What's wrong with Huckabee?

I get my impressions of Dominant Liberal Democratic Thinking from Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo and Salon.com. And, they both are kind of running with the theme that as Giuliani is some sort of corrupt goofball that's trying to turn the fact that he went on TV when the president was AWOL after 9/11 into a credible candidacy, Romney has no apparent principled stands -- the actual realization of the slimefest against John Kerry -- and McCain has damaged his own credibility in his attempts to support the Iraq occupation and other Bush initiatives too badly to stand into a "Republicans have nowhere to turn" analysis of the 2008 presidential race. Of course, they explicitly and preferentially turned to nowhere over other alternatives in the 2000 electoral cycle, but we'll let that lie.

But, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee took second in the Ames Straw Poll. You might point out that lunatic fringe candidates Brownback and Tancredo took third and fourth, and the CW-tagged-unelectable Ron Paul took fifth, but the whole field sort of looks lunatic fringe in aggregate.

I don't know a lot about Governor Huckabee. The only thing I've heard about him recently was that he offered to work with Michael Moore to fight obesity after being kind of a dick to him after Sicko. But, he never seems like a loon or an outsider when I do hear about him.

So, liberal establishment fantasies aside, the GOP may well have a credible presidential candidate to bring to the table next year.