Mike Huckabee is nothing if not adaptable. You put him on a plaid rock and he will turn plaid.

When he ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2008, he was all sweet tea and MoonPies.

"I'm the conservative who is not mad at anybody," he would tell his audiences, because he sensed that was what his audiences wanted.

Huckabee had the "aw, shucks" demeanor of Gary Cooper combined with the homespun humor of Will Rogers. "I can't buy you; I don't have the money," Huckabee would tell voters. "I can't even rent you."

He was very willing to spend time with reporters, and I remember him sitting in the back of some van and growing dewy-eyed talking about his father.

"My dad never finished high school," Huckabee said. "He was a fireman, and on his days off he worked in a generator shop. The work of the day was always on his hands. The only soap we had in the house was Lava. I was in college before I found out it's not supposed to hurt when you take a shower."

A good line. And Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, used those lines to reel in a number of reporters — for a while, anyway. Frank Rich, one of the most astute political analysts in the country, wrote a column for The New York Times in February 2007 comparing Huckabee to Barack Obama.

"Both men have a history of speaking across party and racial lines," Rich wrote. "Both men possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era."

Times change. And Huckabee has changed with them.

He senses his party doesn't want sweet-talkin' guys. This time around, he believes the Republican Party wants guys who will eat nails and spit out tacks.

And Huckabee has adapted.

In 2011, Huckabee said of Obama, "His perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather."

Obama did not grow up in Kenya, of course. He was born in Hawaii and grew up there, spending four years in Indonesia.

Just one of those little details that escaped Huckabee.

One of the things that people remember about Huckabee — if they remember anything at all — is that he used to weigh 300 pounds but lost 100 pounds and wrote a book about it, titled "Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork."

But in February 2011, Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post observed: "Huckabee was tucking into a breakfast of eggs and butter-slathered pancakes at a trendy New York hotel overlooking Times Square. His much-discussed diet ... is apparently on hiatus."

It is. When Huckabee announced for president Tuesday, he looked like a beach ball in a suit — an angry beach ball in a suit.

"Washington is more dysfunctional than ever, and it's become so beholden to the donor class who fills the campaign coffers," Huckabee said.

He did not mention, however, a New York Times story from last month that revealed that a well-known Iowa political operative had formed a Huckabee super PAC "with the ability to raise unlimited donations to support the former Arkansas governor."

Want to know how he feels about health care? Not good, that's how he feels. "How can anyone ever trust government again if they steal from us and lie to us?" Huckabee says. "It didn't help when Congress took $700 billion out of Medicare to pay for Obamacare."

Foreign affairs? "When I hear our current president say he wants Christians to get off their high horse so we can make nice with radical jihadists, I wonder if he could watch a Western from the '50s and be able to figure out who the good guys and the bad guys really are," Huckabee says.

"As president, I promise you that we will no longer merely try to contain jihadism; we will conquer it. We will deal with jihadis just as we would deal with deadly snakes."

Huckabee believes that "we've witnessed the slaughter of over 55 million babies in the name of choice" in this country and are now "threatening the foundation of religious liberty by criminalizing Christianity in demanding that we abandon biblical principles of natural marriage."

Government is not the solution, Huckabee says; it is the problem. "Government in Washington is dysfunctional because it's become the roach motel; people go in, but they never come out."

Having grown rich off his TV show, appearances and books, Huckabee says he is willing to give it all up just to live in public housing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

"I've walked away from my own income to do this," he says, "so I'm not asking you for some sacrifice I'm not willing to make."

And take this, Hillary Clinton. "I don't have a global foundation or a taxpayer-funded paycheck to live off of," Huckabee says.

And take this, Jeb Bush. "I don't come from a family dynasty but a working family," Huckabee says. "I grew up blue-collar, not blue-blood."

Last time Huckabee ran, being a sweetie didn't get him the nomination.

So this time, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

Roger Simon is Politico's chief political columnist. His new e-book, "Reckoning: Campaign 2012 and the Fight for the Soul of America," can be found on Amazon.com, BN.com and iTunes. To find out more about Roger Simon and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.