The Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz takes it as a sign Huckabee isn't running in 2012. Huckabee, Kurtz argues, has a distaste for the process "of running for office and would rather give "a candid answer [to questions], not one calibrated to play well in Iowa and New Hampshire."

There's also the possibility Huckabee has always been a maverick in reliable Republican's clothes. His recent comments defending Rev. Wright echo remarks he made on Morning Joe in 2008 praising then-Senator Obama for handling the flap "about as well as anybody could... Sermons, after all, are rarely written word-for-word by pastors like Rev. Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you'd say, 'Well, I didn't mean to say it quite like that.'"