Disturbed by what many observers are calling an “unfocused” and “incoherent” message from Republican presidential candidates, the Republican National Committee has announced a campaign to rally the party faithful -- and its national leaders -- around a “hard core” of political themes involving atheists, immigrants, Muslims, gays and lesbians, and even evolution and taxes. The campaign, titled “Coordinate the Hate,” plans to open in Ames, Iowa this week and launch an eight-week tour of major primary battlegrounds.

“Huckabee’s surge is just the latest symptom of the problem,” said one analyst. “Before this, it was the attempt to cast Thompson as Mister Excitement. The root problem is that we have an array of niche candidates who offer intense, concentrated hatreds of one group or another, but no ‘big tent’ candidate capable of hating everyone at once. We need to coordinate the hate for 2008.”

Even Huckabee supporters acknowledge that their candidate has run into difficulties on this score. “We’ve got a guy here who goes around saying, ‘I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad at anybody,’” said one campaign staffer. “Well, that sort of thing might get you a nice word or two in the New Yorker, but it’s the kiss of death on the campaign trail. Look at what we’ve had to do with immigration: we’ve had to disavow every sane thing Huckabee ever said, like ‘we’re a better country than to punish children for what their parents did,’ and cobble together some wacky 120-day mass deportation program and a bunch of ‘interlocking’ cameras on the border. We’re dealing with an enormous hate gap, and I’m not sure we can catch up this late in the game.”

Another Huckabee aide expressed hope that the governor would get a badly needed “hate bounce” from the revelation that, in 1992, he had proposed quarantining people with AIDS and eliminating federal funding for AIDS research. Spokespersons for the Giuliani and Romney campaigns, however, suggested it would be too little too late. “Detention camps for people with AIDS is very 1990s,” said a Giuliani staffer. “But 9/11 changed everything, and Huckabee brings nothing to the table when it comes to torture. The Republican nominee has got to be someone who’s willing not only to waterboard Muslims personally, but to ridicule them afterwards and make a few snappy remarks about sleep deprivation the next day.”

Some observers, noting that the Republican field is divided among candidates who hate taxes, Muslims, atheists, Mexicans, gays and lesbians, evolutionary theorists, and versions of their earlier selves, have suggested that the solution lies not in a “Coordinate the Hate” campaign but in a more radical effort, known as the “Rudy Tancromnabee Project,” to combine the brains of three or four candidates using experimental technologies developed by mad scientists. “It sounds crazy, but it just might work,” said Dr. Grover Horowitz of the American Fusion Institute. “If we can come up with a composite ‘unity’ candidate who can hate big government, immigrants, homosexuals, scientists, atheists, and Islamofascists all at the same time and at the same level of intensity, we won’t even need to have a primary.”

Dr. Groverwitz acknowledged that the plan is “dangerous” and could have “unforeseen” side effects. “It all depends on getting the right people into the right pods at the right time,” he noted. “One misstep, and we could wind up with a candidate who provides illegal immigrants with police protection for their mistresses at taxpayer expense, or a candidate who releases a serial rapist and murderer because he believes that Bill Clinton and the Council on Foreign Relations are building Interstate 35 in order to form a North American Union. There’s a lot of full-bore nuttiness rattling around in these candidates’ brains, so it’s kind of a crap shoot.”

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, however, reacted strongly to the idea of asking mad scientists to combine individual candidates, calling it “deeply offensive.” “I profoundly resent the suggestion that candidates’ brains should be fused together,” Romney said in a prepared statement, “because I resent the suggestion that I am incapable of hating all these groups by myself. No one has worked harder than I have to purge every last vestige of decency from his being or to appeal to the basest instincts of the base, and I have demonstrated time and again that I am willing to adopt any and every position necessary to win this nomination. Let every candidate know, whether he wishes me well or ill, that I shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, espouse any belief, oppose any foe, and appease any lunatic in order to assure the survival and the success of my campaign.”