I've pretty much gone full circle with Huckabee. I started out distrusting him, then wound up liking him a fair amount because of his seeming progressiveness on a number of issues, then wound up disliking him again because of his obvious lust for power that outstrips any convictions or better intentions he seems to have. I think he's more like Palin than most people realize, but he does hide it quite a bit better.
This being said, from everything I've read, he was absolutely right at the time to commute Maurice Clemmons's sentence, though obviously it didn't turn out too well. Handing out 100+ year sentences to teenagers makes absolutely no sense, and this sort of maximalist "throw the book at those scum" sort of thinking has led to the abysmal state of affairs here in California. Anger at crime is understandable, but the sort of overreactions that come with it end up helping nobody. And really, there is no justice to sentencing someone whose prefrontal cortex hasn't even finished forming to natural life in prison, and sentencing someone to life for anything other than murder or rape seems really excessive to me.
This being said, he's still a snake and I'm happy that he probably won't be in the running in 2012, as he was the GOP's strongest candidate and rather scary to me. It's looking more and more like Romney vs. Palin, which could easily be the most entertaining contest in history. I'd pay any amount of money to watch a reality show where those two had to share an apartment for a week. What would they even say to each other?
