Pity Jon Huntsman, the Republican wunderkind, who left the U.S. early in 2009 to burnish his resume as the GOP’s best bet to oust President Obama, and came back two years later to find himself obsolete. Huntsman was, The Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson writes, “The re-thinking man’s candidate,” forged in the days after Obama’s election, when the GOP, battered and bloody following the 2008 blowout, had to reassess its position and see things anew.
In those giddy days, only two things seemed possible: that the entire country had turned to the left (and the GOP had to turn with it); or Obama himself would turn to the center, pre-empt independents, whom he had carried, and form an enduring center-left bond.
Either way, the GOP needed Huntsman — urbane, hip and fluent in Mandarin — to help it survive in this metrosexual era. But neither occurred.
The country stayed where it was (a tick or two to the right of dead center) while Obama turned left, terrifying the independents, who then turned against him, and moving the GOP right. Huntsman returned to a different reality.
His campaign peaked on the day he announced it. Before his product even had gone on the market, his “sell-by” date had passed.
Huntsman’s tale shows us how fast things can happen in modern-day politics, and how quickly the parties can change. Today’s Republicans are rebelling not only against the Obama’s regime but that of George W. Bush, their most recent president, who they think now broke faith with their tenets by spending too much.
The Tea Party is in some ways a reaction to Obama, but Bush was elected by reacting against a hard-right and hard-edged Republican Congress which, by the time he was running for president, had worn out its welcome.
Its leaders had won by running against the early Bill Clinton, who raised taxes, spent money, lost independents and tried to push health care — this may sound familiar — but when Bush began running after l998 midterms, that Clinton was gone.
After his shock in the ’94 midterms, he had moved to the center, balanced the budget (with a big push from Congress), reformed welfare (ditto) and said adieu to the age of big government.
In 1996, he won re-election in a landslide. His Third Way was hailed as the wave of the future. Bush’s response — no stretch, as he and Clinton had both made their names as reform-minded governors — was to run more or less as a Third Way Republican. No Tea Party type could have won in that climate. Bush did.
A president not only determines the course of his party, he sets the tone of the other one, too. If Clinton called forth the compassionate conservatives, Obama’s debts and expansion of government empowered the deficit-hawk and small-government factions, and made them the dominant wings.
Not only that, he pushed all Republicans in their direction: The sharp leftward swing of the president’s party pushed its opposition more to the right.
Moderate presidents depress their own base (and that of the opposite party); more extreme presidents energize both. Had Obama governed from the center-left; with no spurts of spending and small steps on health care, the Republican right would not have gained traction and the Tea Party would not have emerged.
In that case, Huntsman might have returned to the welcome he sought as the hope of his party. Instead, he belongs to a bygone era: the ghost of a long-ago past.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
