Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee greets potential voters at Lizard's Thicket, a restaurant in Columbia, S.C., in early December. The former Southern Baptist preacher was once considered a longshot in the Republican presidential race but has enjoyed a surge in the polls. During his 10½ years as governor of Arkansas, he was regarded as a different brand of Republican — a governor with an idiosyncratic agenda that was sometimes difficult to categorize, but always shaped by his religious beliefs.