I told myself I wouldn’t take all the political campaigning seriously until the first of next year.

It bothers me that the candidates can give us only two years of effort before they start putting their interests first on their priority list. I thought we elected senators to give us dedicated service for a full six years.

A classic example is when the New York downstate liberals got Hillary re-elected in 2006. She immediately went into campaign mode and pretty much forgot what her responsibilities really were.

Of course, she only considered New York to be important for her political ambitions from the start. She had no chance of being elected had she run in her legitimate home states of Arkansas and Illinois.

The drooling, left-leaning liberal state of New York welcomed her with open ideological arms. Can anyone tell me what she has done of significance for our state, especially since she got re-elected?

Photo ops don’t count.

To a lesser extent, most candidates of both parties are behaving the same way, putting self-interests first over those of the country.

But I digress. I have to admit I cheated and watched the rerun of the latest Republican debate on the Internet. I tried very hard to avoid all the posturing and positioning of the early campaign process, but I eventually succumbed to the temptation.

As I expected, I learned nothing new listening to Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Tommy Thompson.

Giuliani and McCain have some strengths but are too liberal on a lot of social issues. Mitt Romney looks very presidential, but he has changed his position on too many issues. I thought the only way we could get a truly conservative candidate was to get Newt Gingrich or Fred Thompson into the race.

But then I got a very pleasant surprise when I listened to and looked into Mike Huckabee’s candidacy.

He is a person with true conservative convictions, economic and social. He has not been afraid to clearly state and stand by his convictions. He is not a poll-sniffer and does not waver depending on the audience he is addressing.

As I said earlier, he is a conservative’s conservative. He was governor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007, and before that, he was a practicing Southern Baptist minister from 1980 to 1985.

He, as we all shouldn’t, makes no apology for his faith. He had a great quote: "My faith does affect my decision process. It explains me." Very refreshing.

Here is something scary for the primordial soup believers, those who think our forebears climbed out of this ancient pre-biotic soup, or mud pit and, by accident, turned into the advanced beings we are now. Huckabee does not believe in evolution. Again, very refreshing.

He is a pro-life candidate and thinks public funding of abortions should be eliminated. At the same time, he does support, hesitantly, the death penalty.

Yes, there is no conflict between these two opposing beliefs of life and death. Yes, there is very logical reasoning to differentiate the two beliefs.

On the domestic front, he favors not more government but more-efficient government. A logical extension of this is to respect the 10th Amendment and strengthen the states’ powers.

One of my favorites is that he wants to implement the Fair Tax system. It is not even close to the flat-tax principle and was a topic of one of my very early columns.

It’s great to see support for this concept growing. A great book to read is "The Fair Tax Book" by Neal Boortz and John Linder. After reading the explanations and logic behind its concepts, it would be hard not to become a supporter of the fair tax.

He supports a strong military, private gun ownership and becoming energy independent through the development of alternative fuels and a more-open policy of domestic oil exploration. He is at the same time very environmentally sensitive but not to the point of destroying ourselves economically to achieve impossible (and suspect) goals.

He is critical of President Bush’s war strategy and thinks we should have adopted the "Powell Doctrine" of winning through the implementation of overwhelming force.

He thinks that if we had 300,000 troops in-country from the beginning, they all would have been home safe by now after winning and exiting with an honorable conclusion.

There are many other positive qualities about this candidate, but I don’t have the space to enumerate them. His biggest disadvantages are the lack of name recognition and fundraising capabilities.

After reading a lot about this candidate, I have sent in my contribution to his campaign; I hope all you fellow conservatives will do the same. He gives us all a very positive choice.

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Tom Sears is a professor of accounting at Hartwick College in Oneonta. He can be reached at SearsT@hartwick.edu. His column appears every other week.