Jon Huntsman Reflects on the GOP's Insanity

Of the various GOP presidential primary candidates for the 2012 nomination, the only one I really liked and perhaps could have voted for was Jon Huntsman.  The man is smart, conservative yet not insane, and seemed unwilling to utterly prostitute himself to the Christofascist and Tea Party elements of the GOP base.  Not surprisingly, he was among the first primary candidates to bow out for the very reasons I just listed.  Now, Huntsman speaks his mind in an interview with The Penn Gazette - the newspaper of his Alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.    His comments are largely directly on point.  Not that reality, a respect for science, and sanity in general are exactly attributes of today's GOP.  Here are highlights:

By some reckonings, Jon M. Huntsman Jr. C’87 Hon’10 came across as the most reasoned and nuanced of the Republican candidates. Which, in the Alice in Wonderland universe that is the primary season, may be why he didn’t come close to winning.

“Too much in the way of well thought-out and developed policy papers, and not enough in the way of pandering,” he said drily in a recent phone interview. “Lesson learned.”

When he announced his candidacy in June 2011, the popular former governor of Utah offered detailed policy prescriptions and a worldview that sometimes bucked party trends. (The GOP should not become the “anti-science” party, he warned, and banks that are “too big to fail” are simply too big.) He declined to “run down” either his Republican rivals or President Obama, under whom he had served as US ambassador to China.

Huntsman spoke by phone with Gazette senior editor Samuel Hughes at the end of July.

How difficult is it to get a nuanced message out in the political and media climate today?

It’s almost impossible. As you can tell, I failed miserably at it. My own approach was to say, “I’m not going to pander; I’m not going to do the pledge stuff. I’m just going to tell it like it is.” And I try to describe the world based on what it is, based on my own experiences, either in business, or as a policymaker as governor, or as a practitioner of foreign policy as ambassador. And if people don’t like what I have to offer, I’ll gladly move along, but I’m not going to change the pitch or the tone or the content of my message.

How much does that primary fight hurt moderate candidates?

Well, call me naïve. I’ve been twice elected governor. I ran on getting things done, on putting forward solutions, solutions that were not always within the context of my own party, but rather were solutions that I thought were right for all of the people, or at least most of those I represented as governor.  .   .   .   .   And I thought I’d bring that same sort of approach to problem-solving and framing the issues that needed to be addressed to the run for the presidency—only to find that early, at least in the primary phase, you get a fraction of voters turning out in Iowa, in New Hampshire, but certainly South Carolina and Florida. And they want to be, in a sense, entertained. They want red-meat politics. They don’t want solutions. Don’t explain the world in terms of what it is and where you want to take the nation. We want the president vilified. We want the politics of personal destruction.

You’ve said that the Republican Party is not in a good place right now. How much is that the fault of political leaders, and how much the fault of the voters?

Well, we don’t have any political leaders right now, and that’s part of the problem. People will follow leaders, those who offer a vision and offer a pathway forward. I mean, I can name them throughout the last hundred years who have done exactly that. You can’t blame it on the proliferation of media outlets or the blogosphere or the different voices now that weigh in. Leadership is leadership. And we just don’t have it now in the Republican Party.

You said that you believe in the science of, for example, global warming. Why is this an issue? Can’t religion and science coexist in the country?

I’m absolutely of that opinion. But again, my party, at least a lot of the early organizers, don’t subscribe to the idea that our policymaking should be based on science or some empirical connection to science. It’s common sense. And I always used it as governor as well, to drive everything that I did. If the scientific community weighs in on something that should be informing public policy, then we should stop and listen and be informed by people who have spent a lifetime training and researching in a particular subject area. And it will allow us to make better public policy around that. And I think climate change is one such area. It’s fallen victim to politics. Yet when I look at Congress, I don’t see a lot of physicists present. I don’t see any climate scientists. I don’t see people who’ve done a whole lot of research. But everybody’s got an opinion on it.

I say, come on, time out, folks. Let’s turn to those who actually do this for a living. Let them justify the science of climate change. If you let science do what science is supposed to do, they’re going to render a good judgment that’s peer reviewed and based on rigorous scrutiny, and we’re going to have good information on which to base public policy. 

I don't think Huntsman's comments will endear him the the lunatic base of the Republican Party.  That said, one can only hope that should the Romney-Ryan ticket go down in flames as some of us hope, perhaps Huntsman could have another shot in 2016.