LITTLE ROCK—Former Gov. Mike Huckabee said Monday that President-elect Barack Obama’s Cabinet choices have been brilliant, especially his choice of Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state.

Huckabee spoke at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, and signed copies of his latest book, “Do the Right Thing.” He made his comments about Obama’s Cabinet selections in talking with reporters after delivering remarks to an audience of about 200 that filled Sturgis Hall.

The former governor and candidate for the GOP presidential nomination said New York Sen. Hillary Clinton will have instant credibility as secretary of state — and her selection should benefit Obama by having her on the team as an insider, instead of outside, as a critic.

Huckabee also praised Obama’s selection of governors to serve in his Cabinet. Huckabee said the governors have the valuable experience of actually getting things done.

His speech was a short one, followed by a question-and-answer session. The point of his book, he said, is that government has grown because more and more people have declined to “do the right thing,” requiring agencies to step in to make sure wrongdoers don’t run over the rightdoers.

“When people don’t do the right thing ... government becomes a necessity,” Huckabee said.

That task, he said, can become expensive.

Huckabee said the state of Arkansas pays $60,000 to $80,000 a year for each child it takes into custody from an abusive or dysfunctional home, where people have not done — or been able to do — the right thing.

“The best government we’ll ever have,” Huckabee said, “is not the government we elect, but the government we are.”

During the Q&A session, an audience member asked Huckabee how he justified capital punishment, given the importance of “the sanctity of life,” the topic of a chapter in his new book.

Huckabee said there was an important difference between abortion or euthanasia — the deliberate killing of a person, in the name of mercy — and capital punishment. He said decisions about abortion and mercy-killings were usually made by one or two people, while a death penalty is imposed by “society as a whole” — a culture that agrees it is an appropriate punishment, all three branches of government that decide when it is appropriate, and jurors who decide a particular case.

Asked by another listener about whether it was appropriate for a Baptist preacher to seek elective office, Huckabee said keeping ministers from being involved with government would be “the ultimate form of bigotry.”

During his campaign, he said, he was often introduced as a Baptist minister.

He lamented that this ignored a decade of public service as lieutenant governor and governor, and wondered aloud if it wasn’t sometimes an effort to marginalize his candidacy.

He told some stories from his campaign, recalling a car-rental clerk at Denver who, when presented with a credit card in the name of the “Huckabee for President” campaign, asked: “President of what?”

But he said a tour this fall to promote his book “made the campaign look like chump-work,” taking him to 57 cities in three weeks.