Most of the excitement lately in the Republican race for president has been generated by Baptist minister Mike Huckabee. Huckabee’s surge in the polls seems to stem largely from the fact that he exudes one quality the other Republican candidates seem to lack—authenticity. Unlike Mitt Romney, for example, the folksy former governor of Arkansas hasn’t had to revise his views on abortion or other key moral issues in order to run.
Mitt Romney says that he’s running for president as an American, not as a Mormon, and conceded that if his religious beliefs cost him the Oval Office, then “so be it.”
Was it enough to tamp down evangelicals’ skepticism about his faith? That may depend on which evangelicals, and where they stand on the broad spectrum of religious conservatism.
"We set for ourselves one of the strictest, sternest codes in existence,” wrote South Carolina native Ben Robertson in his 1942 memoir Red Hills and Cotton, “but our country is southern . . . and frequently we fail.” Confusion as well as defeat is in the air of this most southern of states as South Carolina prepares to host two key presidential primaries—the GOP primary on January 19 and the Democratic contest on January 26. The winner of the state’s Republican presidential primary has won the party nomination every year since 1980.