When our Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin founded this country, what they had in mind was a leader like Mike Huckabee. Here’s a guy with a history of obesity and slightly totalitarian ideas like quarantining HIV positive gays who reinvented himself as a lovable goof with a distaste for fast food and a good sense of humor.

What does Huckabee stand for, really? Hell if we know, and hell if he knows. We know he doesn’t want to raise taxes. After that, things get murky, or rather, go undiscussed. But he’s still charmed the pants off of liberals: he’s really not such a bad bass guitar player.

Perhaps it was Mitt Romney’s downfall that he didn’t have a good redemption story: He’s always been a success. On the other hand, Huckabee’s salvation was one we can all aspire to: He lost a lot of weight. Remember, gluttony is a sin, and much more voter friendly sin than lust or wrath. In losing 100 pounds, he put himself on the political map, and positioned himself as someone who believed in change.

After that now iconic Chuck Norris ad came out, Hendrick Hertzberg took a break from his usual outrage over the electoral system (dude, what happened in 2000 was eight years ago—it’s time for a new issue) and hatred George W. Bush and wrote a BJ of a comment piece in the New Yorker.

And what about the other issues? At the end of Hertzberg’s piece on Huckabee, he brought up these pesky facts:

He wants to replace the federal tax code with a gigantic, horribly regressive sales tax; he cannot name a single time he has ever disagreed with the National Rifle Association; he wants to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage and abortion. In practice, however, the sales tax and the amendments would go nowhere, and he couldn’t do much about abortion except appoint Scalia-like Justices to the Supreme Court—which his rivals have promised to do, too. God knows what his foreign policy would look like, but no one else does.

Well, for swing voters, these pesky facts would be a real problem. But he’s so darn charming. And he did lose all that weight.