Huckabee triumphs?

This morning on Morning Joe, David Schuster, a respectable political reporter, said he thought Huckabee could ride his charm all the way to the Republican nomination and, if his opponent was Hillary, he would win, because he's more likable. Wow. Not sure I buy that assessment, but of course I thought GWB was way too much of a lightweight to be taken seriously as a presidential contender. The thought of a Huckabee presidency sure scares the crap out of me. But I spent the whole drive to work thinking about how he could be countered in a national campaign. Then on the shuttle bus, I happened to read this short piece in Newsweek by Howard Fineman, another respected political reporter (below is a link to the full essay and an excerpt):

http://www.newsweek.com/id/84583

Mike Huckabee advertises himself as a "Christian Leader." But he is loath to talk about his preacher days. On the campaign trail, it is the Lost Decade of his life. No one can find, or get access to, texts or video of his sermons. He is an ordained Southern Baptist minister; he led two congregations. Still, he'd rather talk about the guitar his folks bought him at JCPenney, or about the bravery of the Founding Fathers.
[. . .]
Trying to have it both ways is what politicians do for a living. But in Washington and the savvier precincts of elsewhere (Nashville, for example), Republicans and their secular conservatives allies are distraught at the thought of Huckabee as the GOP's 2008 presidential nominee. They couch their fears in terms of secular issues: his spending record as governor, his advocacy of a national sales tax, his confusion about the location of Pakistan. Privately, however, what worries the insiders is that Blue and Purple America will run shrieking from a fellow—no matter how media-savvy and just-plain-folks he seems to be—who does not believe in the science of evolution but who does believe that the Bible is pretty close to literally true.

And to them I say, let us turn to Paul's Letter to the Galatians, chapter six, verse seven, in which he writes: "For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." For the fact is, Huckabee's candidacy is nothing more or less than the logical result of the GOP's 30-year-long crusade to turn evangelical Christians into the shock troops of the party. After Jimmy Carter first lured some of them into the trenches in 1976—and won much of the South in the process—Republicans, under a Tennessean named Bill Brock, made this the core of their strategy, and figures such as the late Lee Atwater, Karl Rove and George W. Bush pursued it. The full fruit of their labors materialized in 2004. Twenty-seven million evangelicals voted by a four-to-one margin to re-elect the president; they formed more than a third of his total vote.

If they are that crucial to the GOP coalition, it only makes sense for them to want to eliminate the middlemen. Why rely on laypeople such as Bush when you can have the real thing? And that would seem to be Huckabee, if he is still willing to admit it.