Mike Huckabee -- the great Republican hope?

In some ways, Huckabee seems like a promising candidate for 2012: a squeaky-clean family man and bona-fide Christian who loves to talk. His communication is folksy but fluid; he never seems flummoxed, like George W. Bush, or befuddled, like John McCain, or unprepared, like Sarah Palin. “If we’re running a race against their most articulate guy,” Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s former campaign manager, told me, referring to President Obama, “we should put our most articulate guy. Huckabee’s that guy.” Schmidt, who has traded barbs with Palin since the election, said, “There’s no one who really provides a better contrast to Sarah Palin, showing her as an entertainer instead of a serious thinker—and there’s not enough oxygen for both of them.”…

Mike Huckabee will always be too weird for the Old Guard of his party. But the Party is a fractured and dispersed association at this point. No clear Republican front-runner has emerged for the next Presidential race. Palin quit her only substantive job in government and has not hired establishment players to reshape her as a more mainstream candidate; even less Presidentially, she is going to be the star of a reality television show. Mitt Romney, who won the straw poll at the Southern Republican Leadership conference, in April, is regarded by some Republicans as a flip-flopper, and his Mormonism is a liability. Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, has the powerful support of Rush Limbaugh, but he is only halfway through his first term and, assuming he wins reëlection in 2011, would have to abandon office almost immediately to start campaigning for President. Haley Barbour has the potential to consolidate establishment support, but it’s still not clear that he intends to run. Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, announced that he will not run for reëlection, which has been interpreted to mean that he has his eyes on the Presidency, but he is seen by some in his party as too liberal.

Steve Schmidt told me, “Really, there’s three primaries within the Republican primary. There’s the primary that’s the evangelical wing of the Party, there’s the establishment primary, and there’s usually a maverick of an insurgent category. Whoever occupies two out of the three is the nominee.” It would not take a packaging genius to put Huckabee out as an evangelical insurgent. The next election will cost billions of dollars, and Huckabee is not much of a traditional fund-raiser. But raising money for the primaries in 2012 could have as much to do with getting people to click a button on their BlackBerry to contribute ten dollars as it does with working the corporate Washington cocktail circuit.