Hopeless

From The Washington Post:

Mike Huckabee and Bill Clinton. Two former governors both from the tiny town of Hope, Ark. One, the hottest thing in the Republican presidential race, thanks in large part to his support from social conservatives; the other, a former Democratic president loathed by those same voters.

It's a match made in heaven for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who is seeking to slow Huckabee's momentum in the lead-up to Iowa's Jan. 3 caucuses.

Romney is hammering Huckabee for his alleged similarities to Clinton (Bill, that is) in a new direct-mail piece that hit the Hawkeye State this past weekend.

"Two Governors from Hope: One was President, One Wants to Be" says the front of the mailer. Inside, voters are offered a series of questions and asked to choose between Huckabee and Clinton.

An example: "Which Governor granted 1,033 pardons and commutations, including 12 sentences for convicted murderers?" Any guesses? Clinton? Wrong. Huckabee.

Let's try another: "Which Governor supported amnesty for illegal immigrants, calling for a special pathway to legalization?" Huckabee again.

And so on.

By linking Huckabee to Clinton, Romney is trying to get the Republican base to think twice about its support for the former Arkansas governor.

The WaPo tries to spin Elmer's record this way:

The hard truth for Huckabee is that he spent more than a decade as the chief executive of a state where Democrats controlled the legislature. That means compromise -- a dirty word when it comes to winning a party primary.

However aggressively pushing amnesty for illegal aliens and letting rapists and murderers out of jail so that they can rape and murder again were not "compromises" which were forced upon him by the Democrat legislature.

The truth is that when Huckabee was in office as governor he was conservative on the moral issues and left-liberal on nearly everything else. He has now taken conservativre positions but the question is do his current words matter more than his past deeds?

I tend to think that deeds count for far more than words so I am glad that there is one man in this race with consistantly conservative deeds as well as words and that is Fred Thompson.