The Left fear Huckabee

This was on a blog called the "LeftWord"

Huckabee in the first tier for GOP
by Jerome Armstrong
It's time to take Mike Huckabee serious. Rasmussen is going to start adding him to their daily tracking numbers tomorrow. They released a tracking poll on Friday that showed him moving into the first tier:Giuliani 20
Thompson 19
Undecided 18
McCain 14
Huckabee 12
Romney 11
That would suggest that the GOP race is really amidst another shake-up, as the previous week's Rasmussen poll released last monday showed these results: Giuliani 25
Thompson 19
Romney 15
McCain 12
Huckabee 8
The Huckabee surge over the past 3 months has been tracked by Rasmussen going from 0 to 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, and 8 last week. Tomorrow, Huckabee will be in double-digits and ahead of Romney nationally.

Huckabee's campaign seems much smarter than your average GOP campaign in their embrace of the web. In fact, though it's not that phenomenal platform-wise, you can see from their websiteand blog that their team understands how to engage their base of activists. Even though its theocons instead of progressives, it's simplicity reminds me of the use of the medium by Dean's campaign in '03.

Huckabee's blog has chosen Digg as their socnet platform to push content out to, has an impressive grassroots "bloggers for Huckabee" blogroll that they use the blog to grow, and has posts that are plausibly by the candidate. By all means, it appears like an online blogosphere has developed for Huckabee which the campaign is encouraging. The small-donor army of Christian donors brought into the GOP by Reagan and Robertson are what revolutionized direct-mail for the RNC in the 1980's, and it appears as though Huckabee is going to be the beneficiary of their finally becoming an internet donor force.

Here are some comments:
Democrats should fear Huckabee. He's not affiliated with any scandals, can bring the "values voters" to the polls (they'll stay home otherwise), and he really isn't a bad guy and won't be easy to demonize.

Based on the past four hours, a link from the Huckabee blog (we got one for coverage of a Republican event on Iowa Independent) is probably worth about 1,000 visits. Not quite Ron Paul numbers, but it's more than any other campaign blog that we have been linked by recently.
In contrast, about two months ago when we got linked by Huckabee's blog, it was worth little to nothing.
-- Iowa Independent

He's not scary
And that's what makes him so threatening. He's got wicked conservative credentials (well, on social issues at least), but he doesn't come across as angry. He's as conservative as a Sam Brownback, but comes across as a nice guy. He's also got a great story to tell with his weight loss, and how folks have to take responsibility...
He's certainly beatable, and I don't know that he's got the chance to move up fast enough, but he would certainly be an interesting candidate to face.