Mike Huckabee is either publicly contemplating running for president or is perpetrating a scam to raise his Q-Score.

On paper, Huckabee should be the strongest of the potential GOP presidential candidates. No one else has his combination of charisma, executive experience, wide name recognition, and pre-existing base among the party’s evangelical Christians. The problem is that he has never been sufficiently serious about the preparation aspect of running for president. Huckabee didn’t do the policy homework during his 2008 presidential run (as Ross Douthat pointed out at the time). If anything Huckabee has regressed since embarking on his new career in the entertainment industry. His most recent CPAC speech was a lazy and disjointed bit of ideological niche marketing rather than something from a prospective president.

If you want to know how far Huckabee can go, look what he does with his FairTax proposal. The Republican party is not going to nominate someone who wants to impose a 30 percent (or perhaps even higher) federal sales tax. Even if Huckabee manages to consolidate the evangelical vote (which might not happen if the other candidates target his tax proposal early), the other elements of the GOP nominating electorate will rally behind whatever establishment candidate survives the New Hampshire primary. As long as Huckabee sticks with the FairTax, he can’t be anything more than the candidate who finishes second.

That doesn’t mean that Huckabee couldn’t have an impact. Michele Bachmann only competed in one delegate selecting contest (in which she finished last), but she helped Romney take down Tim Pawlenty, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich (though Gingrich would have a brief resurrection after Bachmann dropped out).

Huckabee is a far better campaigner than Bachmann and, as Henry Olsen pointed out, Huckabee’s political base in Iowa is quite large. A Huckabee campaign could knock Rick Santorum or Ted Cruz out of the box quickly, and suck up any oxygen that might be available for a candidate that hasn’t been blessed with the favor of the big party donors and the Washington consultant class. But Huckabee isn’t the guy who beats the Republican establishment. He is, at most, the candidate who gets beaten by the Republican establishment and does the GOP establishment the favor of preventing other populist Republicans from getting any traction.

But maybe this is all just part of a Huckabee marketing scam, and he just suckered me into providing him with a teeny bit of free publicity. I hope that is the case.