It’s Monday, so I talked to my Thompson Associate.

On Thompson’s New All-Iowa-Until-The-Caucuses Strategy: “Huckabee is now clearly doing well, and I think that the best way to go at this is for Fred to devote a good part of time on the road doing what he does best. I’m hearing anecdotally that he’s doing well on the stump. We’re going to just go out there and put our guy up against his.”

On the coming strategy: “To use a sports analogy, he’s got to go to the ball, he can’t wait for the ball to come to him. But I think part of the problem is he needs an opportunity, and the campaign environment hasn’t provided them yet – there just haven’t been opportunities to really have a defining moment.”

On Thompson’s ads in Iowa: “He’s moved up two or three points [in the polls] since they went up.”

On the Holidays: “We have another 10 days [to effectively communicate] in Iowa… We have until about Christmas, and then we’ve got a few days afterward, after that we’re locked in. We’ve just got to push harder with ads and hope something breaks through.”

A Short Sample of this Thompson Associate’s Low Opinion of Huckabee: “It seems to me our best hope is that Huckabee keeps doing what he’s doing: making mistakes. He can’t answer questions accurately. He seems ill-informed on national security issues, and he avoids tough questions by smiling and throwing out some line that’s coming out of a script.”

I’m also told to expect “surprises” on Thompson’s bus tour in Iowa.