000 yesterday, including nearly $200,000 in the last 11 hours alone.

The reason they chose $1,034,487 is that's the amount they raised for all of October. Hitting that in 20 days shows improvement, and it's a solid milestone for the campaign, which in the last week released its first video commercial and continued to rise in the polls in Iowa.

But given the difficulty in making the 20-day goal, it will be interesting to see if Huckabee can now hit his goal of more than $2 million for the entire month of November. It's also worth noting that nine months into his effort, he still lags far behind the rest of the major players in ability to fundraise. If he were to become the Republican nominee, that would be a major weakness, particularly when facing the incredible operations of either Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times