It was Huckabee’s ease in front of a camera that enabled him to stay in the 2008 Presidential campaign as long as he did. “In March of ’07, he said to me, ‘This campaign is going to be over before it starts,’ because he was dismally not raising money,” [Kirsten] Fedewa said. “He was staying at Motel 8s.” At the end of 2007, Huckabee had raised less than nine million dollars, compared with Mitt Romney’s fifty-four million—which he augmented with thirty-five million of his own money—and Hillary Clinton’s hundred and seven million.

To compensate, Huckabee gave nearly twenty television interviews every morning for four months, from the run-up to the Iowa caucuses until he left the race. “We estimate that was two hundred million dollars in free media,” Fedewa said. “The media was his base.” The strategy was to make Huckabee available to everyone, not just CNN and the 700 Club but “The Colbert Report” and Rolling Stone—“the shows that your opponents will be too scared to go on,” as Bob Wickers, one of Huckabee’s campaign consultants, put it. Huckabee is not uncomfortable around Democrats or comedians; he is as happy talking to Jon Stewart about abortion as he is interviewing Gayle Haggard about her marriage, as he did on a recent episode of his own show. And liberals tend to like him in return. Even if you find his politics repugnant, you can still find yourself drawn in by his relentless niceness. It doesn’t mean you’d vote for him, but it might mean you’d have him on your show.

–The New Yorker Magazine, June 21, 2010

Read more: The New Yorker Magazine