Centrists and moderates gravitated toward Utah governor Jon Huntsman’s 2012 Republican presidential candidacy and later applauded his position as a co-chair of No Labels, a bipartisan advocacy group pushing for an end to gridlock in Congress.

But over the past year, Huntsman has established himself as an opportunist, a move which has culminated in his reported acceptance of President Trump’s offer to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Russia.

If Huntsman is headed for Moscow – under highly suspect circumstances involving the Trump administration – he will certainly resign his No Labels post. But before he departs, No Labels should quickly and preemptively dismiss him from his co-chair position within the organization.

Surely, the dysfunction within the Trump Cabinet and administration is a far cry from the pragmatic professionalism demanded by No Labels since its founding in 2010. Huntsman’s willingness to join the scatter-shot Trump team serves as a betrayal of centrists and moderates seeking a more stable atmosphere in the nation’s capital. At the same time, Trump’s choice of Huntsman as the high-profile ambassador to Russia, dealing with the Vladimir Putin regime, certainly raises eyebrows among Republican conservatives.

Huntsman established a reputation as a nonpartisan problem-solver during his reign as Utah governor and, especially, when he accepted President Obama’s offer to serve as U.S. ambassador to China.

But a new picture of Huntsman has emerged after his disastrous presidential run in 2012.

His critics, including some who have worked with him, reportedly complain privately that he’s always thinking about how he can climb the next step up the political ladder.

That overt ambition surfaced throughout 2016.

The Washington Post reports that, while others from the Republican establishment were signing “Never Trump” letters last year, Huntsman was singing Trump’s praises. When the infamous “grab ‘em by the p—-“ recording emerged in the fall campaign, Huntsman quickly concluded that Trump could no longer win in November.

Just weeks before the election, the ex-governor called on Trump to drop out of the race. “In a campaign cycle that has been nothing but a race to the bottom — at such a critical moment for our nation — and with so many who have tried to be respectful of a record primary vote, the time has come for Gov. Pence to lead the ticket,” Huntsman told The Salt Lake Tribune, which is owned by his brother.

Yet, later in October, among the foreign policy circles in Washington the prevailing view was that Huntsman badly wanted to be secretary of state despite the Trump taint.

A detailed summary of Huntsman hypocrisy is offered by the astute Joe Hohman in his Daily 202 dispatch today for The Washington Post.

The strange odyssey began in January 2016 when Huntsman and the No Labels co-chair, former Democratic senator and vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman, announced that six presidential candidates – including Trump — had embraced the No Labels “Problem Solver Promise” – a pledge to engage in old-style Washington politics based on bipartisan compromises and big goals.

The agreement was that, if any of the six candidates win the presidency, they’d meet with a bipartisan group within a month of taking office and work on a plan to solve one of four goals No Labels had outlined: creating 25 million jobs in the next 10 years, securing Social Security and Medicare for another 75 years, balancing the federal budget by 2030, or making America energy-independent by 2024.

Trump certainly has not followed through on any of those promises. But Huntsman should have known that the real estate mogul’s support was just another con in his flashy, eccentric bid to capture the White House.

During Huntsman’s tour as ambassador in Beijing, businessman Trump repeatedly belittled the Utah Republican’s service, beginning in 2011, calling him a “lightweight.”

According to the Post’s Daily 202, Trump relished, and even took credit for, Huntsman’s inability to gain traction on economic issues and, over a period of several months, mocked him on Twitter as an ineffective ambassador:

Still, after Trump won last November, Huntsman changed his tune again. When the foreign policy establishment worried about Trump’s controversial phone conversation with the leader of Taiwan, Huntsman reportedly surprised many of his old friends by rushing to the president-elect’s defense on Fox News and in the New York Times. He described the move as “shrewd” and said it could be a “useful leverage point.”

“Having lived in Taiwan twice and having lived in China once, there’s a little too much hyperventilating about this one,” Huntsman said on Fox.

Leading up to Huntsman’s choice as ambassador to Russia, the Daily 202 asserts that the whole family has been part of a charm offensive.

Abby Huntsman, formerly an MSNBC mainstay, now a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” conducted a softball interview with Sean Spicer last week. Meanwhile, her father had reportedly sought the deputy secretary of state post before being surprised by the offer to serve in Moscow.

Assuming he’s confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate, Hunstman will become an extraordinarily hot-spotlight figure. The ongoing federal investigations of Russian interference in the presidential election – plus any revelations that come from a congressional inquiry of the president’s claim that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration during the campaign – will put the former governor in the limelight.

Any Trump moves toward Russia and Vladimir Putin will be under a microscope by Congress and the media. According to the Post, Michael Flynn’s resignation and Jeff Sessions’s misleading sworn testimony – both related to conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. – underscore the sensitivity of the job Huntsman is taking on.

Overall, here is how Hohman of Daily 202 views Huntsman’s political trajectory:

  • President George H.W. Bush named him ambassador to Singapore when he was just 32, making him the youngest U.S. ambassador in a century. He had helped Bush with campaign fundraising in Utah, and Huntsman’s billionaire father – who previously worked in the Nixon administration – was (and remains) a major GOP donor.
  • When George W. Bush became president, Huntsman left his family’s business to become deputy U.S. trade representative. Then he returned to Utah to run for governor in 2004. With a growing national profile, he cruised to reelection in 2008.
  • Obama’s White House worried that the governor could pose a strong challenge in the 2012 presidential contest. To sideline him, the president appointed Huntsman as ambassador to China. The gambit failed. Huntsman came back from Beijing to run anyway.
  • But Huntsman was hobbled by his links to Obama in that campaign, specifically a handwritten “love letter” he’d sent the newly elected president in 2009. Praising him as gracious and kind, he wrote: “You are a remarkable leader – and it has been a great honor getting to know you.” He underlined the word remarkable for emphasis.
  • In another letter, Huntsman effusively praised Hillary Clinton. “I have enormous regard for your experience, sense of history and brilliant analysis of world events,” he wrote Bill Clinton. “I must report that Sec. Clinton has won the hearts and minds of the State Dept. bureaucracy — no easy task. And after watching her in action, I can see why. She is well-read, hard working, personable and has even more charisma than her husband! It’s an honor to work with her.”
  • The portrait of Huntsman in Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s book about the 2012 election was particularly unflattering. Both the candidate and his wife were depicted as especially shallow. Then-White House chief of staff Bill Daley called Huntsman in the middle of the night in Beijing after reading a Washington Post story about his campaign-in-waiting while he was still serving as Obama’s ambassador. “This is a pretty s—y way to treat someone who gave you the opportunity of a lifetime,” Daley told him. Huntsman denied The Post’s report, even though he knew it was accurate.

 

Photo: Wikipedia Commons