Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign website now includes a blog. Huckabee's been getting some good press attention lateley, including a Newsweek article which calls Huck "a would-be Knight for the Religious Right." Asks Newsweek:
Mike Huckabee is pro-gun, pro-life, and anti-gay marriage. So why isn’t he catching fire with the social conservatives who dominate the GOP primary electorate?
The Huckablog also links to a Salon article that calls him "the one Christian conservative running who might not scare independents." And no wonder they like the piece...
For the other second-tier Republican candidates, the hard road Huckabee faces will lead to a near-certain dead end. But no one is counting out Huckabee just yet. It doesn't matter that he is barely a blip on the national polls, or that he has just a fraction of the money, endorsements and organization of the relative front-runners, Romney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain. What matters is that Huckabee appears to have that special something -- the charismatic ability to communicate with the common man, which hundreds of millions of dollars never bought Bob Dole, Al Gore or John Kerry.
"Huckabee is as close to Bill Clinton as I have seen for a Republican since Ronald Reagan left public life," says Richard Land, who heads the public policy arm of the nonpartisan Southern Baptist Convention, which represents 42,000 churches. "When he speaks, he not only knows the words and music, he knows the harmony and the melody."
It is an act that can impress both ends of the political spectrum. In a rousing address Friday to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Huckabee took the group's hard line on taxes and abortion, but he also struck a strong populist tone. "Folks, I stand here today knowing full well that I am probably not the first choice to be president on Wall Street. I am probably not the first choice among the people on K Street," he told the crowd. "I just want to be the first choice among the people who live on Main Street, out there in the heartland of America, who shop at Wal-Mart, who go to church, who hunt, who fish, who drive pickup trucks and listen to country music and follow NASCAR, the kind of people who are tired of politicians telling them what they want to hear rather than what the politician truly believes."During a recent appearance on "The Daily Show," Huckabee wowed even the liberal gatekeeper Jon Stewart with his graceful call for throwing away partisanship. "I couldn't have put that better if it had come out of my own mouth," Stewart told Huckabee, a soft-faced man, with a pointed chin, dimpled cheeks and thinning hair.Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the dean of liberal bloggers at DailyKos, describes Huckabee as the strongest potential Republican candidate, the sort of contender that makes him lose sleep. "The guy is a scary good politician," Moulitsas wrote, "and the more Republican voters around the country see him, the more support he'll get."
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