Tennessean Chip Saltsman is the national campaign manager for surging Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas whose ascent in state and national polls in recent weeks has been nothing short of remarkable.

It's by no means Saltsman's first rodeo. He is also the former state Republican Party chairman in Tennessee who played a leading role in the 2000 President Bush campaign—a race that included Volunteer State native Al Gore losing his home state. Had Gore won Tennessee, Florida ballot results wouldn't have mattered.

Following the 2000 elections, after Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist was elected National Republican Senate Committee chairman, Saltsman accepted Frist's invitation to go to Washington, D.C., to work on the Senate campaign. In that role, Frist was able to wrestle control of the Senate away from the Democrats, marking the first time in a long time in American politics that the party of the president made gains in the Senate in a midterm election.

Saltsman returned home to Tennessee and with some others put together a Bill Frist for President exploratory committee, spending time in Iowa and South Carolina and elsewhere meeting people and talking up Frist, who had by then become U.S. Senate Majority Leader. Ultimately, though, Frist decided not to run for president. As such, Saltsman expected not to be involved in presidential politics in 2007. Then he got a call from Gov. Huckabee.

BusinessTN interviewed Saltsman briefly this week by phone from his location in a barbershop in Iowa, where his boss, Gov. Huckabee was getting his haircut while being photographed by The Los Angeles Times. The following is a lightly edited transcript of that discussion.

BTN:How did you come to be Mr. Huckabee's national campaign manager?

Saltsman: I had met with pretty much all the campaigns and had decided to kind of stay out of it. I got a call from Gov. Huckabee, and at first I didn't think I was very interested. And then I got the call I couldn't refuse. He invited me to come duck hunting down at Stuttgard, Ark., the duck capital of the world. And everybody in Nashville knows that's my weak spot. We went duck hunting, and it was amazing how we absolutely clicked from the minute we met. We talked about him running for president and what he needed to do, because here was a guy that did not do much in the years before 2007 to get ready to run for president. He did not go around the country that much and raise money for other people. He'd made a trip or two to Iowa and South Carolina, but he didn't have political people on the payroll as much as some of these other campaigns. He really didn't finally make a decision to run for president until January. He asked me if I would run his campaign, and of course I was honored.

BTN:Compared to some of the other campaigns, yours has been outspent by a ton. Fellow Republican candidate Mitt Romney has spent about $75 million while Mr. Huckabee has spent about $4 million. And yet your campaign is leading in many polls. How are you being so effective with so little?

Saltsman: We knew from day one we'd be outspent. We knew we wouldn't get the support of the Washington insiders, the Washington establishment, because Gov. Huckabee is not a Washington candidate. He's not of Washington, he's not from Washington. So we decided to do it the old-fashioned way. We're grinding it out in Iowa and New Hampshire. We're doing it town by town, community by community, really, person by person. And we knew we had to do well with what was "next." We had a lot of debates early on, and we knew the governor had to do well in those debates, and he did. Our big break came in the Iowa Straw Poll. We obviously put a lot of emphasis there because we knew we had to have that kind of pop in the national oxygen if we did well there. And we were the only campaign in the top four or five that got more votes than we bought tickets. Every other campaign bought thousands and thousands of tickets and got less votes. We ended up with about 1,600 or 1,700 tickets and got 2,700 votes. That told me there is an underlying current of support for Gov. Huckabee that we can take advantage of. So that's what we've been working on. I tell our good friend and wonderful former majority leader all the time that this is not heart transplant surgery, this is Politics 101. It's blocking and tackling. And even though we've been outspent, we've been very effective at blocking and tackling on this campaign.

BTN:Martial arts guru, television/movie icon and conservative commentator Chuck Norris recently endorsed Gov. Huckabee. A very funny online campaign ad, produced for a mere $60,000, circled the globe. Talk about that endorsement, and the back story behind the ad's creation.

Saltsman: Ask [people who know me in Nashville] if in all the time [they] have known me did they ever think I could come up with something like that! It has attracted well over 1.5 million hits now on YouTube. We had a close mutual friend who was very close with Chuck. We had asked him if there was any chance of getting Chuck's endorsement. Chuck had said that if Speaker Newt Gingrich would run he had promised Newt that he would endorse him. But if he didn't run he would endorse us. True to his word, after the Speaker dropped out, Chuck wrote a wonderful endorsement article on WorldNetDaily. Obviously, for us the wheels started turning. Chuck is this incredible celebrity in his own right but also online as a new generation of folks are finding him for the first time with the ChuckNorrisFacts.com Web site. Our media consultant is Bob Wickers. We were traveling and Bob and I started brainstorming in the Surf Ballroom of all places. We were doing a concert there. (That's where Buddy Holly played his last concert with the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.) It's a wonderful historical place in Iowa. We got Chuck's office on the phone. And one of the ideas we had was maybe to do some Chuck Norris facts and then some Mike Huckabee facts. And then we threw out the idea that maybe we could do like a side-by-side PC-Apple ad where the two are standing next to each other. But before I could get that idea out they were already talking about how Chuck was wanting to do something like that. It was already on his mind. So we started sketching out the conversations. Then the governor and I flew down there. On the plane ride over I came up with the line "Two words to secure the border: Chuck Norris." That just changed the whole ad right there. Then Bob Wickers and some of the media guys and the Chuck Norris crew were coming up with other ideas. It was really very much a group effort and everybody had a little say so in how it worked out. It just turned out great.

BTN:Can we expect a follow up?

Saltsman: I think we've released on the Web site some conversations with Chuck where he and Gov. Huckabee are talking about issues. And we've got one more thing we're going to let out before Christmas. It may not be as widespread as the ad, but it'll be every bit as watched on YouTube. It's going to be really fun.

BTN:You've been focused on Iowa. What's the longer term strategy? And would you talk a little bit about what it's like in a campaign to shift from underdog to frontrunner?

Saltsman: It's interesting that you say that because we just got a poll today that shows us ahead in Georgia over Fred Thompson. The last three polls in South Carolina have showed us to be ahead. The poll last week showed us second in Florida. The two national polls that came out this week show us in a statistical dead heat with Mayor Giuliani. One of the more interesting polls I've seen is we are ahead in the state of Michigan. That is Mitt Romney's home state where his father was governor. That's where John McCain won the primary in 2000, and yet we are ahead. So this is no longer an Iowa-centric campaign. We're running all over the place. And we're doing well. I mean, we're ahead in Delaware! I could not be any happier about where we are or what we're doing. The shift for us is exciting, and it is kind of a structural challenge. But the good news is we've been getting ready for it. Since the beginning of the campaign, I've told the governor that we are going to get our shot. We're going to get our chance.

BTN:Can you raise enough money fast enough now to continue to compete? Is the money rolling in now?

Saltsman: In 1996, I was in the governor's office in Tennessee, and we were helping a Tennessean run for president, a guy named Lamar Alexander, who came in third in Iowa and then blew up. He was able to go to New Hampshire, but couldn't get enough money quick enough to defend against the attacks Bob Dole put on him. So I was able to witness that. I've told Lamar a couple of times that if the Internet was as prevalent in 1996 as it was today I think he would have probably been the nominee because he would have been able to get the money in quicker. Instead, it was by snail mail, and we had a hard time getting the money. This campaign has enough resources now that we've started advertising in South Carolina already. In October, we raised more money in the month than we did in the entire third quarter, and in November we doubled that. So far this month, we did a fund-raiser in North Carolina where they added 100 people in the last 24 hours. We were in Dallas, Texas, last night where the goal in the last two weeks went from $75,000 to $125,000 to $175,000, and we raised about $250,000. So, that's not bad.

BTN:Final thoughts?

Saltsman: One of the things I'd like to think I'm known for is that whether I was party chairman or working for Bill Frist or just freelancing some other campaigns—we're going to have a good time. It's a very important job. We're obviously very serious about it. We work very hard. But we're having fun, and I think that's the key to any campaign.