“I think that she’s not anywhere near the person that sometimes she’s been portrayed to be –- as completely lacking of any intellectual capacity.”

–Mike Huckabee, subtly putting the stress on the word “completely.”

Is this emerging as the new party line on Palin among other top Republican politicians? Last week, Haley Barbour told Chris Matthews that Palin is “a lot brighter than she gets credit for,” and on yesterday’s @katiecouric, Fox News Channel host and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee trotted out a similar-sounding soundbite.

Huckabee did go with the ‘Palin has more executive experience than Obama’ line, which was defensible on some grounds during the 2008 election, but sounds increasingly like a stretch now that Obama has been president for almost a year. He said definitively that he’d vote for her over Obama in 2012 — though declined to say who he’d pick for the Republican primary, which may have something to do with the fact that he’s a frontrunner for the party nomination at this admittedly very early date. Elsewhere in the interview, Huckabee said that he was offended by Obama’s bow to the emperor of Japan.

Republicans who are not Sarah Palin are currently in the tricky position of not wanting to come across as either too critical of or too enthusiastic about her. Huckabee largely pulled it off, though the soundbite came across as an obvious hedge. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Huckabee and Palin are frenemies in book sales?

From the Birmingham News:

About 500 people packed the Books-A-Million store at Colonial Brookwood Village this afternoon to get an autographed copy of 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s book, “A Simple Christmas: Twelve Stories that Celebrate the True Holiday Spirit.”

Some in the crowd had been to the store earlier to get wristbands to get a place in line for Monday’s book signing by Sarah Palin for her book, “Going Rogue.”

More than 1,800 people showed up to try to get one of the 1,000 wristbands to meet Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee.

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(via Breitbart.tv)