From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone is out this week.

I'm Bob Garfield.

This rocking Baptist minister has surged past three of his better-known...

Are Iowa Republicans falling hard for a guitar-playing former Arkansas governor...

The Huckabee support was 8% among likely voters in Iowa in July. Now it's

24%. What's behind it? The hot, hot, hot presidential candidate this week is former Arkansas

governor Mike Huckabee, who according to the most recent Rasmussen poll of Iowa Republican voters

has surged from presumed also ran to frontrunner.

Along the way, he has charmed punditry's heavy hitters.

CNN's David Gergen finds the former Southern Baptist minister, quote,

human and authentic. Huckabee has impressed conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks

as funny and engaging. Even New Yorker

magazine's liberal Hendrick Hertzberg found Huckabee's disinclination toward Bible-thumping zealotry,

quote, almost impossible not to like. But not completely impossible. Back in Little Rock,

the charm offensive has set some eyes to rolling.

Max Brantley is editor of the weekly Arkansas Times. I've really been surprised at the utter absence

of reporting that's been done on Mike Huckabee. There are very legitimate issues on the national

stage, whether it's his fair tax proposal or his stance on some social issues that deserves some examination, but they've been put to the side to focus on his jokes and his charming manner and his pardoning of a Rolling Stones guitar player.

It's a familiar complaint. Local reporters have often chafed at the national presses infatuation with political figures regarded

close to home as decidedly less than favorite sons. On Friday, questions about Rudolph

Giuliani's mayoral record made page one of his hometown, New York Times, a stark contrast to the

...