Vote for Sanity in 2016

(photo via The Atlantic)

Since Jon Huntsman made the anti-EPA remarks that inspired my last ramble on his political future, the candidate has pivoted sharply toward the center, dismissing fellow 2012 contenders Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann as “unelectable.” While one of the first comments on the Times’ Caucus blog was something to the effect of “It takes one to know one,” Huntsman seems to have realized that trying to out-crazy the crazies is not a viable strategy. A former governor who supports civil unions and calls Perry’s skepticism about global warming “a serious problem” is not going to win over any Bachmann-ites or Palin-boosters. Though Huntsman takes pains to point out that he is still a conservative — the WSJ notes that he no longer advocates capping greenhouse gases or fighting climate change “as long as unemployment remains high” — he added to his Twitter following on Friday when he remarked that, “To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

Is this is a good move for Huntsman? I maintained in my last post that moving to the right would do little to strengthen his appeal to Tea Partiers, while simultaneously alienating the moderates he will need to depend on for a 2016 run (or, for that matter, a 2012 general election). At the National Journal, Ben Terris writes that “While the move is sure to differentiate Huntsman from the crowd, it remains to be seen whether it will also be an act of political suicide.” Terris has a point: no matter how much attention Huntsman draws from his noisy shift to the center, it won’t help him in a primary season that has seen Michele Bachmann top the Iowa Straw Poll. Indeed, Politico is reporting that the Democratic National Committee has gleefully latched onto Huntsman’s recent remarks, inserting them into an e-mail to reporters. This belies the theory that there is no such thing as bad P.R., as receiving the seal of approval from the DNC is about as helpful as Obama’s sly, repeated references to Huntsman as “my good friend.”

Still, Huntsman doubled down on his radical-centrist strategy on Sunday, declaring on ABC News’s This Week that “this country is crying out for a sensible middle ground,” not “people on the fringes” with “zero substance.” At the Times, Brian Knowlton writes that such comments “suggested that he might have learned a lesson from a fellow Republican whose campaign bore some similarities to his own: Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota.” Pawlenty, “another former two-term governor with a record as a relatively mainstream conservative,” was criticized for “[coming] across as too soft-spoken and moderate in a year of unusually heated partisan passions.” Where Huntsman presumably hopes to improve on Pawlenty, however, is in the conflation of “moderate” and “soft-spoken.” As far as I can tell, the former governor of Utah wants to prove that mainstream sanity can be just as passionate and conviction-filled as Michele Bachmann’s born-again faith or Rick Perry’s criminalization of the Fed. He’s pinning his chance on the theory that home-schooling and secession aren’t the only things that get crowds riled up. It remains to be seen, however, whether cries to find “practical, common-sense solutions” and end America’s “heroin-like dependence” on foreign oil will be as attractive to voters as the red-meat exhortations Tea Party adherents have come to expect.

None of this is to say that Huntsman is turning into someone who independents will automatically love. His positions are still very much to the right of the many swing voters who were crucial to Obama’s win in 2008 and who increasingly appear to be up for grabs in 2012. The Wall Street Journal writes that he “supports repealing President Barack Obama’s health-care law and turning Medicaid into block grants to the states,” and while what the Journal refers to as “ObamaCare” does not poll well among independents, other parts of Huntsman’s platform are less palatable. He wants to roll back the Wall Street reforms of Dodd-Frank, despite continued Main Street disgust with overpaid bankers and an economy teetering on the brink of another recession. He “opposes another round of federal funding for infrastructure,” when even Bill Gross, the Republican who heads the enormous bond fund Pimco, is advocating for direct hiring by the federal government. If Huntsman is indeed positioning himself for a 2016 run, his foray into the 2012 primaries still has the potential to unearth some landmines.

At The Atlantic, James Fallows took one look at Huntsman’s global-warming Tweet and proclaimed “At Last There’s Proof: Jon Huntsman Is Aiming for 2016.” I can see where Fallows is coming from; it’s indeed evident that Huntsman’s “views are going nowhere with the Republican primary electorate this time around.” In my last post, I wondered whether, by falling into line at the Iowa debate and refusing a hypothetical budget deal that favors spending cuts over taxes by a 10-to-1 ratio, Huntsman risked making himself unelectable in 2016. But now that he has begun to tack more aggressively toward the center, I can discern the outlines of a master plan. Whether Huntsman intended all along to use his 2012 bid as a way to keep his name in the press, or whether he moved the goalpost to 2016 only after realizing the hopelessness of the current field, he seems to have acknowledged the benefit of a reputation for reality-based thinking. If he makes an impression as a sane, qualified contender this time around, 2016 may be for him what 2008 was for John McCain and what 2012 may be for Mitt Romney. After all, America loves a comeback, and one needs only look to post-presidency Bill Clinton or post-OxyContin Rush Limbaugh to know that this is truly the country of second chances.

The WSJ observes that his “low-key, Mr. Mellow approach to the Republican presidential campaign has gotten him high praise in elite media circles – from a spread in Vogue to the New York Times Magazine cover – but little traction among Republican voters who actually do the choosing.” In fact, attention from the “elite media” tends to have an inverse relationship to traction among Republicans ; more of the former invariably results in less of the latter. It’s not for nothing that Sarah Palin, on her latest bus tour, tried her hardest to give the slip to the “lamestream media.” Vogue’s readers may not be voting in the Republican primaries (though, I should point out, neither will many of the Newsweek readers who were treated to the magazine’s creepy, soft-porn photos of a hoodie’d Palin lounging dockside), but Huntsman knows that they may well be voting in November 2016.