Neil Cavuto asks Mike Huckabee about Sarah Palin's criticism of the former Governor over his commutation of Maurice Clemmons.
CAVUTO: Sarah Palin had this to say on this very issue.
[audio of Palin on Lars Larson: "I feel bad for him to be in this position. But I feel even worse for the victims' families in this situation. It's absolutely tragic and just unfathomable what has happened there, and I do feel bad for Huckabee. But it was a horrible decision that he made."]
CAVUTO: What'd you think of that?
HUCKABEE: Well, I think on the part where she says the focus needs to be on the attention of the families, I totally and whole-heartedly agree with her. That's where the focus should be.
So I'll take my medicine for the decision I made. I understand it. It's going to be a decision that's going to be debated, discussed. It's been obviously criticized from the Left and the Right, and that's fine. That's what we do when we ask for these jobs as being a governor of a state.
CAVUTO: [unintelligible] You think this will be "Ah this is his Willie Horton moment. Dukakis type of deal"?
Do you think that this gets to be an enormously divisive issue for you?
HUCK: Well, it certainly could be. But once again, Neil, I look at in the perspective I did not have the benefit of looking out in the future. The easy decision is to just not make one.
And obviously no one would ever have made the decision toward letting this guy out, but he went back to prison a year later on parole violation. He could have been kept. The prosecutor failed to file the charges and he got out....
[Later]
CAVUTO: Well, are you afraid, let's say there are a lot of former governors running...
HUCKABEE [interrupting] ... the political consequences?
In the future, governors and Presidents will be afraid to exercise what ought to be their responsibility to actually look at these cases individually. And if you have a case where you have a young black kid who at 16 does something -- he goes 108 years, a young white kid does the same thing, and he gets probation, 20 hours of community service, and a $1,000 fine that his father pays, I'd like to believe a future governor would be willing to take political risk to make a decision based on what ought to be just rather than, what's politically in his own best interest.
But I do fear that what happens over the long haul -- with the kind of ramifications -- that in the future, those poor kids are gonna sit in jail for 108 years.
Huck's take is a bit more nuanced than Palin's who never pardoned or granted clemency while governor.
Palin, via CNN:
"I don't have a whole lot of mercy for the bad guys. I'm on the good guys' side."
