I've heard it said that Mike Huckabee is so squeaky clean the opposition is going to have a hard time going after him. The only hole in his armour or questionable belief they say is his stand on immigration.

Take Trade. Mr Huckabee calls himself a free-trader, but on the stump he does not sound like one. He rouses nativist crowds by fretting that America cannot be secure unless it is self-sufficient in food, energy and military harware. "I don'T want to see our food come from China, our oil come from Saudi Arabia and our manufacturing come from Europe and Asia", he says. "There is so much foolishness in that one sentence it is hard to unpack", comments Rich Lowry, a conservative coumnist. America Hardly imports any food from China. Mr Huckabee's promise of energy independence within 10 years is impossible. And cheap imports benefit precisely the cash-strapped fold Mr Huckabee purports to champion.

The website for the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based thing-tank, lists the various candidates' position on a range of foreign-policy areas: on an embarrassing number of them, including defence, North Korea, Africa and Inda, Mr Huckabee's position is listed as "unknown".

And as people start to take Mr Huckabee's presidential bid seriously, he will face the sort of hostile scrutiny he has so far avoided. The Club for Growth, a lobby for economic conservatives, assails him for hiking sales and petrol taxes in Arkansas, and for his attacks on industries he accused of "price-gouging". The Club says that nominating him would be "an abject rejection" of the free-market, limited-governement principles for which the Republican Party stands. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, gave him a "D" grade for fiscal policy.

Well I read "Newsweek", "Time" and "The Nation" articles and have since passed them on. But they all, coming from a leaning left perspective, said that Huckabee is going to be hard to smear and is very likable. The articles were very favorable which I kind of thought was surprising.