Category: Jon Huntsman

Governor Asterisk Update: Republican Who Endorsed Romney Trashes GOP

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WITH HIS CONSTITUENTS: Jon Huntsman was surrounded by reporters
after Republican presidential debate in Spartanburg, S.C., Nov. 12, 2012

“Jon Huntsman quit the 2012 presidential campaign just as he ran it all along: Sowing confusion with contradictory messages. …
“Students of American political history who examine the peculiar course of Huntsman’s campaign will undoubtedly scratch their heads and ask themselves, ‘What the f–k was that all about?‘”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “A Fitting Finale to the Huntsman Flop,” Monday, Jan. 16, 2012

Let’s begin by noting that Jon Huntsman’s so-called “presidential campaign” burned through $7 million and finished $5.5 million in debt, having been “loaned” millions by his wealthy father.

What did $7 million buy him? Seventh place in Iowa (739 votes, 0.6%) and third place in New Hampshire (41,495 votes, 16.9%), the latter result in an open primary where exit polls showed Huntsman “handily won groups of voters satisfied with the Obama administration and opposed to the Tea Party,” as the New York Times reported. “Similarly, he won self-described Democrats by a nearly 20-point margin over Ron Paul.”

Keep that in mind as you read this report from Buzzfeed’s Zeke Miller:

Former Republican candidate Jon Huntsman took a battle axe to his own party, comparing it to China’s Communist Party and criticizing it’s standard bearer in a wide-ranging interview at the 92nd Street Y Sunday night.
Recounting his first experience on the presidential debate stage in Iowa last August, Huntsman says he was struck by the question “Is this the best we could do?”
Huntsman, the former Utah governor and once President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to China, expressed disappointment that the Republican Party disinvited him from a Florida fundraiser in March after he publicly called for a third party. . . .
“So I had to say I believe in science — and people on stage look at you quizzically as though you’re was an oddball,” Huntsman said, explaining why he was “toast” in Iowa. . . .
On foreign policy, Huntsman questioned his former Republican opponents’ hard-line positions on China. “I don’t know what world these people are living in,” he said, not naming Mitt Romney by name.

Dude. I was there at the press conference in Myrtle Beach, S.C., when Huntsman quit and endorsed Romney. What was the New York Times headline on the story about that press conference?

Huntsman Leaves Race
With Plea for Party Unity

That was Monday, Jan. 16, just six days after he called his third-place finish in New Hampshire a “ticket to ride” and barely five months after the Aug. 11 Fox News debate in Ames, Iowa, where I first dubbed him “Governor Asterisk.” From the outset, his candidacy lacked any plausible rationale. One might call Jon Huntsman a “useful idiot,” but this would immediately prompt the question, “What actual use did he serve?” He never had any “path to the nomination,” and his faux campaign existed only to garner glowing coverage from the liberal media, to hog up time in televised debates, and to enrich the ruthless campaign consultants who somehow managed to convince him he had a chance.

So here we are in April, three months after he endorsed Romney and pleaded for “party unity,” and Chumpsman is publicly trashing the GOP? Once more we must ask: “What the f–k was that all about?”

(Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: When the former sweetheart of the liberal media wants to claim his remarks have been taken out of context, he can always get a wet kiss from his MSNBC-BFFs at “Morning Joe”:

Suggestion for Mitt: Promise to pay off Huntsman’s campaign debt, with payment due Nov. 7, on condition that he disappear until then. America will thank you for keeping this douchebag off TV.

 

 

PREVIOUSLY:


Palin Helps Romney Win Alaska

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WASHINGTON, Pennsylvania
Mitt Romney has a powerful ally in his effort to win the Republican nomination: Sarah Palin, who told a Fox News reporter last night that she voted for Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich got 1,834 votes in the Alaska caucuses, giving the former House Speaker 14.2% of the vote, good for a fourth-place finish behind third-place finisher Ron Paul (3,105 votes, 24%), runner-up Rick Santorum (3,762 votes, 29%) and winner Romney (4,225, 32.6%).

Gingrich also placed fourth Tuesday in caucuses in North Dakota (962 votes, 8.5%) and Idaho (940 votes, 2.1%), and the primaries in Vermont (4,608 votes, 8.1%) and Massachusetts (16,756 votes, 4.6%). Gingrich placed third in Ohio (14.6%), Tennessee (24%), and Oklahoma (27.5%).

Gingrich’s vote total in Alaska was more than four times as large as Romney’s 463-vote margin over Santorum. In Ohio, Gingrich’s third-place total (175,375) was 16.7 times larger than Romney’s 10,508-vote margin over Santorum.

In related news, Texas Gov. Rick Perry — who quit the presidential race Jan. 19 and endorsed Gingrich — was still on the ballot in Ohio, as was former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who dropped out Jan. 16 and endorsed Romney. Between them, Perry and Huntsman got 13,843 votes in Tuesday’s Ohio primary.

UPDATE: This post seems to have stirred some anger from people who think that my summary of Neutral Objective Facts was intended as a personal disparagement of Sarah Palin.

Of course, I would have enthusiastically supported Governor Palin, had she seen fit to run for president — see my coverage of her Labor Day speech in New Hampshire — but she decided against it. Another source of anger about this post was expressed by my young friend Jamie:

How come you hate Newt so much?

I replied in the comments, but given the rage reaction this post seems to have provoked, I’ll quote my reply here:

I don’t “hate” him, Jamie. But as a presidential candidate, Newt is utterly implausible. There is simply no way in hell a twice-divorced Republican, married to his former mistress — with whom he had an extramarital affair in the midst of the Clinton impeachment scandal — is going to be elected president of the United States.
Not going to happen. Period.
Gingrich’s rhetorical skills are admirable, but his biography makes him unelectable. This is just the reality of politics, and people who would like to ignore Newt’s biography are simply deluded.
It’s not a matter of policy or ideology. I don’t accuse Newt or his supporters of being insufficiently conservative. They are, however, insufficiently realistic about what it takes to succeed in presidential politics, and their admiration for Newt the Great Debater is blinding them to the unavoidable obstacle to Gingrich’s candidacy. Newt is wasting time and money (and his supporters are wasting their votes) on a campaign that was doomed from the outset.
These are, I assert, Neutral Objective Facts. You may dispute the facts, but I guarantee you that Newt Gingrich will not win the GOP nomination.
Not this year. Not ever.

This is my summary of what is, rather than my personal opinion of what ought to be, and I understand that many people wish that Gingrich’s debate skills were sufficient to offset the liabilities of his biography, but they’re not.

It seems that the online world has become a place where we are so accustomed to people expressing opinions that we have become prone to regard simple statements of fact —e.g., “Newt Gingrich will never be elected president, nor nominated by the Republican Party for that office” — as if they were merely opinions, which might be argued out of existence.

Having supported a lot of long-shot underdogs over the years, I recognize why people might vote for a completely hopeless candidate like Newt. But when the hopelessness was so obvious before his campaign ever began, it ill behooves Newt’s supporters to disparage the motives of those who are guilty of no sin more grievous than stating Neutral Objective Facts.

A Fitting Finale to the Huntsman Flop

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Network TV cameras at the Huntsman press conference

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.
Jon Huntsman quit the 2012 presidential campaign just as he ran it all along: Sowing confusion with contradictory messages.

“This race has degenerated into an onslaught of negative and personal attacks,” the former Utah governor said in announcing that he was suspending his campaign. Huntsman denounced “the current toxic form of our political discourse,” which he said had created a “corrosive” environment.

However, Huntsman then endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the GOP frontrunner whose so-called “super PAC,” Restore Our Future, has spent millions of dollars on negative attack ads against his Republican rivals Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. None of Romney’s attack ads ever targeted Huntsman, whose anemic poll numbers never made him a serious challenger to Romney for the nomination.

Huntsman’s farewell speech was crammed full of mixed messages. Having served as the Obama administration’s ambassador to China, Huntsman included a shot at the president in his speech Monday, accusing Obama of waging “class warfare for political gain.” And having spent six months attempting to distract and divide the Republican opposition to Romney, Huntsman said it was “time to unite around a candidate best equipped to defeat Barack Obama.”

Another consistent theme of Huntsman’s candidacy also continued until its end: His final campaign press conference was lavishly covered by the media. Multiple network cameras, dozens of press photographers and scores of reporters were on hand for the 11 a.m. event in Room 202 of the Sheraton Convention Center on Oak Street. Among the faces I recognized in the media swarm: Byron York of the Washington Examiner, Danny Yadron of the Wall Street Journal, Dan Balz of the Washington Post, Michelle Goldberg of Newsweek and Carl Cameron and John Roberts of Fox News.

Huntsman’s media coverage was always grossly disproportionate to his support among Republican voters. He was the subject of glowing profiles in the mainstream press and treated with deference in network TV interviews. Yet despite his enviable media coverage, Huntsman never got out of the single digits in national polls of likely GOP primary voters. Strangely enough, however, his poll numbers were always deemed minimally sufficient to include him in televised debates. He eventually decided to stake his entire campaign on the New Hampshire primary, where he placed third by getting support from voters who approved of Obama’s policies and were hostile to the Tea Party movement, according to exit polls.

And so now, the quixotic candidacy of the man whom I long ago dubbed “Governor Asterisk” is now officially over. Students of American political history who examine the peculiar course of Huntsman’s campaign will undoubtedly scratch their heads and ask themselves, “What the f–k was that all about?”

Video of Huntsman’s speech, recorded by my 13-year-old son Jefferson:


UPDATE: Headlines via Memeorandum:

Axelrod: Huntsman Dropped
Because He Wouldn’t Sell His Soul
— BuzzFeed

Huntsman Leaves Race With
Plea for Party Unity
— New York Times

Huntsman: A boutique candidacy
that didn’t sell
— Washington Examiner

PREVIOUSLY:

Good-Bye, Governor Asterisk

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MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.
I was sitting here working on my American Spectator column, with the Huckabee forum on Fox News playing on the TV behind me, when my son Jefferson yelled from the other room to tell me this news, which was a bulletin on the “crawl” on the TV that I wasn’t watching.

Huntsman Says He’s Quitting G.O.P. Race
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Jon M. Huntsman Jr. informed his advisers on Sunday that he intends to drop out of the Republican presidential race, ending his candidacy a week before he had hoped to revive his campaign in the South Carolina primary.
Mr. Huntsman, who had struggled to live up to the soaring expectations of his candidacy, made plans to make an announcement as early as Monday. He had been set to participate in an evening debate in Myrtle Beach.
Matt David, campaign manager to Mr. Huntsman, confirmed the decision in an interview Sunday evening. “The governor and his family, at this point in the race, decided it was time for Republicans to rally around a candidate who could beat Barack Obama and turn around the economy,” Mr. David said. “That candidate is Gov. Mitt Romney.”

Or at least, so says the campaign manager for the least plausible candidate in the history of Republican presidential campaigns.

UPDATE: It was during the Aug. 11 debate in Ames, Iowa, that I first started referring to Huntsman as “Governor Asterisk,” who somehow managed to get himself included in debates despite poll numbers lower than the margin of error. I subsequently developed that sobriquet into a column at the American Spectator, written on the eve of the Sept. 12 CNN/Tea Party Express debate in Tampa:

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer should begin the Republican presidential debate tonight by asking Jon Huntsman a simple question: “Why are you here?”
The former Utah governor’s campaign has no obvious political rationale and is barely a statistical blip in national polls. . . .
Of course, Blitzer would never question the legitimacy of Huntsman’s candidacy for the simple reason that CNN anchor is a leading member of Huntsman’s most important constituency, the media. . . .

Huntsman was always every liberal’s favorite GOP candidate — the folks on MSNBC loved him — and that was demonstrated conclusively last week:

According to exit polls, Huntsman only won a handful of demographics in New Hampshire: Democrats, those who oppose the Tea Party, and voters who are generally satisfied with the Obama administration.

His daughters were nice-looking, though. So we’ll miss them. But their dad’s candidacy served only one purpose: Wasting TV debate time, and it will be nice to have a Huntsman-free stage at the South Carolina debates this week.

UPDATE II: Ed Morrissey:

Jon Huntsman wasn’t a “pragmatic centrist who could reach out to Democrats.” He governed in Utah as a conservative in a state controlled by the GOP, but talked like a centrist who despised conservatives. Huntsman’s expensive and embarrassing flop really isn’t much more complicated than that.

It will be interesting to look at the FEC reports on his campaign.

UPDATE III: Linked by The Western Experience and Maggie’s Notebook — thanks! — while Bob Belvedere at the Camp of the Saints worries that Mandarin-speaking snobs now have no one to vote for, and Mike Rogers at Granite Grok analyzes the cause of Huntsman’s failure: He was running out of asterisks.

UPDATE IV: Thanks to Adjoran in the comments for noting that the Columbia State, supposedly South Carolina’s most influential newspaper, had endorsed Huntsman in a Sunday editorial, published mere hours before Huntsman quit. These guys are even more clueless than the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, which endorsed Newt Gingrich, who finished fifth in the New Hampshire primary.

Philly Layover Musings: The Republican Party Is Depraved and Decadent

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PHILADELPHIA
With a three-hour layover in Philly, I logged on here at the Riverbend Bar & Grill at the airport Marriot, and the first thing I find atop the Memeorandum aggregation is my buddy Dave Weigel’s thoughts on the campaign to date:

I’m thinking of a Republican primary. It starts with a candidate (John McCain/Mitt Romney) who ran once before, came in second place, and won over the party’s elite class without winning over its base. Other candidates, understandably unwilling to accept this, line up: An under-funded social conservative (Mike Huckabee/Rick Santorum), an elder statesman who’s walked to the altar three times (Rudy Giuliani/Newt Gingrich), a libertarian who wants to bring back the gold standard (Ron Paul/Ron Paul).
The conservative base is displeased. In the year before the primary, it pines for a perfect candidate. At the end of summer, on (September 5/August 13), it gets him: (Fred Thompson/Rick Perry). The dream candidate immediately rises to the top of national polls, but collapses after lazy, distaff debate performances. When the primaries arrive, he’s in single digits and reduced to attacking the front-runners. But in Iowa, he does just well enough to justify staying in the race. . . .

Read the whole thing. The basic problem is this: The sincere idealists suffer from disastrous incompetence, while the selfish cynics are rewarded for their utter lack of ethics or principles. Decent and honest people, recognizing the GOP’s systemic incentives toward moral and political corruption, are repulsed by the shabby lies and vicious compromises necessary to “success” as a Republican, leaving the party to be controlled by a ruthless gang of dishonest jackals.

How else to explain the sadistic venality of those consultants and strategists who publicly backstabbed Newt in May and then hopped the next flight to Austin, where they have spent the past six months collecting fat paychecks in the service of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose formerly excellent reputation his campaign staff has done everything possible to destroy. If he had quit after his humiliating fifth-place finish in Iowa, as any intelligent and honest person would have advised Perry to do, he might have preserved some shred of dignity. Instead, his consultants and strategists — knowing that Perry’s still got a few million bucks left in his campaign account — told him, “No, no, Boss! Don’t quit now! You can win this thing. Trust us.”

And so they’ll spend it all in South Carolina, continuing to pay fees, salaries and commissions to the cronies they’ve hired, and when all is said and done, they will have accomplished nothing but to turn Perry into one of the biggest laughingstocks in American political history, rivaled only by Jon Huntsman. Any politician who hires John Weaver to run their campaign deserves whatever catastrophic embarrassment subsequently befalls them.

The quality of hired help in the GOP has never been really good, and the people who donate money to Republicans ought to start making lists of operatives who hire on to disasters like the Perry and Huntsman campaigns. If any future camapign starts putting those incompetent clowns on its payroll, you’ll know not to give them a dime.

Join the Republican Party!
“We’re Probably Not the Worst Political Party in America”

Two Excellent Arguments in Favor of a Jon Huntsman Presidency

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HOLLIS, N.H.
At tonight’s Hillsborough County GOP dinner I had the enormous pleasure of meeting Mary Anne and Abby Huntsman:

For all the grief I’ve given “Governor Asterisk” in the past several months, I must confess that his daughters were not only lovely, but also quite gracious. I gave them one piece of advice: “Whatever you do, don’t turn into Meghan McCain.”

They laughed: “Don’t worry about that!”

UPDATE (Smitty): Welcome, Instapundit readers! If I may pile on the advice, Chelsea Clinton might be worth a wide berth.

UPDATE II (RSM): Just want to point out that, despite the charm and pulchritude of Mary Anne and Abby, the Santorum surge is still the big story.

Report: Huntsman, Bachmann, Santorum Fail to Make Virginia Primary Ballot UPDATE: Close Calls for Newt and Perry

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A certain number of petition signatures had to be delivered by close of business today in order for candidates to be included on the ballot for the March 6 Virginia Republican primary.

Rick Santorum supporter Lisa Graas just informed me by e-mail that, according to University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato, three candidates — Santorum, Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman — failed to collect enough signatures in time to meet the qualifying deadline.

UPDATE: Andrew Cain of the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:

Four Republican presidential candidates – Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Ron Paul — submitted paper work in time to qualify for Virginia’s March 6 primary ballot. . . .
Rep. Michele Bachmann, former Sen. Rick Santorum and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman did not submit signatures with Virginia’s State Board of Elections by today’s 5 p.m. deadline.
Those who submitted the required signatures must clear another hurdle. The Republican Party of Virginia has until Tuesday to certify which candidates qualify. . . .
The State Board of Elections will turn over the petitions to the respective political parties for validating. Republican will begin the process Friday morning and have sought volunteers to help with the process.
Candidates must submit the signatures of at least 10,000 registered voters, with 400 from each of the 11 Congressional districts.
Romney submitted 16,026 signatures; Paul 14,361; Perry 11,911 and Gingrich 11,050.

UPDATE II: NBC’s Alex Moe reports:

The Gingrich campaign might be able breathe a sigh of relief.
After Newt Gingrich’s third event in less than 24 hours in Virginia, the former House speaker announced that his campaign has secured enough signatures to be on the ballot in the state.

Notice that Perry also barely cleared the 10,000-signature threshold. As Lisa Graas notes below, because some signatures will prove ineligible, it is recommended that candidates get at least 15,000 signatures to qualify. If Romney wants to dispatch lawyers to keep an eye on the validation process, they might be able to disqualify enough petitions to knock Perry and Gingrich off the ballot.

UPDATE III: Hat tip to The Right Scoop on Twitter for this Politico article by Emily Schultheis adding further background:

The state’s primary, which is slated for Super Tuesday on March 6, has some of the most stringent ballot access requirements in the country: 10,000 signatures from registered Virginia voters, including 400 from each of the state’s 11 congressional districts. And the elections board recommends getting at least 1.5 times the number of required signatures — 15,000 for presidential candidates — in case any of them are found to be invalid.
Mitt Romney, who filed Tuesday, was the only candidate to get 1.5 times the required number of signatures . . .
The Gingrich campaign had announced yesterday, after “scrambling” to organize in the state, that it had reached the required number of signatures.
The state parties will certify the signatures from each of the candidates and decide by Dec. 27 whether or not the four GOP candidates are eligible to appear on the ballot, Piper said.

UPDATE IV: OK, we’ve nailed down the facts. Now for the big-picture “What Does It Mean?” stuff that’s usually above my paygrade. (Because it’s Thursday evening three days before Christmas, all the super-genius Smart Guy pundits in D.C. are off the clock, so I’ll give it a shot.)

The Right Scoop says, “I wonder if they struggled to get the 10k signatures needed.” And yeah, of course that was the situation.

On a conference call with grassroots supporters last week, a top Santorum staffer had discussed ballot-access issues in several states. Virginia was singled out as a tough one, because of the “stringent” factor described in the Politico article: Not just the 10,000-signature minimum, but you have to get 400 signatures in each of 11 congressional districts, and the deadline hit in the middle of the holiday season, at the same time that the campaigns were going all-out in Iowa.

The Santorum people on the conference call were asking for Virginia volunteers to help with their ballot-access drive, saying they were hoping for a “Christmas miracle.” Given the low-budget situation with the Santorum campaign, they had no other choice but rely on volunteers. (Romney, of course, could afford to hire professional ballot-access people.)

Contrast Santorum’s situation to the ballot shortfalls by Huntsman and Bachmann — both of whom have raised and spent multiples of Santorum’s campaign budget — and Santorum’s shortfall in Virginia, while certainly disappointing, is not nearly as embarrassing as the others.

The fact that Gingrich was “scrambling” to hit the 10,000-signature threshold in Virginia shows the gap between his high-profile “front-runner” status and the relative weakness of his campaign operation.

But certainly the biggest question mark is why Perry could only get about 900 more Virginia signatures than Newt. The Perry campaign had millions of dollars cash-on-hand in early September, and has unloaded a huge amount on TV ads the past month, yet they barely cleared the Virginia ballot threshold? That doesn’t bode well.

So, yeah: Romney’s now looking a bit more likely as the nominee.

UPDATE V: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Now that I think about it, a wild-card idea: If we assume a four-way Virginia primary between Romney, Newt, Perry and Paul — that is to say, if Romney’s big-money lawyers can’t disqualify either Newt or Perry — could Ron Paul win Virginia?

Think about it: Gingrich and Perry waging an all-out knife-fight to be the “Not Mitt” conservative candidate, both of them taking their shots at Romney. Meanwhile, Paul’s army of fanatics descend on the Old Dominion to turn out every possible libertarian/Constitutionlist/fringe-kook vote. In a four-way primary, if the other three candidates run in the 20%-30% range, couldn’t a maximum effort by the Paulistas produce a shocking upset in Virginia?

War-gaming these crazy possibilities is such fun, isn’t it?

UPDATE VI: Now a Memeorandum thread. I’m sitting here with Fox News on the TV in my home office, and they haven’t even mentioned this story yet. Everything’s all, “Congressional compromise, blah, blah, blah, Iraq, blah, blah, blah.” Maybe they don’t grasp the significance. Probably because their super-genius Smart Guy pundits are all on holiday this week.


Joe Scarborough’s Weird Man-Crush on Jon Huntsman: Get a Room, You Two!

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MSNBC has in recent weeks become the daily venue for one of the most bizarre reality shows on cable TV: Morning Bromance, starring Joe Scarborough as a man helplessly smitten with “Republican presidential candidate” Jon Huntsman.

When he isn’t blowing air-kisses at Huntsman, Scarborough is citing every possible media blurb about Huntsman as ratification of the former Utah governor’s make-believe campaign. Joe is to Jon what 11-year-old girls are to Justin Bieber, or what Chris Matthews is to Barack Obama. If Scarborough hasn’t yet announced his leg-tingles for Huntsman, it’s only because the MSNBC host wants to save his final orgasmic gush for the eve of the New Hampshire primary, where some polls show Joe’s teen-idol candidate in third place behind Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.

Today, for example, Scarborough cited an editorial from National Review that mentions Huntsman as a possible alternative to Gingrich. The obvious conclusion anyone would draw from that mention is, “Gee, Rich Lowry really hates Newt, doesn’t he?” But the conclusion pushed to the Morning Joe audience was that Huntsman’s conservatism has been Officially Validated, the ghost of William F. Buckley Jr. anointing Huntsman as spiritual heir to the Reagan legacy.

Scouting around for further evidence that GOP voters have succumbed to Huntsmania, Scarborough touted something nice that Erick Erickson had said about Huntsman. Evidently Joe isn’t well-informed enough about Erickson’s habits to recognize this for what it was: Proof that the Huntsman campaign recently hired one of Erick’s consultant buddies.

While no intelligent person could be fooled by this ridiculous Huntsman hype from MSNBC’s token Republican host, permit me to reiterate the facts about the man I’ve dubbed “Governor Asterisk.”

If Gary Johnson is a poor man’s Ron Paul, then Jon Huntman is a rich man’s Tim Pawlenty — an unimpressive governor whom self-interested Republican consultants saw as a potentially lucrative vehicle for employment during the 2012 campaign season.

Much like Pawlenty, Huntsman embraced the climate-change/green-energy theme as a triangulating gesture during the 2006-08 era of GOP “brand damage.” Going beyond that, however, Huntsman endorsed a gay-rights group’s agenda in February 2009, three months before joining the Obama administration as ambassador to China. Two years later, when Huntsman announced his presidential candidacy, a headline writer for the Salt Lake Tribune published this masterpiece of understatement:

Huntsman’s civil-union stance
may prove political liability

Gee, ya think so? Huntsman’s record practically guarantees his last-place finish in Iowa and South Carolina. Even if Huntsman should do well in New Hampshire, were that to give him any actual traction elsewhere (which I sincerely doubt), his destruction would be as simple as cutting a 30-second ad with video footage of the event at which Obama announced Huntsman’s ambassadorial nomination.

He’s Charlie Crist 2.0, complete with perma-tan. Huntsman represents no actual Republican constituency. The only reason he’s still running is because his bankrupt campaign got an infusion of Daddy’s Money. 

Huntsman’s “base” is the media, and being MSNBC’s favorite GOP candidate ought to be the final kiss of death for his Disney Princess fantasy of a campaign, and the schoolgirl crush he inspires in the lovestruck heart of Token Joe.

UPDATE: In a New York Times story two weeks ago about the help Huntsman’s getting from his billionaire father, we read this:

“If Huntsman is the story coming out of New Hampshire, he’s got a real shot,” said John Weaver, the candidate’s senior strategist. …

With an albatross like Weaver attached to his campaign, the only “real shot” Huntsman’s got is at being the candidate with the highest ratio of dollars spent to delegates received, which will most likely be zero. Yet hope — and hype — springs eternal with the latest poll numbers in New Hampshire.

It’s the colossal waste of time and money that annoys me.