On Sunday night Jon Huntsman told his advisers that he is ending his presidential campaign and will endorse Mitt Romney. On getting the news, I went downstairs in my hotel in Charleston and ran into Tim Miller, Huntsman’s New Hampshire press secretary. I said it must be tough to leave a race with less than seven days left till the South Carolina primary after working for so many months. “It just wasn’t happening,” he said. “It didn’t make any sense. We were just pulling eight points off Mitt.” Huntsman had criticized Romney repeatedly during the campaign, and with a note of bitterness if I am not mistaken; he made the accurate point that Romney’s tax plan is much more timid than his own. Huntsman finished third in New Hampshire, but most of his votes came from self-identified Independents and Democrats, which are expected to be a smaller proportion of the primary electorate in South Carolina and most later contests. In my January 8 Examiner column I identified what I thought was the central weakness of Huntsman’s campaign: his tone was that of a moderate or even liberal Republican, critical of the party and its followers, while his policy proposals, at least on domestic issues, were solidly conservative. “The tension between the anti-conservative aura he gives off and his genuinely conservative positions seems to have left Huntsman between two stools and struggling to achieve the solid third place finish in New Hampshire that might plausibly give him a ticket to other states.” Well, he got his third place finish in New Hampshire, but it wasn’t enough, give his non-conservative aura, to make him a contender in South Carolina and beyond.
