By Stephen Dinan - MIAMI — Mike Huckabee jokes that if he's not the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, someone better tell the other campaigns to turn their fire elsewhere.
While he's not quite comfortable with the term front-runner — "I would like to say we're 'emerging,' " he said yesterday — the former Arkansas governor finds himself facing near-smothering press attention and the concentrated attacks from other campaigns. But whatever he's called, his emergence means the former two-man race between Mitt Romney and Rudolph W. Giuliani is now a lot more complicated.
Mr. Huckabee spent the morning in Miami yesterday picking up the endorsement of one of Florida's most powerful politicians, House Speaker Marco Rubio, the latest in a line of substantial backers Mr. Huckabee is amassing.
Mr. Rubio said he had planned to stay neutral in the race, but in the past few weeks had felt compelled to back Mr. Huckabee as the candidate who best communicates a pro-life, conservative-values message. Mr. Rubio said that's what helps Mr. Huckabee spar with far better-funded campaigns.
"There's a difference between a campaign and a movement," Mr. Rubio said. "When you're leading a movement, all you need is people. And he's leading a movement."
That movement, though, will have to brave Mr. Huckabee's past, which is increasingly scrutinized. From paroles issued during his 10 years as governor, to his presiding over a net tax increase to his past comments on Christianity and AIDS, Mr. Huckabee is now on the hot seat.
Yesterday, he defended his stance as governor on immigration, when he protested federal immigration authorities' workplace raids. He said his concern then was that citizen children were in effect "abandoned" because social services wasn't alerted to the raids beforehand.
"A raid is a legitimate thing to do. But what is not legitimate is to do it without the cooperation of local authorities," he said.
And in earning the endorsement of Mr. Rubio, the top-ranking Cuban official in the state, Mr. Huckabee said he was wrong five years ago when he called for an end to the embargo on the island nation.
The big-name endorsements have been accompanied by a strong surge in polls.
A new CNN poll has Mr. Huckabee trailing Mr. Giuliani nationally by only two percentage points, the tightest survey yet. And state-by-state surveys show him expanding his lead over Mr. Romney in Iowa, taking the lead in South Carolina and surging in Michigan and Florida, though Mr. Huckabee does not fare as well in New Hampshire.
Florida Senate Majority Leader Daniel Webster, a Republican who has also endorsed Mr. Huckabee, said the former governor's base of support is likely to weather the attacks because many of them chose him even before he seemed to be a viable candidate.
"They had to make a decision to say 'I'm going to take my vote, and even though this vote may not be for the winner, I'm going to do it.' So they had to make a decision, and that makes it hard to pry away his base vote," he said.
That will soon be tested.
Fred Thompson's campaign appears to be making Mr. Huckabee its chief focus, with Mr. Thompson himself questioning Mr. Huckabee's flip-flops yesterday. And Mr. Romney last night announced that he will begin running an ad in Iowa attacking Mr. Huckabee's immigration record.
"Huckabee is peaking right now," said Paul Pate, Mr. Gliani's Iowa campaign chairman. "The longer people look, though, they obviously start picking at your warts and blemishes. I think Huckabee's going to have a few slides on his poll numbers."
He said despite Mr. Huckabee's rise, Mr. Giuliani's strategy — counting on strong showings in the big states later in the season, and hoping to capture an early state or two along the way — still looks sound.
"The run for the presidency is a long distance race, not a short one, even with all the early hurdles, the front-loading of all these caucuses and primaries," he said.
Paul Erickson, a Romney backer who was political director for Pat Buchanan's 1992 campaign, said Mr. Huckabee's ante won't carry him very far.
"It's not only that the Huckabee campaign is unprepared for what they're about to go through this month, but as a practical matter, there is virtually no way to build an operation between a strong showing Jan. 3 and the de facto end of the primary season Jan. 19 in South Carolina," he said.
"The highest electoral hope of the Huckabee candidacy seems to be to provide the necessary confusion to nominate Rudy Giuliani for the presidency," he said.
But Mr. Huckabee's supporters say there was a built-in set of voters looking for another candidate to emerge, and Mr. Huckabee is the conservative-values candidate they were looking for.
"There always was a cry out there for a fourth candidate, from the beginning, and the question was who was it going to be," Mr. Webster said.
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