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There is just no getting around it, America has a hard-on for Mike Huckabee:

Mike Huckabee has vaulted from nowhere into second place in the Republican presidential race, riding a burst of support from evangelicals, Southerners and conservatives, a poll showed Friday.

The upsurge by the former Arkansas governor has come largely at the expense of Fred Thompson, according to the national survey by The Associated Press and Ipsos. Thompson has dropped after failing to galvanize the party's right-wing core as much as some had expected.

Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner, yet while his support long has been steady it shows signs of fraying. Huckabee's growing strength in the South has come as the former New York mayor's support there has dropped, the poll found.

"Why not me?" Huckabee said in an interview Thursday. "I meet all the criteria. I'm conservative, but I think I appeal to a broader set of voters. And I think that people are also looking for someone with whom they can identify."

Yes, people of all stripes ( and by "all stripes" I mean everyone from the Pentacostalists to the Charismatics and all of the snake handlers in between) like Mike. (Isaiah 53:5 "But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed") And if there is anyone that I want to entrust our nations future to, it is a group of people who can't wait to get to the Double-wide In The Sky. Unfortunately that feeling is not shared by certain members of the Conservative movement who inhabit those urban hellholes of depravity that we call cities. Some of them, like Charles Krauthammer, aren't ready to hand over the party to the Glossolalia wing that the Republican party has been catering to for years:

Well, Huckabee is running against Romney (the other GOP candidates are non-factors in Iowa), and he knows that many Christian conservatives, particularly those who have an affinity with Huckabee's highly paraded evangelical Christianity, consider Romney's faith a decidedly non-Christian cult.
[...]

The God of the Founders, the God on the coinage, the God for whom Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving day is the ineffable, ecumenical, nonsectarian Providence of the American civil religion whose relation to this blessed land is without appeal to any particular testament or ritual. Every mention of God in every inaugural address in American history refers to the deity in this kind of all-embracing, universal, nondenominational way. (The one exception: William Henry Harrison. He caught cold delivering that inaugural address. Thirty-one days later, he was dead. Draw your own conclusion.) I suspect that neither Jefferson's Providence nor Washington's Great Author nor Lincoln's Almighty would look kindly on the exploitation of religious differences for political gain. It is un-American.

I think that Krauthammer's point, using William Henry Harrison as an example, is that God is like the Mafia. He exists, everyone knows that He exists, but if you get a little too specific talking about Him, you're gonna get whacked.

Meanwhile, Our Lady of the Ice Cubes Soaked Up My Vodka takes a roundabout way to address what might be called the Godsmacked Yokel Problem:

There was one significant mistake in the speech. I do not know why Romney did not include nonbelievers in his moving portrait of the great American family. We were founded by believing Christians, but soon enough Jeremiah Johnson, and the old proud agnostic mountain men, and the village atheist, and the Brahmin doubter, were there, and they too are part of us, part of this wonderful thing we have. Why did Mr. Romney not do the obvious thing and include them? My guess: It would have been reported, and some idiots would have seen it and been offended that this Romney character likes to laud atheists. And he would have lost the idiot vote.

My feeling is we've bowed too far to the idiots.

Or as a wise man once said:

Bow down before the one you serve.
You're going to get what you deserve.