November 24, 2008 | 10:44 pm

What the Huck: former presidential candidate says Palin ‘looks better in stilettos’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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In addition to Prince and Proposition 8, The New Yorker recently found cause to catch up with Mike Huckabee, the evangelical fan favorite during the Republican presidential primary. In this postmortem—though I don’t think his political career is dead—Huckabee points out that he was ahead of the curve regarding the economic meltdown; says he would have run a more successful campaign than Bring the Pain McCain; and makes one of his characteristically cheesy jokes about the former vice presidential nominee and archetypal sexy Puritan, Sarah Palin:

“It was funny that all through the primary—I mean literally up until McCain got enough delegates to win—people said, ‘You know, Huckabee’s really running for Vice-President. Gee, Huckabee would be a great Vice-President.’ And from that day forward, when I actually was no longer running for President, nobody ever said, ‘Gee, Huckabee would be a great Vice-President.’ ” Neither was he quite so unperturbed by the Palin pick: “I was scratching my head, saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. She’s wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair.’ It wasn’t so much a gender issue, but it was like they suddenly decided that everything they disliked about me was O.K. . . . She was given a pass by some of the very people who said I wasn’t prepared.”

You can read the rest here.

I was hard on Huckabee during the primaries. I didn’t buy his different brand of Jesus juice and I was uncomfortable with his declaration that we should change the Constitution for God. But I too would have found him to be a better choice for McCain than Palin.

Don’t cry for Huckabee, though. He has been busy lately pushing back against his detracting and preparing for quite the future.

In his book he took shots at Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney. He’s got his own show on Fox News. And last week he countered this column by Kathleen Parker and said that the GOP needs to re-stake its claim to the God voters.

If I had to guess, I’d say Huckabee is still thinking about 2012.