FORMER Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has decisively won the Republican caucuses in Iowa, clinching once and for all his status as the most distinguished graduate of Ouchita Baptist University. With his newly minted frontrunner status, Mr Huckabee's economic policy is sure to garner closer scrutiny. It is no secret that Mr Huckabee is despised among those elements of the GOP coalition who prioritise limited government and low taxes. The Club for Growth, a low tax pressure group, has not minced words:

Nominating Mike Huckabee for president or vice-president, would constitute an abject rejection of the free-market, limited-government, economic conservatism that has been the unifying theme of the Republican Party for decades.

The libertarian Cato Institute has given Huckabee a dismal lifetime "D" grade in its "Fiscal Policy Report Card on America's Governors", including an "F" for his final term.

But Iowa Republicans were evidently unfased. The lesson is either that traditional fiscal conservatism is becoming less central to the American conservative creed, that Mr Huckabee successfully convinced Iowa voters that he does not break the fiscal conservative mold, or, most likely, both.

In an effort to appear a tax hawk, Mr Huckabee has signed the American's for Tax Reform (activist Grover Norquist's outfit) no-new-taxes pledge. He has promoted the FairTax, a 23 percent national sales tax that would replace the income tax, as if it will cure male pattern baldness and walk your dog.

But the Fair Tax seems to be rather ill-conceived, as economist Bruce Bartlett explains at length in "Why the FairTax Won't Work" [pdf]. Despite the talk of abolishing the tax bureaucracy, the FairTax would require a complicated system of rebate checks, lest it turn out to be badly regressive and, well, unfair. The real rate, Mr Bartlett argues, would have to be around 30 percent to maintain current revenue levels, which strikes voters as rather less attractive. There would be significant compliance problems, people having gained an incentive to exchange outside the official taxable system. And there would be manifold complexities in administration--complexities that have led every almost every country in the world with a consumption tax to prefer a value-added tax, or VAT. But Americans are not clamoring for a tax system more like France's.

The attractions of the FairTax, then, seem to rest in a number of promises it cannot realistically deliver, which may turn out to be an embarrassment for Mr Huckabee down the line.

Moreover, Mr Huckabee, who famously lost 8 stone while in office, seems more interested in trimming American waistlines than the American budget deficit—unless it comes to the same thing. When asked about fiscal discipline in debates he has emphasised the potential medical savings from weight loss as a way to trim America’s monstrous Medicare liability, though it is unclear what form of suasion could get chubby Americans to put down their burgers and pick up barbells. He gestures toward support for a line-item veto as a way of cutting budgetary fat, but he is vague about what exactly he would cut, given the presidency and an amended constitution.

New Hampshire voters are said to be somewhat less open to the charms of smooth-talking Baptist preachers, so Mr Huckabee may need to do more there to sell his economic conservative bona fides. If he can pull it off, the man may really have a future.