Jon Huntsman, Media’s Man-Crush

“Jon Huntsman Steps Into the Republican Vacuum” (NYT Sunday Magazine, 6/20/11)

“Romney Doesn’t Scare Obama. This Guy Does.” (Esquire, August 2011)

“Something Different This Way Comes” (Newsweek, 6/19/11)

A picture with the president: prophecy or baggage? (photo via gawker.com)

Matt Bai over at the NYTimes’ Caucus blog wonders why the media isn’t taking Jon Huntsman more seriously. Bai, who wrote a long piece on Huntsman for the paper’s Sunday Magazine, claims to be “under no illusion” that Huntsman is a shoe-in for the nomination. Still, he claims that the news media has been more dismissive of Huntsman than of potential candidates like Newt Gingrich. “In Mr. Huntsman’s case,” Bai writes, “the prevailing attitude seems to be that he is wasting our time.” Bai’s theory is that the media has swallowed the narrative of the angry Tea Party; the GOP has been hijacked by the party’s right wing, the story goes, and thus anyone who refuses to throw red meat to the lions has zero chance of winning the nomination. There’s more than a hint here of “liberal media” syndrome, of liberal journalists being only too happy to write off Republicans as a bunch of Constitution-quoting nutcases. Bai suggests that “Huntsman is advancing the notion that there is a more nuanced, less reactionary strain in the party that feels underrepresented. And this seems to unduly irritate a lot of analysts.”

It’s a nice theory. But the best evidence Bai can muster of this supposed ridicule is a Washington Post column by Dana Milbank that looks skeptically on Huntsman’s commitment to civility. Milbank writes,  “I wish Huntsman luck in this noble pursuit, but the high road almost always leads to political oblivion.” Questioning a candidate’s dedication to elevating the debate is hardly questioning the candidate himself. Milbank seems to laugh less at Huntsman than at the former governor’s conviction that he will be able to rise above the mud of electoral politics.

A quick survey of what the rest of the chattering class is saying about Huntsman offers little evidence to support Bai’s view. In fact, I would suggest that it’s exactly the opposite: It’s the general public, not the media, that is having a hard time accepting Huntsman. The media actually seems to be happily onboard, churning out a stream of glowing profiles and glossing over the obstacles — everything from Huntsman’s stances on civil unions and global warming to his Mormon faith — to a Huntsman nomination. These articles are backed by as few facts as Bai’s opinions. What do rank-and-file Republicans think of Huntsman? Well, that’s never really explained. The tone of each piece is set not by the public’s attitude toward Huntsman but by the reporter’s own intimate observations and, most insidiously, the campaign’s own P.R. material. Granted, Huntsman isn’t as recognizable a figure as Donald Trump or even Mitt Romney, but surely these journalists could have rounded up some grass-roots quotations to lend their stories a veneer of reality. Bai complains that the media has dismissed Huntsman in a way that they have not done to Newt Gingrich, but I suspect that the silence surrounding Gingrich’s campaign is less a sign of acceptance than an indication of utter skepticism. No one thinks Gingrich is a serious candidate, and so the press lets him fly under the radar. For all the supposed “scorn” heaped on Huntsman, the fact is that he has received a lot of publicity. Pundits may pay lip service to the long-shot nature of Huntsman’s bid, but no one spends that much time discussing a long shot.

If anything, the preponderance of Huntsman coverage demonstrates that the media is really quite keen on the former governor. Even the more dismissive publications — Businessweek wonders if there’s “trouble lurking offshore for Jon Huntsman,” a reference to the outsourcing ways of Huntsman Corp., the family business he used to help run — are doing their part in raising Huntsman’s profile. It may be pat to say that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” but the cliche holds a grain of truth. Only two percent of likely Iowa caucus-goers named Huntsman as their first-choice candidate in a poll by the Des Moines Register; perhaps more tellingly, a whopping 59 percent didn’t know him well enough to have an opinion. Anything that broadens Huntsman’s name recognition is probably positive at this point.

Even the friendliest of reporters have a way of unintentionally undermining the Huntsman campaign, however. Bai’s own article in the Sunday Magazine is a largely fair, even-handed take on the potential candidate, but the reader comes away wondering whether the author has given Huntsman too much credit. Far rosier coverage in Esquire and Newsweek has the unfortunate consequence of provoking laughter. The articles are so overly sincere and their writers so determined to make a case for Huntsman that some readers may conclude that the lady doth protest too much. Interviews with gung-ho campaign staffers are presented at face value, so that John Weaver, who heads the Huntsman team, is able to opine in all seriousness that “If we can save the country — if we can solve the major problems we face — then we save the party.” Jon Huntsman is apparently more than a great candidate; heck, he’s a veritable messiah, put on earth to deliver America from the sad, backwards clutches of Barack Obama. Delusions of grandeur, anyone?

It’s one thing for Huntsman’s staffers to drink their own Kool-Aid, but it’s another thing entirely for a reporter to sign on to the Huntsman P.R. machine. In the August issue of Esquire, Chris Jones has practically given us a hagiography; it’s surprising that the accompanying photos don’t show a golden nimbus hovering behind Huntsman’s head. The former governor is portrayed as a Very Serious Person, someone whose decision to enter the 2012 race is nothing short of monumental. Jones is the consummate Esquire writer; he seems to have internalized the magazine’s heavy-handed tone and melodramatic phrasing. The writing is so labored and consciously stylized that you can imagine Jones pausing every couple paragraphs to read the piece aloud, inserting the necessary tension-building pauses. Like other Esquire reporters (see Tom Junod’s June profile of Pixar chief John Lasseter), Jones loves repetition. The article opens with the following: “Today is the last day. Today is the last day Jon Huntsman Jr. could do anything else in the world. Today is the last day he could return to the family business . . . .” Jones is also fond of one-line pronouncements, the kind of ba-da-bum zingers that used to cap every chapter in R.L. Stine horror books. But instead of And then Lisa began to scream, Jones gives us lines, each one its own paragraph, like “Or he could do anything else in the world.” Read a few pages and several hours further into Huntsman’s campaign and you’re treated to more: “There is such a long way to go.” Two paragraphs, and then: “Today is the last day.” Finally, by the end of the article, our hero stands on the precipice (actually a lake shore in New Hampshire), musing about the voters he must win over in order to capture the nomination. “Have they been out there all this time, waiting, quietly, by the millions?” Jones intones. Then comes the clincher:

[Huntsman and his daughter] are alone at the end of the dock, alone for maybe the last time for months, possibly for years. Hardly anybody knows they’re here. But here they are — looking out over the water, looking out over the waves — waiting for this narrative to unfold, waiting for the next chapter to be written.

This is the first day.

Anyone who didn’t know better would be excused for thinking that Jones was describing Caesar on the bank of the Rubicon. Combine this with Jones’ predilection for the future tense (“He’ll be called a RINO and a traitor and a nobody . . . but he’ll also be called reasonable and practical and professional and electable.”), which infuses the narrative with a weighty sense of prophecy, and Esquire has written the perfect vanity piece. The magazine follows the first rule of Us Weekly journalism; that is, don’t offend the celebrity, because you might want her on the cover again someday.

On the surface, Matt Bai’s article for the Times seems similar. Both articles lead with the campaign’s New Hampshire kickoff, a meet-and-greet at Jesse’s, a steakhouse near Hanover. The fact that Bai and Jones describe the same event suggests the part of campaigning that reporters usually don’t acknowledge: the presence of other reporters. Each profile professes to give an up-close-and-personal view of the candidate, yet it seems Huntsman arrived in New Hampshire with several writers in tow. The Esquire piece jumps back and forth in time, attempting to weave the night at Jesse’s in with other details, but like the Times it offers a standard sketch of the steakhouse. Though the Times may have greater institutional heft, both publications speak to a largely urban audience for whom bear statues and moose-heads instantly evoke a rustic, hicksville aura.

Bai and Jones part ways on their analyses of the main event. Bai observes that Huntsman speaks with “practiced, diplomatic vagueness” for a “mere six minutes.” Jones goes a little easier, writing that “Tonight, here, Huntsman wants to make a gentler introduction. He wants to be whatever the audience wants him to be.” The former governor is “saving his sharper thoughts on Afghanistan and Pakistan for a major foreign policy speech” after he officially announces his candidacy. While Jones excuses Huntsman’s lack of substance, Bai insinuates that the audience perhaps wasn’t so concerned with substance in the first place:

Maybe 75 voters crowded into the back room at Jesse’s, under the low-hanging canoe and the mounted fish and the twin bear statues looming in back, but it was hard for them to get close to Huntsman, and some of them seemed more preoccupied with scoping out the assembled television pundits anyway. (“All I care about is Carl Cameron,” a woman remarked as the Fox News correspondent readied himself a few feet away.)

Bai also gets a much better reaction from Huntsman himself about the event. The reader pictures Bai cornering Huntsman, perhaps the next day, his notepad (or microrecorder, or iPhone, as the case may be) at the ready:

When he thought back to his experience on that first night, Huntsman, an avid motorcyclist and a lover of perilous sports, compared it to bungee jumping. “You put on the bungee-jumping cord, and you’re standing on the bridge and you leap,” he told me. “Well, that leap moment for me was when I stepped out of the car in front of Jesse’s. And you’re there, figuratively naked, in front of the press gaggle. And you begin to sail. You begin to fall. And whether or not that string is going to catch you before you hit bottom, whether or not you’re going to get through the night or get creamed, is an unknown.”

Both articles offer a run-down of the state of Republican presidential politics. It has become Gospel that most everyone is unhappy with the current field, especially after such potential candidates as Haley Barbour and Mitch Daniels declined to throw their hats in the ring. Rick Perry is the latest possibility, but by next week the chattering classes could settle on someone else. Support for favorite-son Mitt Romney has proved to be tepid, and Bai and Jones both believe that Huntsman is well-placed to offer an alternative. Bai writes,

“Listen, if we got no one answering our phone calls and no doors opened at any of these places among people who are high-profile and respected players, then I think the answer would be far different,” Huntsman told me. “You’ve got to respond to the marketplace. But in this case, nature abhors a vacuum, and there happens to be a vacuum that’s in the process of being filled.”

Bai and Jones provide similar outlines of Huntsman’s biography, noting that, as ambassador to China, he was prohibited from politicking until his resignation was official. Both reporters note the now-legendary (at least among people who follow such things) interview with Newsweek in which Huntsman suggested that he and his family “may have one final run left in our bones.” Bai calls it “the modern equivalent of a message in a bottle,” while Jones more melodramatically says that “Weaver had to do a lot of reading between the lines. When he read that Newsweek interview, this is what he saw: FIRE UP THOSE COLD ENGINES, WEAVER. I’M COMING HOME.”

Bai mentions that “it’s hard to believe that Huntsman didn’t encourage any of this in some tangible way from Beijing, perhaps through back-channel conacts. (Axleroad, who is helping to build Obama’s re-election campaign, mockingly calls Weaver’s version of events the ‘political immaculate conception.’)” but he doesn’t outright accuse Huntsman of breaking any laws. Indeed, Jones — who tends to give Huntsman the benefit of the doubt, perhaps in exchange for what is advertised in the article as “Exclusive Access to Huntsman’s Campaign” — goes out of his way to point out that Horizon was “not affiliated in any way with Huntsman.” Jones is a prime example of the danger of getting too close to a source; just like the reporters embedded with American army units during the Iraq invasion were accused of losing objectivity and writing only what the military wanted to read, Jones risks allowing his fondness for Huntsman (which, perhaps to Jones’ credit as well as his detriment, the article does not attempt to hide) to cloud his judgment.

In some of the clearest writing of the profile, Jones summarizes Huntsman’s greatest advantage: “There was something else that Beijing had given Huntsman: an out. He had been absent during these last two years of weirdness and upheaval. He hadn’t needed to pretend to accommodate the Tea party and its faux populism, like Romney and Pawlenty and McCain, nor pay the price of not doing so, like his former colleague Bob Bennett, Utah’s very conservative senator who was nevertheless abruptly pushed aside by the insurgency . . . . He was unscarred and untainted by the party’s internal wars.”

Jones is correct, but the paragraph also illuminates the problematic nature of Esquire’s political coverage. Like the bomb-throwing Matt Taibbi of The Rolling Stone, Jones makes no pretense of neutrality. “Faux populism” would be a faux pas for anyone writing for a major newspaper, but Esquire’s editorial voice is apparently slightly to the left of the New York Times. Proponents might argue that it’s actually more honest — “faux populism,” may be a politically incorrect description of the Tea Party, but that doesn’t make it factually incorrect.

Bai also notes Huntsman’s outsider advantage, but manages to top Jones in the clever analogy department. (OK, pitting an Esquire staffer against the top political correspondent for the nation’s paper of record isn’t exactly a fair match-up, but still.) He likens Huntsman to the “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer” made famous by Phil Hartman on Saturday Night Live:

As I watched Huntsman tour New Hampshire, I began to think of him, in a kind way, as being the unfrozen caveman candidate. He’d been living in a censored society on the other side of the planet — encased in ice, for all political purposes — during the town-hall uprisings in the summer of 2009 and all the grass-roots fury that attached itself to everything Obama did. And this, he seemed to think, exempted him from having to know much about any of it. I’m just a caveman. I don’t know much about your “tea parties” and your “birthers” But there are some things I do know . . . .

The clincher is the inclusion of the clause “he seemed to think.” Bai, for all his access to Huntsman, has evidently not fallen prey to the temptations of an embed. He hasn’t been seduced by the outfit that Jones describes as “a campaign made of aluminum: sleek, modern, innovative, technological, efficient, beautiful.” (Six adjectives — count ’em folks, six.) Bai uses this opportunity to preview his later blog-post remarks about Huntsman’s doubters: “A lot of political handicappers — particularly those on the left, who tend to view the Republican base as monolithic and somewhat medieval — doubt that Huntsman can even win enough delegates to earn himself a decent speaking slot at the convention.” He counters with the contention that “some of the more sober-minded Republican insiders in Washington and New Hampshire, though, persuaded me that by distancing himself from some of the party’s more populist influences, Huntsman was giving Republican and independent voters an option that could not be so easily dismissed.” (Italics mine.) And persuaded he was.

But the real nut here is something Bai apparently notices but chooses to hurry past. Huntsman seems to think that he is entitled to a free pass. He doesn’t have to address the ultra-conservative Michele Bachmann element of his party because he is above all that nonsense. He doesn’t have to explicitly criticize President Obama because he is taking the path of civility. What it really comes down to, however, is that Huntsman is making excuses for not having articulated a real platform. “[T]he furthest he would go, pressed by reporters at a news conference in a living room in Hancock, was to suggest that Obama pursued some policies he might not have, like sending the military into Libya,” Bai writes. That may be the furthest Huntsman will go, but it’s not far enough to win the nomination. He must forcefully demonstrate that his view of the world is fundamentally different from Obama’s; that’s not pandering to the party crazies, that’s the duty of an opponent. No one wins the presidency by playing nice. To Huntsman’s credit, since his New Hampshire tour with Bai, he has taken a sharper tone with Obama, promising in his announcement speech that he will demonstrate “leadership that knows we need more than hope.” But to date Huntsman has still not voiced a real alternative to Obama’s policies, except to endorse such bland and blurry moves as making “broad changes to the tax code.” So he wouldn’t have intervened in Libya. OK, well — what would he do? On health care, global warming — Huntsman has walked back from his previous positions, but it’s unknown precisely where he stands today. He is still a cipher. At this point in the election cycle, that may be all right, but what is acceptable today won’t be a few months down the road. The time in which Huntsman’s stint in China entitles him to the “caveman” benefit of the doubt is running short.

Read a little further in Bai’s profile, and he does acknowledge that Huntsman can’t get by on being the not-Romney/not-Pawlenty/not-Bachmann candidate forever. Bai writes that Huntsman’s “his lack of any evident vision . . . seemed to have disappointed a lot of voters,” who wonder why, given the importance of first impressions, Huntsman has chosen to introduce himself as a low-key family man. One local Republican official is quoted as saying, “It may be fine, and you may get another bite at the apple, but you’ve got 70 voters in a room right now! You can make your pitch right now!”

That Huntsman has so far failed to distinguish himself is a fact lost on Kathleen Parker, the conservative Washington Post columnist who penned an article for Newsweek entitled “Something Different This Way Comes.” Sure, Jon Hunstman is “different” in that he’s neither a fire-breathing, government-hating Tea Partier nor a flip-flopping former fan of universal healthcare, but is he really the greatest thing since sliced bread? There’s no such thing as “most unique,” but Parker doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. Her brief take on Huntsman is as glowing and superlative as a celebrity profile in Glamour or Marie Claire. “To say that Huntsman is ‘different’ is to cheat the thesaurus,” she proclaims, then goes on to relate quirky anecdotes better suited to a fashion-magazine puff piece. When he recently joined Henry Kissinger for a Reuters-sponsored discussion of China, Huntsman “confesses to having skipped lunch because he didn’t want to ‘regurgitate’ on Dr. Kissinger. Apparently, no matter one’s accomplishments, one never conquers butterflies in the presence of an eminence grise.” Parker relates this cute, humanizing story in the same way that a wide-eyed Glamour reporter would gush about Jennifer Aniston’s forty-dollar Gap jeans or Reese Witherspoon’s appetite for a juicy hamburger.  Jen may be a huge star with a figure any woman would envy, but even our favorite “Friend” finds it hard to resist a deep-dish pizza!

Parker acknowledges that Huntsman, who she describes as “blessed with good looks and privilege,” may be pushing it with his Joe Sixpack persona. She notes his self-aware “pride in having been a dishwasher, and his preference for ‘divey’ restaurants,” which again seems to recall a celebrity intent on fostering a girl-next-door image. After all, stars like Julia Roberts make a point of inviting interviewers to hole-in-the-wall New York diners. But Parker really seems to believe that Huntsman is something special. “It’s safe to say that Americans beyond Utah have never met anyone quite like Huntsman,” she writes, as if the former governor had two heads or a purple mohawk. “Most unique,” indeed.

Matt Bai’s profile is the best of the three, but Bai is wrong when he claims that the media has been overly skeptical of Jon Huntsman. The former governor’s moderate positions, his Mormon religion, his connection to Obama — these handicaps are duly noted, then brushed aside. Chris Jones quotes John Weaver as remarking that “you can’t rush the narrative. We’re exactly in the chapter we should be in.” It’s a confident, politically savvy statement. And it’s one that the media seems to have bought — hook, line, and sinker.