There was Mike Huckabee, the affable governor of Arkansas, who was busy carving out his spot as the field’s evangelical standard-bearer. A former Baptist minister, he was quick with a folksy aphorism and skilled at bringing every political discussion back to Jesus. He was also, in Romney’s private estimation, a “huckster”—the very “caricature of a for-profit preacher.” The two men had first met a few years earlier at a conference for the nation’s governors. “Huck,” as he liked to be known, had thrown an extravagant, staff-berating, I-demand-to-speak-to-your-manager tantrum upon discovering that Romney got a nicer conference room than he did. The episode had left Romney with an impression that beneath Huck’s aw-shucks persona lurked a fragile ego and a petty ruthlessness—two things that could make him a mean competitor.
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