So former Utah Governor and former Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, mired in the low single digits in the polls in South Carolina after a respectable but insufficient third place finish in New Hampshire, is dropping out of the race.
There was a time, before he became Ambassador to China, that I most feared Huntsman as a potential rival to President Obama. He, along with former Governor Mark Sanford and Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, all appeared “moderate” enough to swoon the media and the fickle independent voter, but not too moderate to be labeled a traitor to the radical teabagger movement. But out of those four governors, Huntsman was the most telegenic and Kennedy-esque of them, plus he had a wealthy father and could self fund his campaign through the early primaries, so I feared Huntsman the most.
My fear was confirmed when President Obama, in a truly machevillian move, asked Huntsman to serve as Ambassador to China. Now, if Huntsman was unqualified for the post you can criticize Obama for making the offer, but Huntsman was uniquely qualified to serve as Ambassador to China since Huntsman spent his missionary days as a Mormon youth in China and spoke Mandarain fluently. So it was a smart appointment by President Obama, politically and qualitatively. It was politically beneficial to Obama because he knew it would tarnish Huntsman in the eyes of the most rabid in the Republican base, and at the very least, it would take Huntsman out of the political game for a while when he normally could be campaigning.
What is truly remarkable is that Huntsman either didn’t know that, or didn’t care. If it is the former, his political instincts are poor; if it is the later, he is a true patriot who answered the call to serve his country. I think its both, actually. I think it is obvious that Huntsman has poor political instincts, or at least he poorly read the political layout of the land. As Alan Loudell says,
No way could Huntsman ever win favor with likely Republican voters in the early caucuses & primaries. The Republican Party of the 1970’s and ’80’s. Sure. Today? No way. No way could Huntsman sound the proper notes and emotionally connect with the activists in his party.
But I also think he is a good enough politician to know it would hurt him politically, and he did it anyway. Huntsman is too be commended for that.
So what now? I believe Huntsman would be the perfect candidate for the constantly spurred third party group “America Elects,” which apparently has money and ballot access but no candidate to run for President. But I suspect that Huntsman knows that would end his future in the GOP, and he wants a future in it. So he will endorse Romney. Huntsman has already started scrubbing his YouTube page of all the excellent videos he made attacking Romney. Of course he should realize that you can never delete anything once posted on the internet. We Democrats have of course already saved all of those videos. And we will be using them in the coming campaign.
So farewell Jon Huntsman. Until 2016…