Some have tried to make the case. Indeed, the two men have more in common than sharing the same home town of Hope Arkansas.

Though both have held the job of Arkansas' governor, they came to it from different directions. Clinton had been that state's attorney general, while Huckabee had been lieutenant governor, moving up to the Governor's Mansion after his predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, was forced to resign the governorship because he was convicted of a felony in the Whitewater scandal.

Both have gotten campaign advice from Dick Morris, who, according to Huckabee is a "personal friend." Morris consulted on his campaigns in 1993 and 1994, in which Huckabee ran as a moderate.

There are those who believe that the two former Natural State governors are alike in the sense that both are excellent campaigners who have distorted their records and pretend to be something they are not. Betsy Hagan, Arkansas director of the conservative Eagle Forum and a self-confessed former Huckabee fan, warns:

"He was pro-life and pro-gun, but otherwise a liberal. Just like Bill Clinton he will charm you, but don't be surprised if he takes a completely different turn in office."

There are other similarities. Both are Southern populists. Huckabee certainly sounded Clintonesque in the GOP debate in Detroit, where he said:

"I want to make sure people understand that for many people on this stage the economy's doing terrifically well, but for a lot of Americans it's not doing so well," he said. "The people who handle the bags and make the beds at our hotels and serve the food, many of them are having to work two jobs. And that's barely paying the rent."

"And you know what else?" Huckabee said. "They don't think that they can afford for their kids to go to college. They're pretty sure they're not going to be able to afford health insurance."

Both have ethical baggage. Clinton's is familiar, Huckabee's less well-known:

His campaign ascendancy has drawn media attention to longstanding arguments with the Arkansas Ethics Commission over the propriety of gifts he received as governor.

But there are significant differences, too. With Huckabee, there are no bimbo eruptions. On the contrary, the former Baptist preacher is conservative on social issues, if not on economic ones. But he's a "compassionate" socon, more so than George W. Bush. Unlike Bill Clinton and his "compassionate liberalism," which he claimed allowed him to "feel our pain," The Huck actually feels it.

Despite his Arkansas legacy of tax increases, Huckabee has signed on to Grover Norquist's ultimatum pledge not to raise taxes, an act of political theater that even Billy Jeff was too shrewd to engage in.

Mike Huckabee is no Bill Clinton, and his penchant for nanny statism make him the polar opposite of Ronald Reagan, whose belief in small-government federalism was among his first principles.

No, Huckabee reminds me less of Clinton than he does another former president - Jimmy Carter. Carter was a Sunday school teacher, Huckabee a preacher - both in the Baptist denomination.

Both have been critical of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Huckabee:

"I have... come to understand that from a perspective of the way the world looks at us, GITMO has become a symbol of what a lot of people are angry about, and whatever value it has, it’s being lost by the ill-will that it has generated. So rather than continuing something that is doing us more harm than good, there’re other places to keep these detainees. I want to make clear. Closing Guantanamo is not letting these detainees loose. It’s simply putting them in a different location and not allowing this symbol, which has become a part of Guantanamo, to further damage the prestige of the United States."

Carter:

"I think what's going on in Guantanamo Bay and other places is a disgrace to the U.S.A...

What has happened at Guantanamo Bay ... does not represent the will of the American people. I'm embarrassed about it, I think it's wrong."

Both seem obsessed with their shared perception of America's image in the eyes of the rest of the world. Huckabee on America's foreign relations:

"I would like us to restore relationships and rebuild the kind of positive attitudes people have historically had toward our nation and do that by showing the kind of respect that other nations would want and deserve," he said...

Huckabee also said that nations deserve the same kind of treatment that individuals do. "You treat others the way you’d like to be treated," he said. "That’s to me the fundamental issue that has to be re-established in our dealings with other countries."

Carter:

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, [the Bush] administration has been the worst in history," Mr. Carter, 82, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said in a telephone interview with The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from the Carter Center in Atlanta...

He characterized one of the defenses of the Bush administration in America and worldwide as "O.K., we must be more correct in our actions than the world thinks because Great Britain is backing us."

Ironically, Huckabee, who once cancelled a scheduled appearance at a Baptist conference organized by Jimmy Carter over these same comments by the former president about the Bush administration, is more akin to the peanut farmer than he would like to admit.

Though it galls me to quote George Will, his assessment of the Huckster is right on target and sounds a lot like Carter:

Huckabee combines pure moralism with incoherent populism...

To paraphrase Pogo, "Huck met the enemy, and it was himself."

Huckabee promises to be as compassionate, uninformed, unrealistic and moralistic as the Jimmy Carter who drove our nation into a state of "malaise." He does not possess the backbone that the United States and its allies need in a leader of the free world in these perilous times.

- JP