People have asked me why I disliked Jon Huntsman. Out of all the other candidates — not the warmongering Rick Santorum, not the flip-flopping Mitt Romney, and not the laughably corrupt Newt Gingrich — Huntsman is the only one I truly and personally disliked. I might disagree with Santorum’s insane…
Another (more negative) take on Huntsman. Key line: “Huntsman has shown himself to be a turncoat: to his party, to his president, and to his own campaign. That is despicable and his actions are indications of a great deficit in character and integrity.”
Today our campaign for the presidency ends, but our campaign for a better and more trustworthy America continues.Jon Huntsman • Speaking at the announcement of his campaign’s suspension Monday morning.
(Source: CNN)
Happening now: Jon Huntsman’s suspending his campaign. ”Today I am suspending my campaign for the presidency.” He just endorsed Mitt Romney.
Jon Huntsman’s campaign was a better idea than it was a reality, and the idea was John Weaver’s.
Weaver, a rangy, 52-year old Texan has a storied and controversial career in Republican politics, and now an uncertain future. And the Huntsman campaign is the latest and purest version of a strategy that he’s been pressing since he was at John McCain’s right hand in 2000: A Republican campaign that embraces the mainstream media, sets itself against elements of conservative dogma, and builds a coalition of moderate Republicans and independents that – if it could only survive the primary – would be formidable in a general election. The campaign’s birth in baroque intrigue and its high-level infighting are also Weaver signatures.
Weaver also spearheaded a much-more-successful (but not a winning) candidate in John McCain, and Huntsman’s failure to get off the ground led to much criticism from pundits on the right. Read more here.
Jon Huntsman’s campaign was never going to work. He finally realized that and will drop out to give Mitt Romney, for whom he exhibited no small amount of animosity during the debates, his support. In New Hampshire he preposterously told supporters that a weak third place finish, in a state in which he had campaigned almost exclusively, was his “ticket to ride” to South Carolina. But it wasn’t, just as his campaign wasn’t based on any natural constituency or rationale.The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin • Offering up her harshly-worded take on why Jon Huntsman’s leaving the race. “If it was the GOP presidential nomination he sought,” she continued, “it was of a GOP in some parallel universe created by the press in which the darn Tea Party never arose, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was still speaker of the House and Republicans yearned for an isolationist foreign policy even to the left of President Obama’s.” While the conservative Rubin clearly has her opinions, there is a grain of truth here. Huntsman’s a likable guy, but this was not a campaign that worked in his favor.
Great for the general election. Not so great for the primaries. Jon Huntsman was long the odd man out in the 2012 election, the guy with just enough support in most polls to show up at most of the debates, but never enough to be the focus of them. While his politics found fans (particularly his early pro-science stance, which stood out from the rest of the GOP and he later flip-flopped on), he was attempting to be the un-cola in a year when every other candidate in the race was trying to prove exactly how conservative they were. Huntsman will end his campaign Monday (a day after winning an endorsement from The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper) and will offer his support to Mitt Romney, a guy he didn’t hide his animosity towards. Here’s why:
(photo by Gage Skidmore)
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Comment of the day re: Huntsman suspending campaign
Tags: huntsman dropping out jon huntsman jon huntsman quits race comment of the day from thischarmingsir-deactivated2013 66 • Permalinkthischarmingsir:
So true. The pundit class has been quick to put the dagger in him, but the fact of the matter is, he was trying to do something slightly different — play serious in a GOP race full of wacky hijinks — and he didn’t get a lot of respect for it. That’s a bummer. Jennifer Rubin was right last night, but she was right in a way that reflected how wrong everything around Huntsman is, not Huntsman himself.
(Source: CNN)