Huntsman, the Anti-Tea Party Fall Guy

I feel for Newsweek‘s mandarins, who really want to pick a presidential winner AND humiliate the Tea Party.

The cable-news crowd will undoubtedly scoff at [current Ambassador to China and former Republican governor of Utah, Jon] Huntsman’s prospects in a Republican primary. After a right-wing resurgence flooded Congress with Tea Party Republicans, the field doesn’t appear particularly inviting to a moderate Obama appointee. But

an increasingly vocal segment of the GOP is worried that the conservative populism of 2010 is distracting the party from its more pressing priorities. “We may be confusing a clearing in the forest for being out of the woods,” says Republican strategist John Weaver, who notes young voters’ disapproval of some of the party’s social agenda. “There is a ticking demographic time bomb working against us, and if we don’t correct that problem very soon, we could wind up back where we were four years ago.” What the party needs now, argue supporters like Weaver, is a leader who can negotiate a treaty of sorts between the right-wing base and forward-thinking moderates. The GOP, in other words, needs an ambassador.

I disagree with both Newsweek and James Fallows about Huntsman. It’s not that Ambassador Huntsman is playing for the enemy, that will ruin his electoral fortunes. It’s that, sorry Newsweek, he’s a moderate who has served as ambassador in a foreign country. There are two sins the Republican base will never forgive. And, if elites keep extolling those sins as virtues, Huntsman might wish he could stay in Beijing.

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Filed under: East Asia, Politics, USA Tagged: 2012 elections, barack h. obama, china, jon huntsman, prc