Mike Huckabee has referred to the Romney campaign as "desperate", which is good political rhetoric at this point because it suggests both that his own victory and his rival's defeat is inevitable.

More recently though, Huckabee has added a very curious adjective that at very least amounts to a personal attack on Romney.

“Mitt Romney is running a very desperate and, frankly, a dishonest campaign,” Huckabee said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in Des Moines. “If you aren’t being honest in obtaining the job, can we trust you if you get the job?”

Huckabee doesn't say whether Romney is dishonestly characterizing his record as governor in Arkansas, or if he referring to the hullabaloo over the claim that George Romney marched with Martin Luther King. His own website has no repudiation of Romney's charges regarding his record, but it does have a main page link to a blog post that suggests that George Romney never marched with Martin Luther King.

More importantly though, the repeated claim of Romney's dishonesty may be more than it appears--it may in fact be code for his Evangelical supporters that they have to rally against the Mormon

For over 150 years, anti-Mormon literature prominently features the accusation of dishonesty above virtually all others. Evangelicals have been inundated with a torrent of literature, film and guest speakers who relentless hammer the theme of Mormon dishonesty in much the same way Jews are associated with sharp-dealing (I got "jewed"...).

The premise of the charge of Mormon dishonesty is based on Mormonism's most fundamental claim:

My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner, therefore, did I get possession of myself, so as to be able to speak, than I asked the Personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right (for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong)—and which I should join.

I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.”

Fighting words...Joseph Smith, and by extension the Mormon church, has to be dishonest, because if they are not, then Evangelical Christianity is a "false".

Politicians usuallyprefer more polite terms like "disingenuous" and "dissembling", but Huckabee eschewed them for a code word to his Evangelical supporters.

Stop the Mormon.