I just read the on-line preview of the New York Times magazine’s profile of Mike Huckabee, which will be published this Sunday. It made me sweat bullets about the future of my profession.

The article begins with Mr. Huckabee’s remarkable surge in Iowa, despite the fact that the former Arkansas governor has spent less than $400,000 in the state, and his paid staff there is “not much bigger than a softball team.” Indeed, Mr. Huckabee’s entire presidential campaign is being run on a shoestring budget. “He has almost no money or organization,” says the article. “He has no national finance chairman, no speechwriters and a policy staff of three.”

He has no speechwriters???!!!

What is politics coming to?

Admittedly, there are people who would be very glad to see the last of political speechwriters.

Twenty years ago, in an excellent book entitled, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson argued that if public figures went back to writing their own speeches, they would be clearer thinkers and better leaders.

She wrote:

Throughout history, theorists of communication have noted the educative value of forging thought into language … What is less noted is the value of sustained contact with a set of ideas. As he considered their meaning in speech after speech, on occasion after occasion, Daniel Webster’s concept of both the Constitution and the law matured. So too did Lincoln’s grasp of the meaning of war, union, liberty, and country. The Gettysburg Address expresses an intricate universe in memorable language because Lincoln had absorbed the legacy of the founders, understood the principles upon which government must rest, and had fathomed the importance of fraternity to the body politic. Had his earlier speeches been ghosted, his address at Gettysburg might have been little noted nor long remembered.

Novelist William Faulkner expressed the same idea a bit more succinctly when he said, “I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.”

Even though I would starve if public figures wrote their own speeches, I have to admit that there’s a lot of merit to the idea.

I just devoted a couple of posts to Mitt Romney’s major address on “Faith In America.” Mr. Romney has spent roughly $11 million on political consultants, and he’s obviously hired some very talented speechwriters. His speech on faith was very clever. But as I opined in my last post, it was too clever by half. It’s not going to win over the Republican Party’s evangelical base.

For proof, look at a Gallup poll taken immediately after Romney’s speech. The poll showed that 18 percent of Republicans would never vote for a Mormon –- just one point lower than in March. All the fancy packaging by Romney’s spin doctors has not made him any more appealing to the GOP’s evangelicals -– especially when he’s pitted against an ordained Baptist minister like Mr. Huckabee.

Mr. Huckabee’s years in the pulpit have obviously helped him hone his oratorical skills. Will they be enough to take him to the nomination and beyond –- or will he end up having to hire his own speechwriters after all?