Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

The Mike Huckabee campaign is so pleased with this report from KY3 in Springfield, Missouri, that it posted it on the Huckabee campaign blog. A very nice profile indeed, and Huckabee gets several good soundbites in deftly comparing his always-on pro-life position with the more, uh, off-and-on pro-life position of Mitt Romney, and also neatly deflecting the criticism of a gas tax increase under his watch in Arkansas by pointing out that the people of Arkansas approved the tax increase - to pay for better roads - with 80 percent of the vote.

Huckabee's political record, his solidly conservative  positions and his success in winning elections as a Republican in a Democrat-dominated state ought to have him doing better in the GOP presidential race than being stuck in the pack of seven stuck in single digits, but so far he's been unable to compete with the celebrity of Rudy Giuliani and John McCain and the fund-raising prowess of Romney. Still, he's got a record more in tune with the conservative base of the party, he's got excellent communications skills thanks to his background as a Baptist preacher and his 10-plus years in politics, and he's getting an increasing amount of good press.

Consider this column from Ruth Marcus in the San Jose Mercury News - she's a liberal who finds no issue on which she agrees with Huckabee, and yet she likes him...

The presidential candidate was talking about the threat of outsourcing and the immorality of corporate chief executives getting huge bonuses while workers' pension plans go bust.

"When CEOs are making 500 times the average wage of their worker, how can you justify that?" he asked. "I think a president ought to call out companies ... in which the CEO leads his company into bankruptcy ... and gets a $100 million bonus while the workers down below end up losing their jobs and have worked 20 and 30 years for pensions and they're gone. ... That's immoral. ... And that's not free enterprise; that's theft."

Standard presidential primary fare, perhaps, except that the candidate speaking was a Republican, and a conservative Christian one at that: former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. A long shot for his party's nomination, certainly, yet Huckabee, a Baptist minister, is not the cartoon Christian conservative of popular imagining.

He's got, as he put it, "the purity of credentials," but Huckabee's menu of social conservatism offers more choices than implacable opposition to abortion and gay rights. "Being a conservative is also about having a much broader agenda than the very narrowly focused one that sometimes conservatives are either accused of or - frankly - can be guilty of," Huckabee said last week at a luncheon hosted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public  Life.

Huckabee, 51, has the air of the nice neighbor who wanders by to discuss your crabgrass problem. "I'm a conservative," he said, "but I'm not mad at anybody about it."

Marcus also includes this bit about former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who briefly flirted with running for the Democratic nomination.

After the lunch, I happened to see one of Huckabee's fellow former governors and marathon running buddy, Iowa Democrat Tom Vilsack. "I've always thought he was the dark horse in the race," said Vilsack, who dropped out of the campaign for lack of funds. If Huckabee can avoid that fate, Vilsack said, "I think there is room for Mike Huckabee" in Iowa, where evangelicals "are pretty serious caucus-goers."

Don't count Huckabee out. If he comes close to Romney in the Ames straw poll, the composition of the "top tier" in the Republican race will be utterly and completely changed.

And, remember, the namesake of the leftwing blog The DailyKos, center of the nutroots universe, said Huckabee is the Republican candidate he fears most.