Huckabee denies saying anything unkind about Mormons

Former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee says he loves

Mormons and believes they make the most effective public servants in

America.

"Utah doesn't need to think there is a problem with me," Huckabee told the KSL Radio Doug Wright show Friday morning.

Huckabee has received some criticism in Utah for comments he has

made about fellow former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a

member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and about

some of the church's religious beliefs.

Romney received 90 percent of the vote in Utah's Republican Party presidential primary just over a year ago.

In a 12-minute interview, set up with several major radio stations

across the nation, Wright asked Huckabee, a born-again Christian and

former governor of Arkansas, about his comments concerning Romney.

Huckabee admitted that he saw a "different Romney" than the man he

knew as a fellow GOP governor. (Romney served one term as governor of

Massachusetts.)

During the presidential primary campaign Romney "was not the Mitt I

knew," Huckabee said. "You could ask all the guys" who ran in the GOP

primaries, said Huckabee, and they would agree that backstage, in

public debates and campaigning, Romney acted differently than when he

was governor or otherwise out of an intra-party race.

Huckabee said that Romney's "attitude and atmosphere" around him

was perhaps caused because "he was surrounded by people who gave him