George Will: Is Huntsman the One?

George Will is not always the most rational of conservatives, but these days anyone who is not certifiably insane stands out as the remnants of logic and reason in the GOP. In a Washington Post column, Will makes the case for Huntsman. He also acknowledges the difficulties ahead for Huntsman given the power of the Tea Party and Christianist extremists in the GOP nominating process. I have my reservations about Huntsman, but when compared to the other alternatives in the GOP clown car as Pam Spaulding calls it, Huntsman stacks up respectably. How far he is willing to go to prostitute himself to the extreme elements in the GOP is yet to be seen and depending on how much he makes himself a political whore to the far right could damage his chances in the general election. Here are highlights from Will's column:
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Donald Trump’s pathological political exhibitionism has ended, Newt Gingrich has incinerated himself with an incoherent retraction tour, Mitt Romney has reaffirmed his enthusiasm for his Massachusetts health-care law, rendering himself incapable of articulating the case against Obamacare and the entitlement state generally, Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee and Mitch Daniels, aware of the axiom that anyone who will do what must be done to become president should not be allowed to be president, are out.
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The Republican contest may soon acquire a photogenic family and a distinctive foreign policy voice. The independently wealthy Huntsmans have seven children, among them two adopted daughters from China and India, and a son at Annapolis aspiring to be a Navy SEAL. Huntsman’s economic policies are Republican orthodoxy. His national security policies may make him the neoconservatives’ nightmare but a welcome novelty for a larger constituency.
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He favors tax reform to stimulate capital formation, including a corporate tax rate of 24 percent or lower. He thinks lower but more inclusive income tax rates would be good economics — and good civics, reducing the share of households (47 percent in 2009) that pay no income taxes.
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He is among the sizable American majority disturbed that there is no discernible winning outcome in, or exit strategy from, Afghanistan, where, he says, there is now, and will be when we leave, a civil war that need not greatly concern us.
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How will the Republican nominating electorate, preoccupied with questions about domestic policy and the role of government, respond to a candidate stressing national security and those national security positions? Huntsman replies: “I don’t know, but we’re about to find out.”
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Huntsman will bypass Iowa. “I don’t like subsidies,” he says, so he opposes the Church of Ethanol, the established religion out “where the tall corn grows.” New Hampshire, however, he says, “likes margin-of-error candidates with a message.”
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Cool-hand Huntsman, with his polished persona and the complementary fluencies of a governor and a diplomat, might find those virtues are, if not defects, of secondary importance in the competition to enkindle Republicans eager to feast on rhetorical red meat.

So it is difficult to chart Huntsman’s path to the Republicans’ Tampa convention . . . he faces the worthy but daunting challenge of bringing Tea Party Republicans — disproportionately important in the nominating process — to a boil about foreign policy.