So Mike Huckabee is, at long last, gone from the Republican presidential race.

He has a lot to be proud of, as the guy who came out of nowhere to become the next-to-last man standing.

And when I say nowhere, I mean nowhere.

I remember following Huckabee around the Iowa State Fair last August. He wasn’t exactly attracting big crowds. Looking over my notes from that day, I watched Huckabee play second fiddle to Kristy Demner, the Iowa Holstein Princess, as she addressed a crowd at the Cattlemen’s Beef Quarters.

Huckabee got to say a few words after Demner finished, but few were listening.

Later, Huckabee walked — pretty much unnoticed — to the WHO Radio temporary studio, where one of his early boosters, a talk-radio host named Steve Deace, gave Huckabee tons of time on his program.

Huckabee told listeners he didn’t have the money to rent buses and give people rides to the Iowa Republican Straw Poll, coming up the next day in Ames. So he urged everyone to accept free rides from other candidates, and, once in Ames — on Mitt Romney’s or Sam Brownback’s or Tom Tancredo’s dime — vote for Mike Huckabee.

They did. Huckabee came in a surprise second in the poll, knocking Brownback out of the race, diminishing Romney’s victory, and setting up all that was to come in the Huckabee campaign.

That evening, as dusk fell on all the tents and bandstands and barbecue stands in Ames, Huckabee was ecstatic.

“For all practical purposes, we won the Iowa Straw Poll,” he told reporters. “No one was even saying we would come in second. Everybody was saying, ‘Huckabee may get fourth, maybe if he’s really lucky he’ll get third.’ You’ve got to admit, for what we had to work with and the resources we had, for us to surge, coming in second, is the victory, it is the story.”

From that day forward, Huckabee began an astonishing ride up the polls in Iowa. If you look back at the graph of the Iowa race on the RealClearPolitics average of polls, you’ll see Huckabee come out of nowhere in late summer, climb through September and October and November and finally, in December, take a 10-point lead over Romney, far ahead of the rest of the field.

At that point, as candidates sometimes do, Huckabee seemed to have briefly exempted himself from the law of gravity.

Shortly afterward, however, gravity reasserted itself. Huckabee began to slip in the polls, and for a while it seemed like he might lose Iowa to Romney. But Huckabee got himself back on track, prevailed, and did serious damage to Romney’s win-early strategy.

A long stretch without wins followed. Big primaries — New Hampshire, Michigan, South Carolina, Florida — came and went without Huckabee victories.

Later, there were wins in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, West Virginia and Kansas. But never, after his Iowa glow faded, did Huckabee seriously challenge for the Republican nomination.

There were a lot of reasons. Huckabee managed to irritate two-thirds of the three-part Republican coalition, alienating economic and national-security conservatives while relying disproportionately on the support of social conservatives.

But in some ways, this just wasn’t Huckabee’s year, at least not in the Republican primaries. As governor, he was deeply concerned with issues like healthcare and education, and not so concerned with Iraq and national security.

When I interviewed him in Iowa, just before the straw poll, he seemed frustrated by the Republican emphasis on the war. “Among the Republican candidates, there’s really very little separation about Iraq, with the exception of Ron Paul,” he told me. “And yet, we still go back through it over and over and over again, and I just never quite understood why we continued to plow the same ground when there were so many topics we never touched. Do you realize that in four debates we never had a single question on education? Not one. And two on healthcare, that I can recall.”

They’re key issues, just not this year in the Republican primary race.

But in 2012, who knows?

If there is a contested Republican primary, chances are Huckabee will be there. If he spends the time between now and then studying up and working on his weaknesses, he might win it all.

York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it