I was leaving Mormonland when Huntsman was getting his bearings as governor of Utah, so truth be told I did not really formulate much of an opinion of him. I did see later that he was working on trying to loosen up Utah’s anti-alcohol laws. I put that in the plus column. By and large, Huntsman seemed to be cut from the Business First, Religion Second mold that is not actually that uncommon among Utah statewide pols. The problem, for me, is that he is a Huntsman. Huntsman is one of those names you see a lot in Mormonland, like Shumway or Andrus or Young. Without knowing the history, I suspect that it involved a predecessor with a large number of wives. I knew a number of Huntsmans. I tended… not to like them. At all. The name became synonymous in my mind with Mormon Male Entitlement Syndrome. So when he first expressed interest in the presidency, I was not quick to hop on.
When he accepted the ambassadorship, I figured that was that. The offer struck me as a shrewd move on Obama’s part. Huntsman was qualified. He was apparently willing. For Jon Huntsman’s part, I figured that was simply his way of cashing out. He would take the ambassadorship, make all sorts of connections, then cash in on them when he got back. It seemed very much like a Huntsman thing to do. So I was surprised when he resigned to run against his boss and especially when he started taking swipes at China (so much for those connections). The more I learned about him, the less of a Huntsman he really was.
Despite potentially burning the China bridge, and quitting a nice ambassadorship to run for the presidency, I didn’t and still don’t understand exactly what he was doing. It’s one thing to differentiate yourself from the party whose ticket you’re running on, but he was going out of his way to bash his party. He was running with a gameplan doomed to failure. Now people are saying that 2016 was the goal all along. Maybe so, but I am actually skeptical of the soundness of the plan. He will be six years out of office, sitting on an ambassadorship appointment by The Enemy and a single term as the governor of a relatively low-population state that couldn’t be more different than the country as a whole. His biography isn’t bad, but it’s not going to get better.
A part of me wonders if there is some sort of blood feud between the Huntsmans and Romneys. Everything about Huntsman’s campaign seems to be to kneecap Mitt. Which makes sense, because as much as I question his odds in 2016, I think if the losing Republican nominee is a Mormon one-term governor with business experience who lacks credibility among the conservatives, they might not be inclined to go with another even if they do step back from the ledge.
Anyhow, slowly but surely he has been backing his way up to the top of list of my preferred candidates. Despite the fact that he’s considerably more conservative than I am. I view the presidency as one part competence and one part sail-setting. He may be conservative, but he’s not a warrior. That’s a real plus for me right now, in the current environment. I was actually considering putting a bumper sticker on my car, but inexplicably his website doesn’t have any of the printable sort (Gary Johnson’s does). I briefly considered putting this one on my car, but that would not win me friends here in Red America (county went 63% for McCain, 72% for Bush). So my tradition of never putting political bumper stickers on my car remains intact.
So, I hope that the good folks in New Hampshire give Huntsman a chance.
Even if he is a Huntsman.
I am pleased to have read this essay. It was a good one.
Thank you, sir! Romney is coming up next…
I would imagine being the spawn of *that* Huntsman, his economic prospects are never going to be in jeopardy. Maybe he thought, given the absolutely dire circumstances we find ourselves in economically and the level of dissatisfaction currently climbing in the country, a man who is as sensible and moderately conservative (compared to the fire and brimstone others) as I am could find himself sitting with a fair amount of support come election time. But you’re right, running as a sensible republican in 2012, he is sooo screwed.
That’s true, though if Jon’s Huntsmans are anything like the family that owned “Falstaff”, the company I used to work for, that only goes so far. There was (I was told) a real expectation that they make it “on their own.”
“On their own” being a relative concept, of course. During one of my more irritable moments, I commented on the CEO “It’s so impressive. It all started with a man, a dream, and an unlimited supply of capital from Daddy.”
It was an unfair observation. Lots of people are given money to start a business and a lot of them fail. The CEO and his brother (who started a separate, and even more successful enterprise) made it. So I’d be surprised if Huntsman will be content to go back to work for the Huntsman Corporation, if the whole public office thing doesn’t work out. Anyway, that was my thinking on the whole China-cash-out thing.
This post describes exactly how I feel looking at Bill Haslam and thinking about 2016.
I had to look Haslam up. I’m surprised Knoxville had a Republican mayor. I figured it was a liberaly college town.
You might think, so, but you’d be thinking of Nashville.
Get more than a mile and a half away from Neyland Stadium, and pretty much all of East Tennessee in the bag for Team Red.
Shelby County (Memphis) is pretty hard-wired Democratic, but that doesn’t necessarily make it liberal.
that include Johnson City?
I plead ignorance. Didn’t get out there very much.
hardwired Democratic? … think you meant hardwired Ford.
[enjoy the sardonic humor or don’t, i’m not being serious]
The thing about Huntsman that gets lost in all these discussions about his “sanity” is that he’s really, really, really right-wing. He is one of the more conservative candidates in the GOP primary, but he tweets something halfway not-stupid about global warming and people forget that he doesn’t want to do anything about global warming and he also thinks abortion should be a felony.
Rightwing but reasonably sane equals someone I can work with, and someone likely to be moderately pro-science. If you had me vote (and in Iowa i’d be republican this year), i’d go huntsman.
I don’t get it. Romney is reasonably sane and considerably less conservative than Huntsman, who would almost certainly be the most conservative president in 100 years.
Romney’s a slender reed. I don’t think he’d be pro-science, not even as much as GWB was, which wasn’t much.
What does being “pro-science” entail from a policy perspective? What specific policy differences between the platforms of Huntsman and Romney make one more “pro-science” than the other?
1) Not appointing people that cause insurrections at NOAA would be a start. (Hurricane monitoring, Florida)
2) Letting the nonpartisan scientists decide where funding goes (not defunding herpes research because “it promotes out of wedlock sex”).
3) More funding for science in general (particularly basic science)
4) Stem Cells! Stem Cells! Stem Cells! (I read the patent rolls. the only new things we make in this country are pharmaceuticals, and we’re nearly at the end of chemistry. Biotech!)
5) Clean Energy, fully funded and staffed (science first perspective — let’s get that fusion reactor BUILT — you can thank the Navy for the plans, but we need a damn prototype). And for the love of god, someone ought to be working on the “dirty solar panels” problem the Southwest has…
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more tangentially related…
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6) Where is MY Generation’s Hoover Dam? In America, we used to do things that were great — the greatest in the world. Our infrastructure is crumbling and needs a dramatic makeover. (I remember when we had that “blackout” in the early 2000s — and how it actually happened).
7) Efficient models (as best we can get) of Global warming, to enhance land valuation for farmers and predict which crops are most profitable.
8) Put the legacy coal plants under the clean air act! People are getting fucking hospitalized around here! (healthy 20 year olds shouldn’t be sent to the hospital for collapsing because of poor air quality)
9) Fund the universities. America won’t last long as a world leader without the brain drain.
And you can point to specific places in Huntsman’s platform where he takes better positions on these things than Romney does?
On at least one of them, I can guarantee you can’t. Huntsman is pretty unequivocally opposed to funding embryonic stem cell research.
Ryan,
yuppers at least on the global warming bits.
Please do so.
In action, Huntsman wasn’t a remarkably conservative politician for Utah (I’d argue he was pretty moderate). He lowered taxes (which the state could afford to do – spending increased) and increased fees, but was on the side of the angels on alcohol law and signed on to the WCI until it fell apart. In the less conservative environment of national policy, and given his overall temperament, I’m not worried about him being a conservative ideological warrior. His current platform has good and bad, but I don’t expect him to get his way on either the good stuff or the bad. The question is how he will respond. Governing comes down to deciding from what you want, to what you will accept, to what you will walk away from. Huntsman seems good on the latter two. Romney is a mystery. Others, I worry about.
As governor, Huntsman signed into law one of the most draconian anti-choice programs in the entire United States. He did say something nice about civil unions at some point, to his credit, but he was not all that much like a moderate.
“For Utah”
He is indeed solidly anti-abortion. You can do more with that in a state that is among the most anti-abortion in the country than you can nationally. And there are limits to what you can do in both.
A statewide Republican in Utah supporting civil unions and fighting for increased hospital visitation rights for gay couples belongs in Profiles in Courage.
He worked on the alcohol front. He didn’t use Utah’s budgetary largesse solely to cut taxes. By most accounts, he sought to make Utah a more congenial place for people to come and live (this is an idea that is unpopular among many Utahns, who don’t like the outsiders).
I’m not saying the guy isn’t conservative. Moreso than I, for sure. But my perspective on him differs from yours.
Personally I’m hoping for a miracle and a Santorum of Gingrich nomination. Nominating a right wing nut and getting Mondaled would be good for the GOP’s long term sanity and for the country.