Last week, we wrote about how presidential wannabe Jon Huntsman is still so loyal to his former boss Barack Obama he won’t criticize the president by name. But apparently, Huntsman’s chief strategist John Weaver has no such compunctions about blasting his own party.

Esquire quotes Weaver speaking of the Republican Party as being “a bunch of cranks” that is “nowhere near being a national governing party.”

Weaver, who helped run John McCain’s campaign, is following through on that notion by crafting a Huntsman run predicated on contempt for both the party whose nomination he seeks and its activists. The liberal Esquirethinks Monday’s GOP debate that gave major boosts to both Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann exposed the field as extremists. According to them, that gives Huntsman an opening to be a major contender. But Esquire and Weaver fail to explain how he hopes to win the nomination of an increasingly conservative party by running as a liberal.

Both Huntsman and Weaver make it clear the former Utah governor and ambassador to China will run on a platform calling for a bug out in Afghanistan and Libya. While some support for isolationism and war fatigue exists within Republican circles, the main constituency for this sort of a candidate exists in the Democratic Party, not the GOP. The “cranks” for which Weaver has such disdain are the ones who catapulted the Republicans to a record midterm landslide last November. And it is largely those “cranks” and Tea Partiers who will pick their party’s presidential nominee.

Huntsman continues to rack up laudatory press clippings from publications with little sympathy for his party or its base. Which means it is rapidly becoming apparent there has never before been a candidate with so much support in the press and absolutely no appeal to the voters of the party to whose nomination he aspires.