Jon Huntsman’s Non-Crazy Strategy

With the GOP presidential candidate line up largely raising the question of which one is crazier than the next, as noted in a prior post, Jon Huntsman appears to have adopted a strategy of demonstrating that he's the sane candidate who is in touch with reality. Whether or not it will get him anywhere given the utter craziness of the GOP base is, of course, a bigger question. In the longer view, one has to wonder whether Huntsman's real goal id to be the credible candidate in 2016 in the event the GOP nominates a loony like Bachmann or Perry who leads the party to defeat in 2012. It's a gamble because even if the GOP loses 2012 in a big way, that doesn't mean the crazy folks in the party base will grasp that THEY are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the loss. Based on past insanity, they will likely claim that their candidate lost because he/she wasn't ultra-far right enough. Here are highlights from a Daily Beast column that looks at Huntsman's ploy:

Far be it from me to fail to do my small part to help seal Jon Huntsman’s doom, so count me as one more impressed liberal. His tweet from last week about believing in science and evolution and his remarks from his This Week appearance on Sunday, in which he disparaged his opponents on various reality-based grounds, were the words of a man who actually occupies this planet (and I mean the 4.5 billion-year-old one, not the one formed divinely 6,000 years ago when caveman and dinosaur fell simultaneously from the sky). Occupying this planet, of course, gives him no chance of winning the GOP primary, but it does give the rest of us a narrow thread of hope about the future.

Interestingly, Huntsman’s most clear-eyed observation was about his old boss, Barack Obama: “So I have to say that there was zero leadership on display in terms of my opponents. Leaders—zero leadership on display in terms of the president, who should have used the bully pulpit well ahead of time. He should have walked away from the teleprompter. The people want you to speak from your heart and soul. Tell us where you want us to go. Tell us what you expect from Congress. Tell us what's on your mind. That never happened.”

The Huntsman strategy here is obvious: position himself as the moderate and reasonable guy on the off chance Republicans decide to be moderate and reasonable. We must assume he is aware that his odds on this are rather long, so what he’s really hoping for is to be the consensus candidate of 2016. Maybe the party just has to go through this purge, this Reign of Terror; so just let it do that, and once it does and nominates an extremist who can’t beat a weak incumbent during a time of 9 percent unemployment rates, and the heads are piled high enough in the tumbrels and enough people finally have returned to their senses, he will ride the Thermidorian wave to victory after Obama leaves town.

It’s not completely implausible, and it does provide the occasion to make a point that needs making from time to time in this poisonous political culture. I enjoy political combat as much as the next guy, but I really do wish that there were more than three or four Republican moderates out there. Huntsman is hardly even a moderate . . . .

Even so, his remarks about science, Perry, and the debt ceiling all suggest a man who doesn’t think compromise is, to use Perry’s word, treason. It would be such a good thing for the country if some GOP legislators came down with a case of the Huntsman flu. Maybe if Huntsman can survive a while on the stump—and since he can self-finance to a large extent there would seem to be no reason that he couldn’t—and keep after his opponents from the perspective expressed over the last few days, he can help create an atmosphere where come 2013, if Obama is reelected, some GOP senators who know better might be emboldened to behave more maturely.