It turns out that Mike Huckabee...

...won't be running for president in 2012 after all. The reason? Well, there are a lot of them, but the main one is, No fire in the belly. Or not enough of it. (Or, as one wag quipped about Haley Barbour, "More belly than fire.")

Ross Douthat has a (mostly complimentary) piece on the former governor of Arkansas in this morning's Times, "A Requiem for Huckabee." But he also points out Huck's glaring weakness:

...a desperate lack of policy substance. Huckabee won votes by talking about issues that the other Republican candidates wouldn’t touch, but his actual agenda was a grab bag of gimmicks and crank ideas. And nothing in his subsequent television career has indicated a strong interest in putting policy meat on the bones of his worldview.

David Brooks put it well (and succinctly) back in 2008 when he dismissed Huckabee's candidacy by saying, "He doesn't believe in evolution."

And I agree. The president of the United States should -- at the very least -- believe in science.