Now the Hard Part Begins for Huckabee

MELVILLE, N.Y. _ Until recently, Mike Huckabee was a second-tier Republican candidate, a man who was rarely confronted in debates and was perhaps best known for having lost 100 pounds in the year before his campaign.

But in recent weeks, everything has changed. The ordained minister and former Arkansas governor now holds a comfortable lead in Iowa over Mitt Romney and some recent polls place him in a national dead-heat with Rudy Giuliani for first place. A herd of reporters follows his every move, and his face now appears on the cover of Newsweek.

Suddenly, Huckabee, who struggled to gain a foothold early on, looks like a viable candidate. For evangelical Christians, he is seen as an acceptable alternative to Giuliani, a social moderate, and Romney, who is seen as a flip-flopper on issues like abortion. Then there is his personable campaign style and sense of humor, including a tongue-in-cheek campaign ad that featured action hero Chuck Norris.

“He’s enormously engaging personally, he’s funny and he doesn’t take himself too seriously,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster.

Now the hard part begins. Although his down-to-earth demeanor is a hit in the small towns of Iowa, observers say he doesn’t have the cash to compete in big states like Florida and New York, where the battle will be fought on television and radio. Romney has painted Huckabee as liberal on taxes and immigration. And a CNN poll released Tuesday showed that the three leading Democrats would trounce Huckabee if the general election were held today.

All year long, evangelical Christians _ who are an influential Republican voting block, especially in Iowa _ have openly fretted about who to support in the primary race. Some chose pragmatism and threw their support behind frontrunners Giuliani and Romney. Others threatened to leave the Republican Party altogether and back a third-party candidate. Now, some say, they’ve found their man.

“Evangelicals are just like any other voters … it is usually a mixture of how they feel about their politics and what their chances of winning are,” said Oran Smith, president of the Palmetto Family Council, a South Carolina evangelical group. Now, “some folks that maybe had been looking elsewhere have sort of come home to Huckabee.”

Huckabee is pro-life and holds conservative views on gun control and gay rights. He speaks openly of the guiding role that faith plays in his life. Still, he’s not a typical conservative, and some of his positions _ such as supporting arts in schools and paying for the children of illegal immigrants to attend college _ have won him critics.

Economic conservatives have also slammed him for raising taxes while he was Arkansas governor, including the fiscal conservative group Club for Growth, which Tuesday launched anti-Huckabee television ads in Iowa, South Carolina and nationwide.

“We think that as Arkansas governor, he was a serial tax hiker,” said Nachama Soloveichik, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based club, who compared him to liberal Democrats. “He sounds more like John Edwards or Jimmy Carter than any authentic economic conservative.”

Ayres said this image is one Huckabee will have to battle if he hopes to win outside of Iowa. “There’s still more economic conservatives than social conservatives,” he said. “He’s going to have to expand his coalition.”

Another challenge is money. Huckabee has raised only $2.3 million, a miniscule amount compared to Romney’s $62.8 million and Giuliani’s $47.3 million. While the Iowa race can be won by shaking hands in diners and holding town-hall meetings, the states that vote a few weeks later _ Florida, New York, New Jersey, and others _ are too populous for a barebones campaign.

Huckabee must also contend with the fact that all this buzz comes at a price _ increased scrutiny. Already, he has had to answer questions about remarks he made in 1992 advocating the isolation of AIDS patients, as well as his support of parole for a convicted rapist who was later accused of killing a woman.

“It’s windy at the top,” Ayres said. “And he just reached the summit.”

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