As Ana Marie Cox notes, Jon Huntsman continued to “pander for the irony vote” at the CNN debate “with an oblique and deeply weird Nirvana reference.” The former Utah governor was straining to connect Mitt Romney’s book, No Apology, to the grunge group’s track “All Apologies.”
“Governor Romney called [Social Security] a fraud in his book No Apology — I don’t know if that was written by Kurt Cobain or not — and then you’ve got Governor Perry calling it a Ponzi scheme,” Huntsman said. “We’re frightening the American people.”
Quite strange. For one, Huntsman connected the straight-laced Romney to a late rocker. And he did this at a tea-party event, where you can bet “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is far from a beloved rally song. For Hunstman, who generated a little buzz last week in Los Angeles, it was, to say the least, off-key.