Huck Redux? Huck Springboards From Fox News To 2012.

Politico's Mike Allen's 'Top Talker':  'Morning' Joe Scarborough, moments ago: 'Roger Ailes is the most powerful voice in the Republican Party. ... [Fox News] is the only organizing force in the GOP.' Joe made that observation when we told him about a Richter-rattling New Yorker profile of Mike Huckabee that notes the Fox News weekend talk-show host has MOVED TO FLORIDA: 'In February, the Huckabees bought a place in Miramar Beach, near Pensacola, and Huckabee changed his voter registration to Florida Republican. They still have a big house in North Little Rock, which they renovated after they left the Governor's Mansion, but Florida has certain advantages: the taxes are lower than in Arkansas, and it's easy to get to New York City. It could also be politically advantageous to have a bulkhead in the Sunshine State should Huckabee decide to run for President in 2012. Huckabee says, 'The dogs like it there in the winter.''  it might be the juiciest political read since 'Game Change' (or anything by Leibo). 

Some excerpts from Levy's 'PRODIGAL SON: Is the wayward Republican Mike Huckabee now his party's best hope?':

• “Glenn Beck, he’s the man. I basically parrot all his views to my friends. His,” he said, motioning toward Huckabee, “Hannity’s, Glenn Beck’s—whatever I can hock.” A Jewish boy from Brooklyn author Ariel Levy interviewed while traveling with Huckabee in Israel.
• Huckabee’s tone as a commentator is markedly less combative than that of some of his colleagues on Fox. (“I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad at anybody” was one of his memorable lines in the most recent Presidential campaign.) He described the initial concept for his program, which first aired in September, 2008, as “adult-level civil conversations with people with whom I disagree,” and his favorite compliment is that the show has a calming effect: “It’s like a cha-ching in my head when I hear that.” But his differences with Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly are primarily stylistic; “I’m certainly on the same ideological spectrum."
• In some ways, Huckabee seems like a promising candidate for 2012: a squeaky-clean family man and bona-fide Christian who loves to talk. His communication is folksy but fluid; he never seems flummoxed, like George W. Bush, or befuddled, like John McCain, or unprepared, like Sarah Palin. “If we’re running a race against their most articulate guy,” Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s former campaign manager, told me, referring to President Obama, “we should put our most articulate guy. Huckabee’s that guy.” Schmidt, who has traded barbs with Palin since the election, said, “There’s no one who really provides a better contrast to Sarah Palin, showing her as an entertainer instead of a serious thinker—and there’s not enough oxygen for both of them.”
• A bad host, he said, was someone like David Letterman. “I just found him to be the most detached and—I’m sorry to say this—arrogant jerk. He was not warm.” (Huckabee had no similar critique of his Fox colleagues, some of whom can be less than courtly with their dissenting guests.)
• “Huckabee” has the aesthetics of a local-access show: the host ends every episode playing bass with his house band, the Little Rockers, which is composed of fellow Fox staffers. “What he does well is break the rules of cable news,” Bill Shine, the senior vice-president of the network, said. “The show is about him; it’s built around him, and not around the genre of cable news. Sometimes I look at the guest list and think, Wow, Neil Sedaka?”
• Lucrative and enjoyable as his television career has proved, it remains to be seen whether life in the private sector will be sufficiently stimulating for Mike Huckabee . . . Mike Huckabee will always be too weird for the Old Guard of his party. But the Party is a fractured and dispersed association at this point. No clear Republican front-runner has emerged for the next Presidential race.
• Steve Schmidt [Repub political hack] told me, “Really, there’s three primaries within the Republican primary. There’s the primary that’s the evangelical wing of the Party, there’s the establishment primary, and there’s usually a maverick of an insurgent category. Whoever occupies two out of the three is the nominee.” It would not take a packaging genius to put Huckabee out as an evangelical insurgent. The next election will cost billions of dollars, and Huckabee is not much of a traditional fund-raiser. But raising money for the primaries in 2012 could have as much to do with getting people to click a button on their BlackBerry to contribute ten dollars as it does with working the corporate Washington cocktail circuit.

It's obvious Mike's running in 2012.  Should Roger Ailes yank his weekend show off the air?