Huckabee will never be the candidate as long as the GOP is run by the ideologues. If the Party turns away from ideology, or at least from conservative ideology, then Huckabee would be a natural choice.
When or if Republicans realize that the eight years of the Bush administration demonstrated a total failure of the conservative ideology, then Huckabee would be their natural choice, since he's a good man, whom they could trust to make the right decisions in a non-ideological way. Unfortunately, since he's ideologically impure, he will never be the candidate of a party of ideologues.