Jon Huntsman wants you to know he rides a dirt bike. On real dirt! He’s Salt of the Earth. Grease of the Garage. Dragster on the Dunes. Huntsman’s runnin’ and gunnin’ for president. But underneath the Steve McQueen costumery, this made-for-cable-TV Moderate Speed Racer is a creaky old John McCain on Wheels.
The former Utah Republican governor and Obama ambassador to China is the answer to an election-year problem that doesn’t exist. The quadrennial “problem,” in the minds of Beltway GOP strategists and liberal-media chin-pullers, is that the Republican party isn’t moderate, civil, self-critical, or inclusive enough.
Huntsman is the latest no-labels flavor of the month, a straw man of the same people who have spent the past year smearing entitlement reformers as senior-citizen killers, budget hawks as Hitler’s spawn, border-security activists as racists, and leading GOP women as sluts, nuts, and bimbos.
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Just like the failed 2008 GOP contender whose consultants are now fueling the Huntsman bid, McCain 2.0 is a big-spending accommodationist more in tune with the Democratic elite than with the conservative rank-and-file. In the shadow of the Statue of Liberty on Tuesday, Huntsman assailed the current economic crisis overseen by the Obama administration as “totally unacceptable” and “totally un-American.” Yet Huntsman retains nothing but “respect” for his former boss in the White House and laments the loss of “civility” wrought by “corrosive” political debates.
This is all you need to know about the manufacturing of the Huntsman candidacy: Swooning reporters far outnumbered supporters at the kickoff in Liberty Park and at a follow-up rally in New Hampshire. CNN’s enamored anchor Wolf Blitzer gushed: “Here’s what I especially liked about Jon Huntsman’s presidential announcement in front of the Statue of Liberty. He called for some civility in the race for the White House. Unlike several of the other Republican candidates, he did not open with a blistering assault on President Obama.”
Yeah. Who do all those uncivil Republicans running against Obama think they are — opposing the opposition with oppositional rhetoric? Heaven forfend.
Former McCain mastermind John Weaver, now a key Huntsman strategist, said this week that the campaign will be “mellow.” More like “marshmallow.” Instead of trashing enemies by name, they’ll keep it vague and mushy. Huntsman has been buoyed by months of glowing coverage from left-leaning dead-tree media, whose reporters have lapped up his trashing of the GOP as “devoid of ideas” and “a very narrow party of angry people.” See? No names. No nastiness. Embrace the civility!
While politely paying lip service to principles of tea-party fiscal restraint, Huntsman hopes no one remembers how 2,000 Utah tea-party activists booed him in April 2009 so corrosively it could have stripped the paint off a fleet of Harleys.
Utah conservatives raised their voices at the seminal tea-party rally against Huntsman for championing $1.6 billion in Obama stimulus funds (Huntsman wanted even more money than that) — and against GOP senator Orrin Hatch and then-GOP senator Bob Bennett for backing the Bush-Obama TARP bailout. The grassroots message: “Send them home!” A year later, voters ousted Bennett from the GOP primary after four profligate terms in office. And Hatch is in for the fight of his entrenched incumbent life.
While state governments across the country are rejecting or repealing onerous cap-and-trade environmental regulations, Huntsman is a climate-change Republican who backed radical emissions limits and “green job” fantasies. Just like McCain 1.0 did.
While state governments across the country follow Arizona’s immigration-enforcement model and Washington repeatedly rejects mass-amnesty programs in the face of 9 percent unemployment, Huntsman supports the costly DREAM Act, an illegal-alien bailout with a wider “path to citizenship.” Just like McCain 1.0 did.
While state governments reined in middle-class entitlement spending and Washington turned to means-testing, Huntsman turned SCHIP’s government-funded health plan for low-income children into a universal health-insurance mandate. McCain 1.0 was for SCHIP before he was against it.
McCain’s Straight Talk Express ran out of gas when his former media paramours inevitably turned against him — and his gambit to out-big-government the Democrats blew up in his two faces. So it will be with McHuntsman and his campaign wheels to nowhere.
A pretty good rule of thumb is if the MSM and cultural elites want candidate X to be the GOP nominee, you can bet that candidate X is an accommodating 'centrist' who will 'compromise'. Given the current state of our economy and its impending implosion, our country can not afford more 'compromise'.
Huntsman's political career was doomed the moment he accepted Obama's job over to be ambassador. This is a vanity campaign. There is already one GOP moderate in the mix (Mitt). And he has been campaigning for months.
But the GOP bedwetters have been dreaming of a Huntsman run since 2009. Unfortunately for them is the simple fact reality. Huntsman offers nothing but accomodation to the Beltway Progressives. He does offer words and cliches. But, the GOP teaparty activits and conservatives are in no mood.
He buckled (or simply never had the principles) in a deeply red state. What happens when he meets real opposition and a press that constantly presses him to accomodate?
Without Sarah Palin on the ticket, McCain would have struggled to get 25% of the vote. The last thing we need is another marble - mouthed moderate who refuses to fight.
Interesting post. However, Bob Bennett was not "ousted . . . from the GOP primary" by the "voters" in Utah -- he was defeated at the convention. Therein lies the rub for the GOP -- whatever one thinks of the qualities of the candidate, the faithful who make decisions at the convention are more passionate and less representative of the electorate as a whole than even the primary voters. The past few years have shown nothing, if not the fact that appealing to the extremes of either party is rarely a recipe for general electoral success.
What are you talking about? Yes it's true that Bennet was ousted at the convention. However, Bennet was replaced by a very conservative (an extremist!) Republican.
So explain to me again how the convention attendees were less representative of the electorate as a whole and how this "appealing to the extremes" of the GOP wasn't a recipe for general electoral success?
My main point is that Malkin should get her facts straight if she's going to write an article. And it is true that Bennett was replaced by a very conservative Republican. But Utah is a conservative state. Such strong views don't play well everywhere, much as some might wish otherwise.
Maybe you should get your logic straight before posting an attack on Malkin. First, your diatribe about convention attendees makes no sense vis a vis the presidential election (that's what we're discussing here) since the convention attendees will nominate whichever candidate wins in the various primary elections.
Second, would you care to back up your contention that: "The past few years have shown nothing, if not the fact that appealing to the extremes of either party is rarely a recipe for general electoral success."? To the contrary, the past few years have shown quite clearly that trying to appeal to the "moderates" is the electoral strategy that is almost guaranteed to fail.
For the record, I live in Utah and I will not be voting for Huntsman. If he is the GOP nominee, I will do as I did in the previous presidential election, vote third party.
With that said, I think that Huntsman's candidacy might be a net positive for the GOP. Huntsman has zero chance of winning the nomination and perhaps he'll distract the dead-tree media. Maybe they'll be so busy genuflecting in his direction that they'll forget to be an impediment to the GOP getting their message out. Hey a guy can hope can't he?
Isn't Malkin exactly right. The state convention removed Bennett from the GOP primary. Then at the GOP primary election, held on June 22, 2010, Mike Lee became the Republican nominee by winning 51 percent of the vote against Tim Bridgewater's 49 percent.the general election.
Oh, Michelle, it's time for you to write another bombastic article defending the interment of Japanese-American citizens during WWII.
I'm a Huntsman supporter; but I guess according to some Republicans that makes me an apostate b/c Huntsman had the audacity to serve under Obama. You know, like Secretary Gates is doing and we all know what a RINO he is!
Seriously, you can disagree with Huntsman all you want. But this article is the type of venom I usually see directed at those on the far left, like Michael Moore, Chomsky or Gore Vidal. Believing in global warming doesn't make you a Democrat, neither does supporting civil unions. It might make you a moderate, but I thought there was room for us moderates in the GOP.
I will have to object to the characterization of Bob Bennett as "profligate". Congress was profligate, yes, but Bennett was easily to the right of the solid majority of Congress, if not the vast majority of Congress. But being solidly on the right was not enough for Utah GOP convention-goers, who wanted someone as far to the right as possible, and who also wanted (more importantly) to claim a trophy in a "throw out the bums" year.
Bob Bennett was as good a candidate for the Senate as Republicans could hope for in anything but a perfectly safe district like Utah. That he scored 80/100 on the ideological purity test rather than 100/100 should not be held against him; he was a decent and hard-working supporter of conservative values who did much to advance those values.
Maybe someone can explain something to me. For a month or two now, Huntsman's name has been coming up all over the place. Not just in the MSM but on Fox, too. And I for the life of me can't figure out why. To me, he is in the same league as that poor guy, whose name I can't remember, the former governor of New Mexico who had to complain at the very first GOP debate that the moderator wasn't giving him any questions. So Huntsman was a governor. OK. So he was ambassador to China. OK. So he speaks Mandarin. OK. So ... what? Why is he important? What noteworthy thing has he done? Why all the buzz? Even on Fox News?
Now, if you're a Huntsman supporter, more power to you. If you're actually enough of a wonk to dig through Lexis Nexis and whatever to find out all about him, you've certainly earned your right to an opinion. But the point is: for those of us who just try to stay basically informed, he is, as I said, in the same league with the former NM governor. So, again, the question I am asking is not what makes him so good for the job. The question is: Why all the fuss about him? Two different questions, OK?
And, off topic, but props to BrandingIron5. Palin wasn't able to turn McCain's defeat into a victory, but she turned his oncoming rout into just a quasi-respectable electoral defeat.
Palin certainly did NOT help out McCain. After her disastours interviews on the MSM she helped tank his campaign (not that he was doing a bang up job before)
Also, Obama won by pandering to the center not to the left. Of course his policies are left, but that wasn't what he was empasizing.
I agree with Michelle. The press loves progressive Republicans for two reasons:
1. They are poor candidates and are unlikely to win
2. If they did win, they would take no steps to reduce government.
It's a win-win for the left.
John McCain was darling of the media from 1999-2007. They fawned over him and said how much they would like him over Bush, yet once he was the nominee, he was criticized as "Bush's Third Term".
Why all the fuss about him? B/C he was an extremely popular governor of a red state (nearly 85% approval rating) who was able to create a business friendly environment. He's also a moderate on social issues, which isn't really represented by any other Republican candidate. However, he still consistently pro-life. He's also the type of moderate candidate that would likely appeal to more independent minded voters.
Is he going to win? No, probably not. But for us moderates in the GOP, who are too often ridiculed by social conservatives for not being "conservative enough", he gives us a candidate to root for.
Like I said, fine if you don't like him on the issues. But to treat him like a heretic isn't the way you build a big tent to take down Obama.
If you really think Bachmann or Santorum has a chance against Obama, then, in my opinion, you're fooling yourself.
