Huckabee. It sounds like one of those American restaurant chains popular across the South, the kind of place where on All You Can Eat Tuesdays the patrons down buckets of barbecued ribs and fried chicken while sucking on 32-ounce tumblers of diet soda. Then again, it could be a character from a Mark Twain novel, or a predictably contrived name in the first line of one of those obscene limericks written by bored schoolboys. But President Huckabee, commander-in-chief, leader of the free world?

If — and it is an even larger conditional than usually applies in the fickle arena of political success — the current opinion polls are to be believed, the Huckabee Era is a possibility that the world ought to be starting to contemplate seriously. In the unending soap opera of the 2008 US presidential election campaign, Mike Huckabee is the star of the latest episode.

The former Governor of Arkansas — there’s a presidential pedigree of recent vintage for you — has been an outsider for most of the race for the Republican nomination. But in the space of a month he has jumped from fifth in the national opinion polls to a tie for first place with Rudolph Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York. Much more importantly, he seems to have established a large lead in Iowa, the state that votes first on January 3.

In case you were inclined to think, by the way, that it’s just supercilious Englishmen who think Huckabee is an odd sort of name for a president, it was the Texan Dan Bartlett, George Bush’s former communications chief, who said a few months ago that Mr Huckabee could not be taken seriously as presidential material because of his name. That is shaping up to be about as bankable as many other Bush Administration judgments.

The current surge — the Huckaboom as it has inevitably been dubbed — is due to a number of factors. Perhaps the most obvious is religion. Mr Huckabee is a Baptist preacher and comes closer than any of the Republicans to meeting the confessional requirements of Christian evangelical orthodoxy. Certainly, set against the other candidates — a Mormon, a multiply married Catholic and a collection of milquetoast Protestants — he fits the bill.

And yet he is not, to be fair, straight out of central casting’s collection of fire-breathing televangelists. He is very much a representative of a modern breed of conservative Christian — anti-abortion and against gay marriage, certainly, but with a much broader horizon. He talks in almost social democratic terms about inequality. When Governor, he raised taxes to fund programmes for the poor and was decidedly soft on illegal immigrants, giving them scholarships for higher education. He is likeable, funny and self-deprecating.

The second factor behind his sudden rise is the saliency of domestic issues in the election. One of the most confident predictions all the pundits made about this election was that it would turn on foreign policy. But with the surge in Iraq continuing to take the war out of the headlines, and with last week’s official intelligence report taking Iran out of the crosshairs, suddenly the world outside is a non-issue. Instead, the hot topics are the economy, health- care and immigration. This is helping the domestically focused candidates with no foreign policy experience such as Mr Huckabee, and on the Democratic side, Barack Obama.

The third factor is the most transitory for Mr Huckabee and it could be — problematically for him — the most important. There’s a desultory quality to the way Republican voters are eyeing their options. A poll for The New York Times this week found that not a single one of the eight main candidates had favourable ratings above 50 per cent. The Republican field resembles a kind of faded carousel, where each gaudy horse gets a brief moment in the sun before rotating off into the shadows. First it was John McCain, then Mr Giuliani, then Mitt Romney, then Fred Thompson. Now it’s Mr Huckabee. Wait a few weeks and it could be Mr Romney again.

The particular problem for the new front-runner is this. Each candidate in succession has been propelled into the glare by a lack of enthusiasm for the others. But when the light shines harshly on his own candidacy, it shows up some of the rust and wear.

Now Mr Huckabee is starting to get some unflattering attention. It was discovered this week that he made some unfortunate remarks about “isolating” Aids patients in the early 1990s. He authorised the release from prison of a rapist who went on to commit murder. Before the Christmas decorations are down, the Huckaboom may well have turned into a Huckabust.

This impatience with the party’s would-be leaders reflects the fracturing, if not the splintering, of the great Republican movement. As has often been observed, the Republicans are a vast unwieldy coalition: religious conservatives, libertarians, pro-business groups, free-market ideologues, foreign policy hawks, America-first nativist isolationists, neoconservative idealists.

Sometimes when the political weather demands it — the economic crisis that produced Ronald Reagan; the post-9/11 world that cemented the Bush presidency — some overarching interest unites these groups around a candidacy. At other times, they fall apart. There’s no reason now why a foreign policy hawk should make common cause with a religious conservative. Supporters of free trade are at odds with anti-immigration nativists. Libertarians don’t trust the business lobby.

Circumstances have helped to bring about this disarray. But so too have eight years of a Bush Administration that has redefined competence downwards and a party that grew corrupt and complacent as it controlled Congress. All this might suggest that, with or without a Huckaboom, the Republicans don’t stand a chance in any case next year.

But that assumes the Democrats will nominate an unthreatening, run-of-the-mill candidate who can sail unmolested to victory. Instead they are going to choose either a clever woman who is despised by half the country, or an appealing young black man, who, if elected, would have the least relevant experience of any president in the history of the country.

The Republicans only look dead.

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