Subscribe
RSS
Mobile
Jon Huntsman wants you to know he rides a dirt bike. On real dirt! He's Salt of the Earth. Grease of the Garage. Dragster on the Dunes. Huntsman's runnin' and gunnin' for president. But underneath the Steve McQueen costumery, this made-for-cable-TV Moderate Speed Racer is a creaky old John McCain on Wheels.
The former Utah Republican governor and Obama ambassador to China is the answer to an election-year problem that doesn't exist. The quadrennial "problem," in the minds of Beltway GOP strategists and liberal media chin-pullers, is that the Republican Party isn't moderate, civil, self-critical or inclusive enough.
Huntsman is the latest no-labels flavor of the month, a straw man of the same people who have spent the past year smearing entitlement reformers as senior citizen-killers, budget hawks as Hitler's spawn, border-security activists as racists, and leading GOP women as sluts, nuts and bimbos.
Just like the failed 2008 GOP contender whose consultants are now fueling the Huntsman bid, McCain 2.0 is a big-spending accommodationist more in tune with the Democratic elite than with the conservative rank-and-file. In the shadow of the Statue of Liberty on Tuesday, Huntsman assailed the current economic crisis overseen by the Obama administration as "totally unacceptable" and "totally un-American." Yet, Huntsman retains nothing but "respect" for his former boss in the White House and laments the loss of "civility" wrought by "corrosive" political debates.
This is all you need to know about the manufacturing of the Huntsman candidacy: Swooning reporters far outnumbered supporters at the kickoff in Liberty Park and at a follow-up rally in New Hampshire. CNN's enamored anchor Wolf Blitzer gushed: "Here's what I especially liked about Jon Huntsman's presidential announcement in front of the Statue of Liberty. He called for some civility in the race for the White House. Unlike several of the other Republican candidates, he did not open with a blistering assault on President Obama."
Yeah. Who do all those uncivil Republicans running against Obama think they are -- opposing the opposition with oppositional rhetoric? Heaven forfend.
Former McCain mastermind John Weaver, now a key Huntsman strategist, said this week the campaign will be "mellow." More like "marshmallow." Instead of trashing enemies by name, they'll keep it vague and mushy. Huntsman has been buoyed by months of glowing coverage from left-leaning, dead-tree media, whose reporters have lapped up his trashing of the GOP as "devoid of ideas" and "a very narrow party of angry people." See? No names. No nasty. Embrace the civility!
While politely paying lip service to principles of tea party fiscal restraint, Huntsman hopes no one remembers how 2,000 Utah tea party activists booed him in April 2009 so corrosively it could have stripped the paint off a fleet of Harleys.
Utah conservatives raised their voices at the seminal tea party rally against Huntsman for championing $1.6 billion in Obama stimulus funds (Huntsman wanted even more money than that) -- and against GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch and then-GOP Sen. Bob Bennett for backing the Bush-Obama TARP bailout. The grassroots message: "Send them home!" A year later, voters ousted Bennett from the GOP primary after four profligate terms in office. And Hatch is in for the fight of his entrenched incumbent life.
While state governments across the country are rejecting or repealing onerous cap-and-trade environmental regulations, Huntsman is a climate-change Republican who backed radical emissions limits and green job fantasies. Just like McCain 1.0 did.
While state governments across the country follow Arizona's immigration enforcement model and Washington repeatedly rejects mass amnesty programs in the face of 9 percent unemployment, Huntsman supports the costly DREAM Act, an illegal alien bailout with a wider "path to citizenship." Just like McCain 1.0 did.
While state governments rein in middle-class entitlement spending and Washington turns to means-testing, Huntsman turned the SCHIP government-funded health plan for low-income children into a universal health insurance mandate. McCain 1.0 was for SCHIP before he was against it.
McCain's Straight Talk Express ran out of gas when his former media paramours inevitably turned against him -- and his gambit to out-big government the Democrats blew up in his two faces. So it will be with McHuntsman and his campaign wheels to nowhere.
---
Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2010).
COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM
June 22, 2011 @ 11:15 am
When I heard his announcement on the radio, I heard a new voice, but having no idea what Huntsman looks like, I pictured McCain. Michelle, you have confirmed my beliefs by using the term McCain 2.0. That describes him to a “tea” (so to speak). I know, it’s “tee” or “T”.
June 22, 2011 @ 11:23 am
The Whitehouse reportedly called Huntsman the candidate they feared the most. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that they said this hoping that enough people would believe this obvious lie and vote for him in the primaries, thereby setting up a rematch of 2008 (Obama vs. the moderate GOP). They saw the power of the tea party last November, and that is what they really fear. If a Republican can harness the passion of the tea party they will destroy Obama next year.
The mainstream media is singing the same tune, labeling Huntsman as the only candidate who can beat Obama. In my mind he is the weakest candidate so far and the majority of registered Republicans, who have long since stopped listening to the MSM, will reject Huntsman and chose their own candidate.
June 22, 2011 @ 11:42 am
@NY Graham, you on right on the money. These are scary times, folks. 2012 may be our last opportunity to get our country back.
June 22, 2011 @ 11:55 am
Look for establishment Republicans to sabotage TEA party candidates in the early primaries, forcing them out of the race before the rest of the country has a chance to vote. If that happens, TEA partyers should organize a massive write-in campaign and bypass the GOP anointed candidate.
June 22, 2011 @ 7:28 pm
Agree John. The establishment candidates are scared to death of folks like Bachman, Palin, Cain, etc., because they are the ones who will end the gravy trains and long-term incumbencies of BOTH parties. To the old goats of both parties, it’s all a big game. They golf together, they party together, and they support and rescue each other all the time. Meanwhile, our country goes down the toilet and no one can seem to find any waste, any redundant programs, or anything that can get cut. We voters need to purge ALL incumbents out through SEVERAL voting cycles to get some new blood in office that will respect the Constitution and get this country back to its former glory.
June 22, 2011 @ 12:23 pm
As usual Michelle nails it! Jon in Aug 2009 (after being named Ambassador to China) sent a handwritten note to O’bama, praising him as a ‘remarkable leader’ – nuf said
June 22, 2011 @ 7:31 pm
Yeah, that’s all I needed to hear too. Hannity ran him over the coals last night too and confronted him on several positions that aren’t CLOSE to being conservative. Do we REALLY need more lukewarm, trying-to-please-everyone candidates? I don’t think so, and in last November’s election, the rest of the country said as much too.
June 22, 2011 @ 12:36 pm
Michelle, thank you for this most informative article. I still think you are the greatest.
GOD BLESS AMERICA
June 22, 2011 @ 1:51 pm
Another great column by Michelle! Huntsman out-RINO’s all the others!
June 22, 2011 @ 2:58 pm
When Obama minions, MSM, FOX’s Krauthammer, Morris, & O’Reilly start proclaiming “the one Obama fears, the only one who can beat the current administration, etc., you can be certain of ONE thing: THAT is the GOP candidate they can most easily defeat. Remember how they did the same thing last go-round and gave us McCain? Mac dang near pulled it off by naming Sarah Palin as his running mate.
By the way, all those same sources are declaring neither Palin nor Bachmann have a sowball-chance-in-hell of winning. Now I ask you, if that were true why are they wasting so much time, energy, and money trying to convince us?
June 22, 2011 @ 3:04 pm
I don’t know if I’m interpreting your sentence correctly, but are you lumping the Fox News commentators you mentioned in with Obama’s minions? If so, how do you figure Fox News is in the tank for Obama?
June 22, 2011 @ 4:05 pm
Because, Phil, no matter what the administration, Soros, the MSM, and all the other left wingers say, FOX IS fair and balanced. Some of the people on FOX are not truly conservative. That includes Krauthamer, O’Reilly and possibly Morris. They represent so called moderate thinking to a greater degree than conservative thinking. They dislike Palin and Backmann and like guys like Huntsman and Romney. That tells us a great deal.
June 22, 2011 @ 4:40 pm
Liberty:
You’re wrong about Fox News if you think they support Obama. I’m not saying you think that, but that’s what davnkatz seemed to be saying, and that was what my post was in response to. I realize that most of the commentators on Fox are not as conservative as Sean Hannity for instance, but there’s no way Morris would ever try to undermine the Republican candidate. I watch him on every show and I can tell you for a fact that he is solidly against Obama.
June 22, 2011 @ 5:57 pm
The Kraut and O’Reilly have become too self-important, O’Reilly being nothing more than an old self-serving wind bag.
I don’t think Morris is in Obama’s camp but he is NOT always right the way he would have you think.
June 22, 2011 @ 5:44 pm
Huntsman contributed $25,000 to demented crook Harry Reid’s reelection campaign. That tells me all I need to know about Huntsman!
June 22, 2011 @ 7:10 pm
Thanks Michelle for another informative article. I saw a former Hillary Clinton supporter on Fox today and she helped raise 1.2 million for Huntsman and she thinks he’s terrific. She says we should forget about social issues and he is just what the country needs.
BEWARE….Huntsman is being pushed by the media and the GOP elite just like Romney because they are “moderate”.
We don’t want Romney, Huntsman or Johnson! …..all Rino’s. We need a real Fiscal & Social Conservative if we really want to start tuning this country around. Romney & Huntsman say they are pro-life but refused to sign the SBA pro-life pledge. Huntsman is for civil unions and Romney flip flops on the issue. They both believe in the “man-made global warming” and cap & trade hoax. Johnson is pro-abortion , gay marriage and wants to legalize drugs. Why in the world would we want a McCain clone (aka Democrat-lite) in the Whitehouse?