COMMENTARY | And like that, he was gone. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Jon Huntsman is out of the race for president of the United States. After a solid, third-place in the New Hampshire primary, where he increased his polling share more than 50 percent in the Granite State since the Iowa caucus, he announced his decision on Monday. Based on tireless campaigning, and two strong showings in as many debates in New Hampshire the former governor of Utah had his day in the sun.
At the same time Huntsman was gaining steam, front-runner Mitt Romney slipped a bit down the muddy hill of the Republican hopefuls. The former Bain Capital exec dropped 10 percent from 43 percent to 33 percent since he won Iowa. He ended up winning New Hampshire with 39.3 percent of the vote, a little over 15 percent more than second place finisher Ron Paul's 22.9 percent. Those numbers seemed high, but being the governor of neighboring state Massachusetts, the win less than stellar.
Romney's poll numbers sagged in New Hampshire in no small part, due to the incessant attacks he sustained to the left and right on the debate stage. During two nationally televised New Hampshire debates last weekend, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich played "good cop, bad cop" on Romney's conservative image and are starting to do damage. Standing to the far frame left in the old "Santorum spot." Huntsman stood tall and strong and presented himself well. He was given numerous opportunities to shine and often did just that.
The seminal moment of the Huntsman campaign, and perhaps the entire race up to this point, was in response to Romney's chastising of his service to President Barack Obama as ambassador to China during the NBC Meet the Press debate Sunday morning. A tired, but chippy Huntsman responded, "This nation is divided, [moderator] David [Gregory], because of attitudes like that." The subtext to the statement was that Romney is considered, as Gingrich labels him, a "Massachusetts Moderate," who was widely known for crossing the aisle and working with his political foes and is therefore a hypocrite in attacks on Huntsman.
On the following Monday, Huntsman kept up the heat. His campaign ran ads anywhere they could buy airtime, replaying Huntsman's "presidential moment," while a dramatic underscore set the tone. At the same time, Romney made a "pink slip" gaffe during a town hall meeting that went viral and sent his campaign into triage mode: "Governor Romney enjoys firing people I enjoy creating jobs." Huntsman responded to the New York Times amid a crush of reporters on Monday , as he walked the cold streets of Concord looking for votes.
Huntsman had timing on his side, with Romney's gaffes happening so close to the election. UCLA Department of Political Science Professor Lynn Vavreck suggests that "when scholars look at the data as a whole, we see that the [gaffes] actually may matter in the moment, but those effects decay very rapidly and there's almost always this reversion back to an equilibrium level of support for the candidates". That Romney bobbled the ball so close to the election only boded well for both Huntsman's New Hampshire showing, and President Obama's opposition advertising; should Romney make it that far.
That gaffe was chum in the water to Romney's republican rivals , as they've picked up on the "1 percent corporate raider" meme and started to paint him as the "vulture capitalist" who's only interested in the scorched earth economics of destroying jobs; not creating them.
In Jon Huntsman, the Republicans had a legitimate threat to Obama's second term, but his run went by way of the dodo heading towards an already contentious South Carolina primary that had him polling behind even satirical television host Stephen Colbert (if he were to run) in a Public Policy Poll. The Real Clear Politics poll average has him at 3.5 percent, nearly 26 points off front runner Mitt Romney.
What few had discussed was that Huntsman was stuck in the catch 22 of having low poll numbers, which caused problems in fundraising, which in turn made it difficult to organize and advertise and thus raise one's poll numbers. That all could have changed if Huntsman's father, Utah billionaire businessman Jon Huntsman Sr., put substantially more than the 2.1 million dollars he had already donated, according to Buzzfeed.com, into the Our Destiny PAC, a pro-Huntsman super PAC airing ads for the Mormon candidate across the country.
Huntsman had gone out of his way to tout his solid foreign policy, but over the weekend, Huntsman committed a massive blunder on that topic. He spoke the devil's tongue. He willingly and brazenly uttered fluent Chinese during a nationally televised debate, and it freaked people out. Maybe not in New Hampshire, but in places like Tallahassee and Columbia, it was just too much.
That Huntsman served in China was "other" enough, but that he served in China under an Obama administration was too much the "other." That fact was enough to repel a lot of straight-forward southern Christian conservatives who elected George Bush twice. President Bush's carefully manufactured "common-man" persona made him someone common folk wanted to have a beer with, and Huntsman was never that man.
What many people didn't see, though, is that Huntsman was pitching the same "uniting the country" message both George W Bush and Barack Obama sold to masterful effect during their runs to the presidency. That centrist stance was and remains the right ticket for a country that has the lowest congressional approval rating in history.
Given that Gingrich and Santorum are splitting the conservative vote in South Carolina polls, and appear to just be getting warmed up in their tag team attacks on Mitt Romney, and thus supplying the Obama campaign with ammunition to beat him, Huntsman was the Republican's last, best shot at taking the White House in 2012.
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