Huckabee?(The Talk of the Town)(Mike Huckabee)

Huckabee. Funny, improbable name; funny, improbable candidate. How funny? Well, have a look at the first Huckabee for President campaign commercial, aired last week in Iowa and now ubiquitous on the Web. In it, the former governor of Arkansas trades straight-faced non sequiturs with Chuck Norris, the B-list action star. (Norris: "Mike Huckabee wants to put the I.R.S. out of business." Huckabee: "When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn't lifting himself up, he's pushing the earth down.") It's an unusually entertaining spot--or, rather, meta-spot, the subtext of which is its own absurdity and, by extension, that of the whole genre.

How improbable? Well, up until the tail end of the summer, polls had Huckabee's support for the Republican nomination hovering between zero and three per cent, usually closer to zero. In October, he broke into a trot, in November into a Gallup. In a poll released on Thanksgiving eve by Reuters/Zogby, he is in third place, at eleven per cent, nosing past not only John McCain but also Mitt Romney and narrowing the gap with the fading Fred Thompson to four points. In Iowa, where actual voting will occur on January 3rd, he has surged into what is essentially a tie with Romney for first place.

Huckabee, who at fifty-one is the youngest Republican running, spent half of his adult life as a Southern Baptist minister. Most of his support, so far, comes from the Evangelical Christian right. Yet to those who are not in that category his affect is curiously unthreatening. "I'm a conservative, but I'm not mad at anybody," he likes to say. His manner and appearance are reassuringly ordinary. When he smiles or laughs, which is often, his dimpled face looks interestingly like that of Wallace, of Wallace & Gromit.

On a recent day that Huckabee spent in Seattle, where he went to scare up a little cash (he has raised and spent a tiny fraction of his opponents'), his unexpectedness was fully on view. A luncheon speech to a roomful of like-minded supporters--such people do exist even in the land of Microsoft--was remarkable for what it wasn't. The snobbery of cultural elites, the "homosexual agenda," the alleged desire of Democrats to surrender to Islamofascists--these went unmentioned, as did abortion, gay marriage, and the liberal media. Nor did he have anything unpleasant to say about any of the other candidates of either party, unless you count an otherwise respectful reference to Hillary Clinton as "the presumptive Democrat nominee." ("We get along cordially," he said, referring to the Clintons. "They've campaigned against me and raised money for every opponent I ever had, and that's O.K., because I've campaigned against them just as fervently.")

Huckabee speaks calmly, in stories, parables, and extended metaphors. The foreign-policy section of his talk (what there was of it) was a leisurely account of how his children laugh at him when he tells them that his grade-school class used to "duck and cover" in fear of a Soviet nuclear attack. "Somehow, in our naivete," he said, "we thought that if the world is coming to an end the crosshairs of the first nuclear missile would be aimed at the Brookwood Elementary School, in Hope, Arkansas." The section's conclusion--and the speech's only hint at how the speaker might deal with what he called "a very dangerous world"--was a single sentence: "I want to be the President that helps to make it so that your grandchildren laugh at you when you tell them you used to have to put your toothpaste in a plastic bag and take your shoes off to get on an airplane to go somewhere in this country."

Like another governor from Hope who once ran for President, Candidate Huckabee reserves his real passion for matters domestic. On education, he talked not about standardized tests or back-to-basics but about something like their polar opposite. "We have to change and reform the education system so that we're capturing both the left and the right sides of the kid's brain," he said. "There ought to be a new focus not just in math and ...