Mike Huckabee talks faith, family and freedom. But whose faith, whose family, and whose freedom…?

It’s been a long time since Mike Huckabee was a hot property — January 3, to be precise, when the former governor of Arkansas rocked the Republican Party establishment by winning the Iowa caucuses. Huckabee did go on to win a number of other primaries and caucuses, but ultimately had to give way to John McCain in the first week of March, when the senator from Arizona won enough delegates to give him the nomination.

As speculation intensifies over McCain’s choice of a vice-presidential running mate, Huckabee’s name occasionally comes up, but the smart money is on either Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty or perhaps a bit farther afield, on a woman such as Kay Bailey Hutchison or even Carly Fiorina.

For all of that, I think there are at least three reasons why the former governor of Arkansas may well be on McCain’s short list of possible running mates.

First, though the primary season now seems long over, it is important to remember that Huckabee lasted longer than any of McCain’s other rivals and carefully avoided attacking McCain during the primary season, unlike Mitt Romney, who launched attack after savage attack against the Republican front-runner. Even if he ended up coming in a distant second place in pledged delegates won, Huckabee came closer than anyone else to McCain out for the nomination. The fact that Huckabee accomplished this on a shoestring budget that was only a fraction of that available to the independently wealth Romney says something both about Huckabee’s political skills and even more so the almost fanatical support of evangeiical Christians.

And that leads to the second reason why McCain may well be considering Huckabee as a possible running mate: Huckabee has more credibility with the religious right than any of the other also-rans, a credibility that McCain rather desperately needs. The religious right distrusts and even despises McCain, who simply cannot win without a strong turnout from right-wing Christian evangelicals.

At least as important as the two aforementioned reasons for picking Huckabee would be this third quality: Huckabee is a very effective campaigner, as he proved time and again during the primary season. He may not have won the nomination, but Huckabee showed great political skills and demonstrated the appeal of his folksy sense of humor. And Huckabee showed enormous personal discipline in losing over 100 pounds while governor

As Americans, we all too blithely throw around terms like ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative.’ And yet, there are in fact many conservatisms. At the very least, the Reagan coalition that dominated American politics for nearly a generation included economic and foreign policy conservatives as well as social conservatives

On the one hand, Huckabee’s policy prescriptions for the most part are steeped in the Southern Baptist tradition from which he comes and on most issues, and on social values issues — including same-sex marriage and other LGBT rights issues — he is as far right a Republican as one could find in elected office in the United States today. During the primary season, Huckabee suggested that he was open to accepting the support of the Log Cabin Republicans; but the other Man From Hope is unlikely to support rights for LGB people in any form, let alone rights for transgendered people. And Huckabee’s comments about isolating people with AIDS are downright alarming.

But a careful examination of Huckabee’s record shows that he cannot be described as a conventional conservative in economic policy terms. As governor of Arkansas from 1996-2007, Huckabee was all too willing to engage in government intervention in the style of a traditional Southern populist. For example, Huckabee’s support for more music and art education in schools runs directly counter to the test-them-until-they-drop approach to education that many Democrats as well as most Republicans seem to have embraced.

Despite his impeccable religious right credentials, then, Huckabee is not popular with right-wing talk radio heads such as Rush Limbaugh, who calls him ‘The Huckster.’ Or with Sean Hannity, who follows Limbaugh on ABC affiliates on weekday afternoons, and who has gone so far as to label the former governor of Arkansas a ‘radical leftist/liberal.’

Rush Limbaugh may insist that Huckabee is no conservative and deride the Arkansan as a ‘populist,’ but if McCain does pick Huckabee as his running mate, his credibility with the religious right could help deliver just enough votes to deliver the White House to the Republicans for the third time in three elections.