Jon Huntsman’s announcement today that he was dropping out of the presidential race is theoretically a news event, but it’s one that was entirely predictable to anybody before he even officially anounced he was seeking the Republican nomination.
Three years ago, Huntsman was viewed by conservatives as too moderate to run for president. And that was before he accepted a job as Obama’s ambassador to China. And that raised the first of the several contradictions that doomed his candidacy once he choose to run.
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As I noted last June when he was deciding to run, Huntsman’s defense of his decision to become ambassador didn’t add up. To start, he said that he accepted the post the to serve his president “during a time of war (and) economic difficulty.” Fine. But that argument gets undermined when you consider that the war and economic difficulty still existed when he decided to resign his post and run for president instead. Sure, he could have argued that he started out serving Obama with the best intentions, but became disillusioned by his agenda and lack of policy understanding, so he felt he had to leave and challenge him. But he wasn’t willing to go after Obama in that way either.
Huntsman lamented today that, the race “has degenerated into an onslaught of negative and personal attacks not worthy of the American people” and called on all candidates to “cease attacking each other.” Yet despite the fact that one of his campaign themes was to stop the divisiveness in politics, he launched as many negative attacks on his rivals as any other campaign.
But the biggest contradiction of all was the way he fostered his moderate image even though his record in Utah as well as his policy proposals were generally conservative — and certainly well to the right of frontrunner Mitt Romney. He endorsed Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget and had a tax plan that was bolder than any other candidate. Yet instead of running somewhere to the right of Romney and to the left of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, he ended up supporting many policies to the right of Perry and Bachmann, while positioning himself to the left of Romney in New Hampshire.
So, not only was his candidacy doomed from the start, but once he started running, his tactics didn’t even support his flawed strategy.
