Former Arkansas governor and southern Baptist minister Mike Huckabee, who now leads the polls in Iowa and South Carolina, is running hard in New Hampshire. Huckabee's sudden surge from the back of the field is stirring up a frenzy, not only among his primary rivals, but among anyone who had hopes that a Republican race led by a nervous Mormon from Massachusetts and an adulterous Roman Catholic from New York might at least be free of the Bible-thumping, holier-than-thou rhetoric that has characterised the party under George W Bush.
The press is howling over a Mike Huckabee TV ad showing the governor - who recently lost 100lbs and looks like a shadow of his former self - invoking Jesus as he sits before a Christmas tree, the bookshelves behind him forming the shape of a cross. On the Today show on Wednesday, Huckabee insisted that sometimes a bookshelf is just a bookshelf - and sought to cast the whole incident as some sort of anti-Christian attack: "People are looking for anything in the world. It's so politically incorrect to say "Merry Christmas" anymore ...'' But in an earlier commercial, Huckabee intones: "Faith doesn't just influence me; it really defines me," as the words "CHRISTIAN LEADER" fill the screen.
In person, Huckabee comes off as an amiable preacher man, trekking about the state accompanied by action star Chuck Norris, who also made a TV ad for the candidate. (The team is now being referred to as "Chuckabee.") Our cameras caught Huckabee visiting a veterans' home in Tilton. Sick though they may be, the vets, who doubtless have been visited by numerous candidates, cagily weighed the man during lunch. These guys are more likely to be impressed by the old soldier John McCain than they are by the evangelist Mike Huckabee.
