It looks like the slate of viable GOP candidates has increased from four to five with the recent addition of Mike Huckabee. But in my mind, there are four qualified candidates, and Mike Huckabee isn't in that group. Why? Lots of reasons.

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For me, the top two issues are the economy and the War Against Militant Islamism. For the economy, the GOP is the party of free trade and free markets. But when it comes to free trade agreements, Huckabee talks like a Democrat . I get nervous when a politician starts talking about "fair trade" because tariffs and other trade-diminishing measures aren't far behind. This is a deal-breaker for me. Why is the Party of Business seriously considering an economic populist as its standard-bearer? It makes no sense to me.

On taxes, Huckabee talks like a Republican but he governed like a Democrat. From factcheck.org :

He frequently says he cut taxes "almost 94 times" but leaves out the 21 taxes raised during his tenure. In the end, he presided over a net tax increase.

While I have some open-mindedness about the fair tax, his proposals look ill-conceived and unrealistic. James Taranto has been poking holes in the math, and if a fellow GOPer can have such an easy time of it, imagine how well Hillary or Obama operatives will shred his tax plan.

Huckabee's spending record isn't terrible. His budgets increased 5.2% per year over his eight years in office. In Washington State, you'd be considered a budget hawk with growth like that. But at the same time, Huckabee is a little too comfortable with a big federal government for my taste, favoring arts funding, agricultural subsidies and national smoking bans. Michael Tanner from the CATO Institute:

On its annual governor’s report card, Cato gave Huckabee an "F" for fiscal policy during his final term, and an overall two-term grade of "D." Only four governors had worse scores, and 15 Democratic governors got higher grades, including well-known liberals like Ted Kulongoski of Oregon, Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, and Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania.

But Huckabee doesn’t just embrace big government in the form of big taxes. He truly appears to believe that if something is a good idea it should be a federal government program.

For example, having become health conscious while losing more than 120 pounds (a remarkable feat), he now calls for a national smoking ban. Because he believes that "art and music are as important as math and science" in public schools, he wants these programs funded -- and thus, directed and administered -- federally.

Huckabee is, incidentally, the only Republican candidate for president who opposes school choice.

Huckabee has called for increased federal spending on a variety of programs from infrastructure to health care. He wants more energy subsidies, including, naturally, more subsidies for ethanol. In fact, he supports increased agricultural subsidies generally. He is the only Republican candidate who opposes President Bush’s veto of the Democrats’ proposed expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and he is skeptical of most conservative proposals for entitlement reform.

We've already suffered through one big-government "conservative" in George W. Bush. Why go through that brain damage yet again?

On Iraq and the WAMI, Huckabee's positions aren't bad, but McCain's are better, and both McCain and Thompson have more experience on the national stage, which is why they're in my top two. Huckabee's foreign policy knowledge is a concern :

But things have changed since then. Huckabee says he believes that the next president of the United States will have to lead Western civilization in a worldwide conflict with radical Islam. For a man with that kind of ambition, he has not been particularly well briefed. On Dec. 4, for instance, he was asked about the National Intelligence Estimate released the day before, which found that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Huckabee said that he hadn’t seen it, though it had been the top news story in the country, maybe the world, for the previous 24 hours.

At lunch, when I asked him who influences his thinking on foreign affairs, he mentioned Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Frank Gaffney, a neoconservative and the founder of a research group called the Center for Security Policy. This is like taking travel advice from Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, but the governor seemed unaware of the incongruity. When I pressed him, he mentioned he had once "visited" with Richard Haass, the middle-of-the-road president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Huckabee has no military experience beyond commanding the Arkansas National Guard, but he doesn’t see this as an insuperable problem. "What you do," he explained, "is surround yourself with the best possible advice." The only name he mentioned was Representative Duncan Hunter of California. "Duncan is extraordinarily well qualified to be secretary of Defense," he said.

If nominated, he and the rest of the GOP are going to pay a political price for him saying, in 1992, that AIDS patients should be isolated . I might've agreed with him had he said he wanted to quarantine Andrew Sullivan, but Magic Johnson announced that he had the virus in 1991. Did he really want to isolate Magic Johnson and countless others?. The causes of AIDS and its transmission were well settled by that time, and Huckabee's views look neanderthal, even for back then.

Huckabee's other past statements will also be scrutinized with equal fervor. Rich Lowry is right , in my opinion. He is under-vetted and his policy prescriptions are inch-deep. McCain, Romney and Thompson are looking better after second looks. To me, Giuliani and Huckabee do not fare so well.