Funny how much perspective matters. In that first clip, my take was that Huckabee hit it out of the park and it was Mitt who was fumbling. Funny too how you felt it was terrible when McCain and Huckabee were smiling when they made jokes about Romney’s position changes (they were actually enjoying it!) but now when Romney gets in a jab at Huckabee you say it’s OK, he ‘did it in a non-nasty way.’ Glad you at least admit your bias on that.

And what is the basis for Allahpundit’s scathing criticism? Huckabee is a bit of a populist, but he’s hardly John Edwards. He’s touting an economic platform which would help small business, which creates more jobs in this country than anything else. He’s not anti-business, in fact he is very much a ‘true conservative’ when it comes to getting the red tape out of the way for entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, how did Romney raise revenue in MA? By increasing "fees" and "closing corporate tax loopholes". It would be interesting to see how entrepreneurial groups compare the two, and whether small business in MA generally supports Romney and in AR if they support Huckabee. Unfortunately small business owners are not very well organized and it’s difficult to get a sense of who they’d endorse.

The tests with undecided voters say the same, and other bloggers share my view. In fact, I’d say, you’re the exception… Why’s that?

I was surprised by that too- my only conclusion is that Romney’s attack must have been effective. By calling Huckabee a liar, if the audience didn’t know the facts they were obviously swayed by that and thought that indeed, Huckabee must have been making things up- yet I can’t think of a single thing he said which was inaccurate there. Can you point out one single inaccuracies? He obviously didn’t want to answer the question of net tax increases, and tried to avoid it until he finally explained it (which was the one weak part of his response- he should have said right upfront why he had to raise taxes, he was forced to do it.) What he tried to do in this exchange was to say that Romney also had net tax increases, he just used spin to call them by a different name.

Was Huckabee as effective in the rhetoric here? Probably not (and the audience reaction shows that.) But what I’m saying is that that’s a shame because when you know the facts, Romney was the one who was spinning. Do you know the truth about his ’support’ of the Bush tax cuts, for example? He told the Boston Globe that he didn’t support them but he had to keep a good relationship with Bush. Then just recently when asked about it, he said basically like Obama and Iraq war votes- that since he wasn’t a Senator, he didn’t have to go on record one way or the other. You have pointed out the duplicity in Obama’s case, and it’s the same here. Romney criticizes McCain harshly for voting against the tax cuts, but he’s not the one who had to go on record either for or against at the time. In hindsight he now says he supported it- but the Boston Globe contradicts him on that.

And: doesn’t this newspaper endorse McCain and attack Romney quite aggressively or am I mistaken? Isn’t this a bit like quoting McCain himself?

By that logic, since you’ve been posting quite negatively toward certain candidates, I suppose we should take anything you say about Romney as though it’s campaign sloganeering from Romney himself.

Isn’t that what matters? He didn’t have to vote about them, but when he took a public stance he supported them. McCain, on the other hand, didn’t.

You haven’t explained why you take the opposite stance than you did in the very similar situation with Obama and Clinton. Obama says that he opposed the Iraq War and criticizes Clinton for her pro-war votes. When his supporters point that out, you say that this isn’t valid because he wasn’t in the Senate so he didn’t have to put his name on a vote one way or the other. You very correctly, IMO, pointed out the difference between those issues for people who are in the Senate and those who aren’t. In that regard, it’s fine that Romney had an opinion but wasn’t in the position for his opinion to matter one way or the other- but he shouldn’t now try to turn it into a campaign attack against McCain. And he also shouldn’t lie about it by saying he never opposed the cuts or that his first public statements were to support them, when there obviously were statements made to the contrary. It may be true that the Boston Globe opposes him, but unless you are arguing that they falsified that report then Romney simply isn’t telling the truth here.

Isn’t that exactly what the problem is? He stumbled and fumbled, didn’t want to answer the question… That’s the problem.

Yes, I agree that was a problem for Huckabee. I felt the overall strength of his answer before Romney attacked him outweighed this, and that the facts DO mitigate his tax increases. The problem is that fiscal conservatism has been very wrongly boiled down to a litmus test about whether or not a candidate ever raised taxes- and that’s juvenile and ridiculous. Romney used that effectively against Huckabee- yet an honest exploration of how and why each man handled taxation in his respective state shows that they both have explanations for what they did. Huckabee is more honest about it at least (even if he does evade the question when it’s posed in a ‘gotcha’ format like Romney did here.) But when pushed, he explains that he had no choice but to raise some taxes because of mandates on federal programs and the court order to fix the education budget in his state. Romney, on the other hand, evades the question by using ‘fee’ as a political doublespeak instead of calling a tax a tax.

Romney’s public stances clearly indicate that if he was in the senate he would’ve voted for them.

Well, I don’t know that it is that clear- it may be so but it is debatable.