Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman has no discernable base among Republican voters and no rationale for his presidential candidacy. Having spent the first two years of the Obama administration as a loyal employee of the man he wishes to replace in the White House, it is unclear exactly why he is running, since his name is associated with no cause or issue or set of beliefs around which Americans can rally. All we really know about him is that he is as ambitious as he is wealthy and currently unemployed.
But Huntsman does appear to have staked out at least one position that has given him a few prominent friends: opposition to continue fighting the war on Islamist terrorists. It is this point that seemed to intrigue George Will the most in his puff-piece column on Huntsman that appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post.
Will could find nothing unusual or noteworthy about any of Huntsman’s positions except a commitment to “clean up the map” of American foreign policy. Apparently Huntsman wishes to cut the defense budget, bug out of Afghanistan, and avoid the use of American military power against human-rights abusers. It is this vision of a Republican presidency that will drop the ball on the struggle to defend the West that excites Will.
The columnist has been pining for a return to the foreign policy of the first George Bush for two decades. Thus the idea that Huntsman could be “the neoconservatives’ nightmare” prompts Will to drop such complimentary-to-Huntsman adjectives such as “cool hand,” “polished,” “attractive,” and “photogenic.” His crush on the former Utah governor is so thorough that if Will were an excitable liberal like Chris Matthews rather than an uptight conservative, he might have confessed to Huntsman’s giving him a chill up his leg.
But the problem with Will’s love song is that America already elected a president with a “realist” foreign policy: Barack Obama, the man Huntsman represented in China for two years. The constituency for defeat and surrender to the Taliban is in the other party where restive Democrats are unhappy about the fact that Obama decided to do the right thing and carry on with our commitments in Afghanistan. The idea that a Republican can be nominated by running to the left on foreign policy while also flirting with the left on global warming is so absurd that even Will admits that it is difficult to chart a path to the nomination for Huntsman. But we repeat ourselves. Jon Huntsman has no constituency and no appeal for Republicans. Makes you wonder why he is bothering.
