Mike Huckabee

With 34 days remaining, the Republican presidential race in Iowa has broken wide open, as Mike Huckabee surges into contention with the longtime front-runner, Mitt Romney. Polls show the two former governors running nearly even in Iowa, which will cast the first votes of the 2008 campaign, despite Huckabee's meager resources and the large amounts of time and TV advertising that Romney has lavished on the state. Earlier this month, surveys had Huckabee trailing Romney by double digits.

In 2005, a Republican state senator named Jim Holt introduced a bill to deny public benefits to Arkansas' soaring population of illegal immigrants. Holt, a Southern Baptist minister, figured it was a rock-solid conservative idea -- a matter, he said, "of right and wrong." Arkansas' governor at the time was also a professed conservative, and also a Southern Baptist minister. But Mike Huckabee had only scorn for his fellow Republican's proposal.

Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee eyed the hundreds of supporters spilling out of his newly expanded Iowa headquarters, thronging him for autographs, grabbing campaign signs and volunteering for his cause before Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses. The sight was quite a contrast to his summer visits to pizzerias around the state, when the former Arkansas governor said he was "thrilled" if 25 people showed up. "I've been at the bottom and I've been at the top," he said late Tuesday evening.

Mike Huckabee, the ascendant Republican presidential candidate in Iowa, is enjoying a surge of support across the country -- and Rudolph W. Giuliani seems to be paying the biggest price, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found. Huckabee has pulled into second place, close behind Giuliani, in the national survey of Republican-leaning voters.

Pastor Jay D. Cole had two close friends. One was an inmate in the Arkansas state penitentiary. There, the minister would sit with Wayne DuMond "and pray and read the Bible." For a while, the prisoner's wife even lived in Cole's home. Cole's friendship with Mike Huckabee ran deeper, back to when Huckabee was the youngest-ever head of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. The two men produced Bible lessons on videotape.

Mike Huckabee once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could "pose a dangerous public health risk." As a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 1992, Huckabee answered 229 questions submitted to him by the Associated Press. Besides a quarantine, Huckabee suggested that Hollywood celebrities fund AIDS research from their own pockets, rather than relying on federal health agencies.

Re "Huckabee wanted AIDS patients isolated," Dec. 9 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, believed that rapist Wayne DuMond had a religious conversion to Christianity and therefore deserved to be freed. DuMond went on to kill.

As governor of Arkansas five years ago, Mike Huckabee joined a bipartisan chorus of politicians who concluded that the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba was bad for businesses. Now that he's a top-tier candidate for president, Huckabee has decided he favors the embargo -- so much so that he vowed Monday to outdo even President Bush in strangling the regime of Cuban President Fidel Castro and punishing those who do business there.

In a sign of the rapidly shifting dynamics of the Republican presidential contest, Mitt Romney on Monday became the first candidate to run a TV attack ad, slamming Mike Huckabee on immigration in a bid to brake his rival's sharp rise in the polls. Romney's assault comes amid new polls suggesting that white evangelicals -- a major Republican voting bloc -- have started rallying strongly behind Huckabee after months of wavering among candidates across the field.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee calls his cadre of loyal volunteers "Huck's Army." And one of his premiere battalions is a tight network of Christian home-schooling families who view the campaign as a civic -- and educational -- duty. Huckabee has spent roughly $400,000 campaigning in Iowa and has hired enough full-time workers in recent months to put his statewide staff into double digits.