It was an encounter of the Huck-kind.

Laura and I had the chance to sit down and do a real face-to-face interview with former Ark. Gov. Mike Huckabee at 102.5 KZOK Thursday morning. The governor was in town for a meeting Wednesday night of the Family Research Council, a non-profit conservative Christian think tank. He was also rockin’ it out in Redmond Thursday night at a fundraiser for Music Aid Northwest.

We had a 20-minute talk about music education, the evangelical vote, media narratives, speculation on a possible VP role with the McCain campaign, why he lost, what he wants to do next and several other cool topics. Laura and I will be posting as much of our material up tomorrow.

In the meantime, here’s a teaser:

“It’s changing conventional thinking,” he said, referring to how his campaign took Howard Dean’s “netroots” and used it to reach out to the GOP’s evangelical base.

He was outspent by several orders of magnitude by bigger operations such as Gov. Mitt Romney, but he said his message resonated with a particular subset of voters that shouldn’t be taking for granted.

Evangelicals may well go shopping this fall, he said. He gave Sen. Barack Obama credit for talking openly about his faith; Huckabee said that he thinks Obama is a sincere Christian.

McCain, for his part, still has to work hard to reach out to evangelicals, and shouldn’t assume that they will vote in lockstep with the party. They can’t be bought off either, he said, with flashy media campaigns (*cough* such as the one Romney ran).

“Frankly, I think that’s a good thing,” Huckabee said.

Look for more tomorrow.