I'm guessing that we've probably seen that last of Mike Huckabee's "Mr. Nice Guy" routine regarding Sarah Palin:
Sarah Palin says former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee made a “horrible decision” nine years ago in granting clemency to a man suspected of killing four police officers two weeks ago in Washington state.
...
“It’s absolutely tragic and just unfathomable what has happened there, and I do feel bad for Huckabee,” Palin said. “But it was a horrible decision that he made.”
As governor of Alaska, she said she had never been in the position of having to grant a prisoner clemency, adding that “most Alaskans know me well enough to know that I don’t have a whole lot of mercy for the bad guys.”
“I’m on the good guys’s side,” she said. “I’m all about redemption and recovery and reform and all that. But I will always error on the side of punishing even stricter, even harder on the bad guys.”
Ever since Palin burst on the scene, Huckabee has been exceedingly diplomatic and careful never to say anything that might come across as critical of her, even though it was pretty obvious that he's been irked by the fact that overnight she became the darling of the conservative movement despite having accomplished next to nothing and having no real public record on key conservative issues, at least in comparison to him.
Presumably, Huckabee won't be quite so diplomatic regarding Palin down the line after this ... though whether he'll really be willing to run the risk alienating Palin's supporters remains to be seen.
