In today’s Washington Post, George Will writes about the presidential prospects of Jon Huntsman, the wealthy former governor of Utah and former U.S. ambassador to China in the Obama administration.
Will writes that Huntsman’s economic policies are “Republican orthodoxy” while his national security policies “may make him the neoconservatives’ nightmare but a welcome novelty for a larger (general election) constituency.”
Here’s a portion of Will’s analysis:
“Huntsman co-chaired John McCain’s 2008 campaign, from which he has drawn key advisers. Like McCain, 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.’ In South Carolina, his cadre of supporters includes Mike Campbell, (Mike) Huckabee’s 2008 state chairman. Huntsman hopes for a respectable showing in Michigan, and he will also focus on Florida, where his wife is from and his campaign headquarters will be, in Orlando.
“… The Republican nominee will be chosen by a relatively small cohort consisting of those Americans most determined that (President Obama not win re-election). Nominating electorates make up in intensity what they lack in size. They pay close attention to presidential politics early, and participate in cold-weather events, because they have a heat fueled by ideology.
“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 through a nominating electorate that is understandably furious about Obama’s demonstrably imprudent and constitutionally dubious domestic policies.
“Even if that electorate approves Huntsman’s un-Obamalike health-care reforms in Utah and forgives his flirtation with a fanciful climate-change regime among Western states, he faces the worthy but daunting challenge of bringing Tea Party Republicans — disproportionately important in the nominating process — to a boil about foreign policy.”
