Iowa's Holy War

DES MOINES, Iowa Dec. 19, 2007 — -- Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has just landed in Des Moines and he's surveying the enormous plush black bus that will be taking him on a 15-city tour of the state.

It's decorated with a huge picture of him.

"It's strange," Huckabee says. "Kind of like riding in a bread truck and you're the bread."

Underneath his gigantic photograph it reads: "Mike Huckabee. Faith. Family. Freedom."

And faith is no small reason for Huckabee's success in the Hawkeye state, where he now holds a commanding lead among likely Republican caucus-goers, who will cast their votes in just two weeks.

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leading Huckabee narrowly among the 80 percent of caucus-goers who don't care about Romney's Mormon faith.

But among the 20 percent who say Romney's Mormonism makes them less likely to vote for him, Huckabee's lead is so overwhelming he now leads Romney overall by eight points, 35 percent to 27 percent.

Does it concern Huckabee that one of the reasons for his surge in the polls is what can be seen as intolerance of Mormonism?

"I don't know that it's intolerance," the Baptist minister tells ABC News.

Then he stops himself and makes the first point he wants to make: "First of all, I don't think whether a person's a Mormon or is Baptist or is Jewish, I don't think that has anything to do with whether they would be a good president."

Huckabee continues, "I think what people ought to look at is whether their record is consistent. How did they get where they are? Do they really truly represent that guy out there who says, when he's putting his family around the table at dinner, 'There's my president, I'm watching him on TV, he understands me. He understands what I'm dealing with. And he's going to make a decision based on how it's going to affect me, not how it's going to affect him.'"

Does it bother Huckabee that unwillingness to vote for a Mormon is one of the factors helping him?

"You know, it's not something that I agree with," Huckabee says. "But I agree with the final outcome. I just have to believe that there's still a reason that a lot of people are connecting with me and I don't think it's religion."