{"id":343,"date":"2011-04-13T10:29:03","date_gmt":"2011-04-13T14:29:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=343"},"modified":"2011-04-13T14:49:58","modified_gmt":"2011-04-13T18:49:58","slug":"mike-huckabee-stealth-frontrunner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/mike-huckabee-stealth-frontrunner.html","title":{"rendered":"Mike Huckabee: Stealth Frontrunner"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amidst all the hand-wringing about the state of the Republican presidential field, one potential candidate seems to be sailing blithely along–undeclared, familiar, discounted, and atop the polls. It’s Mike Huckabee, of course.<\/p>\n

Here’s how January looks for him. He’s well ahead in Iowa<\/a>, where he won the caucuses<\/a> in 2008. He’s comfortably in the group behind Mitt Romney in New Hampshire<\/a>, where he finished<\/a> a poor third in 2008. He’s tied for the lead in Florida<\/a>, where he also got walloped<\/a> in 2008. And while no one has polled South Carolina Republicans lately, he finished a close second<\/a> to John McCain last time they voted in a presidential primary.<\/p>\n

Nationally, Huck is maintaining his slight lead<\/a> over all other candidates–and is the only one of the top candidates to improve<\/a> his standing since the emergence of Donald the Reformed Gambling Impresario. Among Republicans, he’s got by far the highest favorable rating<\/a>.\u00a0 As noted<\/a> in this space earlier, he appears to have calmed the nerves of Catholic voters, who stayed away from him in droves in 2008. And in the electorate at large, he matches up well<\/a> against Obama.<\/p>\n

At the moment, the onetime Southern Baptist pastor is letting the loonies make the big noise, while doing his own nice guy act on Fox and the Daily Show<\/a>. He’s a clever politician who knows that the Republican establishment doesn’t much care for him. I’d say he’s laying back in the weeds, waiting to be anointed as the GOP’s last best hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amidst all the hand-wringing about the state of the Republican presidential field, one potential candidate seems to be sailing blithely along–undeclared, familiar, discounted, and atop the polls. It’s Mike Huckabee, of course. Here’s how January looks for him. He’s well ahead in Iowa, where he won the caucuses in 2008. He’s comfortably in the group…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-mike-huckabee"],"yoast_head":"\nMike Huckabee: Stealth Frontrunner - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/mike-huckabee-stealth-frontrunner.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mike Huckabee: Stealth Frontrunner - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Amidst all the hand-wringing about the state of the Republican presidential field, one potential candidate seems to be sailing blithely along–undeclared, familiar, discounted, and atop the polls. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":345,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions\/345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}