The Conservative Cowardice of National Review

William Buckley: conservative but not (too) crazy.

In an op-ed published Monday in the Times, former Republican National Committee staffer David Welch laments the disappearance of right-wing “gatekeepers” like William Buckley, the National Review editor who in the 1960s denounced the extremist John Birch element of the GOP and silenced the party’s nuttier elements. Buckley, writes Welch, “displayed political courage and sanity” in his opposition to the conspiracy mongers who saw Communists behind every potted plant – and even, in the person of President Eisenhower, in the White House. Welch likens conservatives’ mid-century flirtation with the far right to the present-day takeover of the GOP by the Tea Party, which he believes Buckley would have similarly characterized as “essentially calling on the party to commit political suicide.” Here’s Welch:

 The modern-day Birchers are the Tea Party. By loudly espousing extreme rhetoric, yet holding untenable beliefs, they have run virtually unchallenged by the Republican leadership, aided by irresponsible radio talk-show hosts and right-wing pundits. While the Tea Party grew, respected moderate voices in the party were further pushed toward extinction. Republicans need a Buckley to bring us back. 

In 2012, however, there is no William Buckley to pull the Republican Party back from the brink. The vacuum has enabled “extreme, untested candidates to take center stage and then commit predictable gaffes and issue moon-bat pronouncements. Democrats have used those statements to tarnish the Republican Party as anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-gay, anti-immigrant extremists. Buckley’s conservative pragmatism has been lost, along with the presidency and seats in Congress.”

But while Welch exhorts “party leaders” like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush to “seize this moment as Buckley did decades ago,” he curiously neglects to delve into the largely negative role now played by Buckley’s old magazine itself. It has morphed from a publication brave enough to carry Buckley’s unpopular rejection of the Birchers to a cowardly, sycophantic arm of the Republican Party. In the past election cycle, the National Review was a vocal proponent of the very extremists Welch castigates. It was an early booster of Ted Cruz in Texas, devoting a gushing 2011 cover story to the UN conspiracy theorist (Ban Ki-moon wants to destroy your golf courses — really!) who prevailed against the more moderate David Dewhurst in the Republican primary. It inveighed against the moderate Richard Lugar, who lost the Republican primary to Richard Mourdock (“a credible conservative alternative,” according to NR), a member of the GOP “rape caucus” who defined compromise as “Democrats joining Republicans to roll back the size of government.” Mourdock, it should be noted, went on to lose an eminently winnable seat in Indiana in November . . . and still NR writers continued to defend the “spirit” and “authenticity” behind his assertion that pregnancies resulting from rape were “something that God intended to happen.”

National Review backed plenty of other extremist losers as well, such as New York House candidate and anti-abortion crusader Wendy Long, a favorite of the rabidly Catholic Kathryn Jean Lopez, who as much as anyone personifies the magazine’s swerve from the conservative mainstream to the fringe far-right. Lopez likes to say that Catholicism provides the light and inspiration for her life, but her favorite word is “abortifacient,” not “Jesus” or “God,” and she spends more time lobbing faux-naive softball questions (“But isn’t the HHS mandate all about contraception?” she asks, as if she’s just so confused about her #1 issue) at business owners challenging the Obama administration’s contraception mandate (oh, excuse me, “abortion-drug, contraception, sterilization mandate”) than she does celebrating the role of religion in public life. Even when she interviews the author of a book as unrelated to religion as “Rush to Judgment,” a defense of George W. Bush’s war on terror, she manages to squeeze in a Catholic League-approved question. Of course, she doesn’t ask whether the unnecessary war in Iraq violated the church’s just-war theory or how Bush’s approval of torture squares with Catholic doctrine. Grabbing every opportunity to bash Obama is a Lopez tic, so she poses this probing question, contrasting the ostensible “discomfort” over Bush’s religious views to the acceptance of Jimmy Carter’s: “What do you make of this? Has this, too, only gotten worse? I’m thinking here about the freedom-of-religion debate we’re having at the moment.” Sigh. Well, I guess in Lopez’s world, “freedom of religion” is restricted to the freedom to deny employees health care that covers — oh, horrors! — birth control.

Rich Lowry: an unworthy successor.

Under editor Rich Lowry, National Review gives a platform to writers far more odious than Lopez, who is basically a harmless ranter who elicits eye-rolls even among conservatives and was ousted from the editorship after NRO’s “Corner” blog turned into something too close to “Catholic Corner” for the magazine’s backers. There is, for example, Dennis Prager, a talk-show host who equates “conservative values” with “American values” and recently penned an entire article about the threat of public nudity to Christianity. Secular, godless liberals apparently think nudity is OK because they see no difference between humans and rutting, carefree animals:

Leftism seeks to undo most of the values that are distinct to Judeo-Christian religion. The Left has always been anti-religious, and especially anti-Christian. Karl Marx understood that a vibrant leftism and a vibrant Christianity could not coexist. He was right.

The language Lopez’s fellow National Review pro-lifers use to refer to women who exercise their Constitutional right to abortion is noxious. A taste of Michael Walsh:

It seems to me the pro-life movement is missing a big beat when it fails to turn the Left’s own tables on it and point out that the FDR/LBJ/BHO welfare state is only sustainable with a high birthrate, and that most of those millions of aborted babies since Roe v. Wade would today be taxpayers helping to prop up the tottering system, instead of being thrown out with the other medical waste. But this is the end result of the sexual revolution: a society that either prevents or annihilates its own children today so that they won’t be around tomorrow to take care of their annihilators.

Kevin Williamson, who calls himself a “roving correspondent” for the magazine, employs the sort of language that drove socially moderate Republicans away from the party after it embraced figures like Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum. He describes a movie about gay families, That’s My Family, as “a very clever piece of cinematic propaganda courtesy of organized homosexuality” and “a product of the institutional wing of the gay-rights movement.” It’s enough to make one wonder whether he thinks there is an armed wing of the gay-rights movement as well, as he seems to picture LGBT advocates as Orwellian members of a gay Hitler Youth. In Williamson’s mind, perhaps “homosexuals” (funny how the right-wing just can’t pull itself away from the 19^th century, pathological connotations of “homosexual”) assemble in strip clubs across the country to plot the demise of traditional America. William Buckley, as man of his time, surely would not have approved of gay marriage, but he might have recognized that bile like Williamson’s is repellant to the 53 percent of Americans who see little wrong with it. Perhaps he would not have written John Birch-esque sentences like this:

There are no cease-fires in the culture wars, because the Left simply will not stop until it has achieved total conformity, which it pursues under the banners of “tolerance” and “diversity,” i.e., a virtue the Left does not possess and a condition the Left will not abide.

Other contributors include Mark Krikorian, the anti-immigration zealot whose brand of xenophobic, racist rhetoric was, as much as anything, responsible for Romney’s devastating numbers among Hispanics on November 6. “Islamophobic” is perhaps too kind a term for Andrew C. McCarthy and Mark Steyn, both of whom harbor more hatred than fear for any religion outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. McCarthy, the author of such brilliant tomes as “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America” and “How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda,” sees “sharia totalitarianism” even in relatively pro-western countries like Turkey, while Steyn is offensive both in content and tone. (Sample Steyn: “How quickly the supposed defenders of liberal, pluralist, Western values came to sound as if they were competing to be Islam’s lead prison bitch.”) McCarthy’s crusades against Muslims — and it is indeed a crusade against all Muslims, not simply radicals, as he always puts scare quotes around “Islamic democracy” and writes fair-minded things like, “far from being a fringe ideology, Islamic supremacism is the dominant interpretation of Islam of the Middle East” — brings to mind another infamous McCarthy. He mimics Steyn in his conviction that President Obama sympathizes with jihadists, ranting that “the American people have elected, and now reelected, a president notoriously fond of America-bashing Islamists” whose passion for social justice is “not meaningfully different from the Islamist perspective of America. Both envision a world in which the enlightened, godly West is in constant conflict with a barbaric East that is not only pushing sharia law in the Middle East but has somehow infiltrated the U.S. and is thisclose to veiling women and murdering gays (who otherwise rate zero interest or empathy from either man) in every state without a Michele Bachmann to protect it.

The magazine also runs columns by Michelle Malkin, a writer second only to Ann Coulter in her penchant for bomb-throwing crudity. Malkin, who spouts racism and misogyny and then complains about being labeled racist and misogynistic, calls the president “the brass-knuckle-wielder-in-chief” and refers anyone associated with his campaign as “Chicago thugs.” She hilariously whines about Hollywood’s coarsening of the culture while coarsening it herself to an amazing degree. Likewise, National Review contributor Thomas Sowell uses his minority status as cover to make statements that would, coming from one of the ostensibly racist MSNBC hosts he lambastes, sound remarkably . . . racist. In his world, the left (or the Left, as conservative capitalization fetishists prefer to say) is really the side filled with racists, because . . . well, because they have the audacity to call out the dog-whistles peddled by conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly.

These are the people on the National Review’s payroll, yet they appear nowhere in Welch’s New York Times piece. He praises Buckely’s rhetorical and political legacy but ignores the sinister role of Buckley’s real, tangible legacy – the National Review itself – in the GOP’s current devolution. Lowry, et al. have sullied a publication that used to lay claim to the rational center, that used to subscribe to logic and that perhaps would have logically deferred to the judgment of 99% of scientists rather than running a blog dedicated solely to poking fun at Al Gore and the “myth” of anthropological climate change. The magazine is a sad shell of Buckley’s flagship. It is better than its fellow conservative publications, some of which regularly refer to Obama as a “red diaper baby” (The American Spectator), and certainly better than the true media heirs to John Birch, such as World Net Daily, whose addition of presidential also-ran Rick Santorum to its stable of authors perfectly exemplifies the GOP’s trend toward endorsement of the fringe. If NR chose reason over ranting, it could be an even more influential voice today, when previously sane outlets like the Wall Street Journal editorial page have hired people like committed anti-feminist (read: misogynist) James Taranto and published inaccurate and hilarious letters from “scientists” denouncing climate change.

Strangely and perhaps tellingly, given the frantic pace at which its Corner blog is otherwise updated, National Review did not offer a rebuttal to Welch’s op-ed until late Tuesday night. When it did so, it chose as its messenger not a contemporary of Buckley’s or a confederate familiar with the man’s legacy but a baby-faced online editor who looks hardly older than myself. It would have looked bad, I suppose, had an older or more distinguished figure inconveniently agreed with Welch’s diagnosis. Daniel Foster’s argument is weak and unpersuasive, positing that the GOP’s embrace of unsuccessful, extreme candidates like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock occurred prior to their controversial (and ostensibly election-losing) comments about rape. “After his rape stupidity and his subsequent cupidity in refusing to bow out, Akin was more or less cast out from polite Republican society,” Foster writes, ignoring the real question: If the “stupidity” of remarking on “legitimate rape” was enough to make Akin an outcast, why were his earlier, nearly identical (but less widely publicized) remarks not enough of an impetus? Akin’s record even at the time of his nomination placed him on the loony fringe. As a Missouri state legislator, he voted against a bill criminalizing spousal rape, explaining that allegations of marital rape might be used “in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband.” He blamed government involvement in student loans for giving America “the equivalent of stage three cancer of socialism,” opposed spending federal money on school lunches for students below the poverty line, and compared incumbent Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill to “one of those dogs” who goes to Washington to “fetch” and who became less “ladylike” after her 2006 campaign. In short, the remarks about “legitimate rape” were hardly Akin’s first offense. What further bound of propriety was National Review waiting for Akin to breach?

Foster tries to draw a distinction between the loony fringe of the John Birchers and the current Tea Party, but in many cases it is a distinction without a difference. The Birchers of yesterday are the Birthers of today, whether Foster admits it or not. He asks us to “remember why Buckley took action”:

In the late 1950s, the Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch, published a book claiming that the sitting president of the United States, a Republican, was a Communist agent. Other Birchers claimed that there were Red Chinese on the Mexican border prepping an invasion, or that the Council on Foreign Relations was actively plotting a U.S.-Soviet merger.

Did Foster miss the number of times the current “sitting president of the United States” has been smeared as a Communist? Does Sarah Palin, who just days ago stated without reservation that “Barack Obama is a socialist” and whom Republicans would have placed a heartbeat away from the presidency, count as  one of the “nuts [who] are and ought to be shouted down”? (The GOP and its enablers at Fox News seem to be doing a just fantastic job of shouting her down.) When Mitt Romney, the man at the top of the Republican ticket, stood onstage with Donald Trump, was he shouting down Trump’s birther contention that Obama’s “grandmother in Kenya said he was born in Kenya and she was there and witnessed the birth,” his support of “the great” Jack Welch’s labor report conspiracy theories, or his belief that energy-efficient light bulbs cause cancer? When the American Spectator, a publication for which erstwhile veep candidate Paul Ryan has written, publishes an article that uses the word “Marxist” to describe Obama no fewer than 12 times, where is Foster’s outrage? Where is it when Allen West, much praised in the pages of National Review, claims blithely that “there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party” and posits that Obama seeks to “enslave” blacks via the welfare state? West, it should be noted, lost his election this year. I guess Buckley’s supposed heirs at National Review really saw that one coming.

The name-callers, then, are hardly all “the fringy stuff” that Foster defines them as, unless he considers his own magazine’s contributors fringy. Thomas Sowell, whose syndicated column appears multiple times per week on the website, enthusiastically endorsed Dinesh D’Souza, the auteur who brought us 2016: Obama’s America, which purports to examine the president’s “anti-colonial” hostility toward American democracy. “Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s,” D’Souza writes in the accompanying book. “This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.” 2016  is a remarkable piece of conspiracy-laden agitprop, leading even right-wing stalwarts at the Weekly Standard and the American Conservative to describe it as “the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet written.” The Weekly Standard notes that D’Souza “always sees absence of evidence as evidence of something or other,” which comes pretty darn close to describing the Birch-era conviction that a lack of proof that Eisenhower was not a Communist agent was proof that he certainly could be. And don’t think that Sowell’s endorsement of D’Souza is his first foray into Crazyville. He bemoans the “un-American vision of Barack Obama” (really, why not Barack Hussein Obama?), asks, “Have you noticed how many of our enemies in other countries have been rooting for Obama?” and froths, “The America that has flourished for more than two centuries is being quietly but steadily dismantled by the Obama administration.”

Given that Welch does not press the point in his op-ed, it is perhaps expected that Foster likewise fails to address his magazine’s own complicity in enabling extremists. Ironically, on the same day the website ran Foster’s piece, it also published the transcript of a speech delivered at conference put on by the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale. Neal B. Freeman, a member of the program’s board of directors, heaped praise on Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels for his “common-sense conservatism . . . the crystallization of what Bill Buckley used to celebrate as ‘the politics of reality.’” Freeman commends – get this – Daniels’ moderation, favorably comparing the governor’s low-key efforts at labor reform to the pot-stirring, demonstration-provoking measures passed by Scott Walker in Wisconsin.

It is instructive to recall, when tempted to fight fire with fire, that the fire department itself uses water. Our speaker tonight, dousing the flames with anodyne rhetoric, signed legislation this year that makes Indiana the first right-to-work state since Oklahoma . . .

Yet Freeman’s remarks are printed, with a straight face, alongside Foster’s defense of Tea Party elements of the GOP that are farther to the right than even Scott Walker. And if NR thinks it so laudable to douse the flames, why did it publish, on the same day, a column by professional fire-starter Michelle Malkin, whose illustrious past includes defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, raving against “rabid feminists,” and sliming Michelle Obama as the “Bitter Half” and the “First Crony.” Hypocrisy, thy name is Rich Lowry.

It’s easy to see why someone on the NR payroll lacks for self-reflection, but Welch’s choice to give the magazine a pass is truly puzzling, especially considering the existence of a nearly contemporaneous example of NR lending credence to the loony fringe. Welch could hardly have been unaware of the attempt, in the weeks preceding publication of his op-ed, by United Nations conspiracy theorists and far-right religious fundamentalists to sink ratification of a UN treaty protecting the rights of people with disabilities. When even Bob Dole and John McCain, the Benghazi conspiracy theorist in-chief, support ratification, you know the 38 Republicans voting “no” represent the worst the party has to offer. Representative of these 38 votes was Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who gathered signatures for a letter that, as Quartz reports, held that “the treaty threatened US sovereignty and could force the parents of disabled children to send them to public schools. It drew the support of home-schoolers who also fretted that the treaty was, among other things, a sly way to force America to adopt laws enshrining ‘abortion rights, homosexual rights, and demands the complete disarmament of all people.’”

Based on the United States’ own Americans with Disabilities Act, the treaty would have done nothing of the sort, and would have had no power to alter American laws. But facts are never an issue for folks like Rick Santorum – and apparently they matter little at NRO as well, as Betsy Woodruff penned a piece for the website urging a “no” vote and arguing that the treaty could “potentially undermine American sovereignty.” The article is lousy with quotes from Lee, and makes the irrelevant and jingoistic case that the quadrennial status reports required by the treaty would be “self-abasing for the U.S.”

A report in Roll Call highlights just how far the GOP has fallen:

One by one, Senators of both parties approached [Dole], with former colleagues gently resting their hands on his shoulder or reaching out to his left hand. … Then, one by one, after Dole was wheeled off the floor, most Republicans voted against the measure. Many members did not register their “nay” votes verbally, instead whispering their opposition directly to the clerk or gesturing their hands from their chairs.

Classy.

Welch should have held up National Review pieces such as Woodruff’s as evidence of the magazine’s utter failure to police Buckley’s dictum to support the “most conservative candidate who is electable.” Richard Mourdock was not electable. Wendy Long was not electable. Neither, once Floridians had gotten a taste of his extremism, was Allen West. If other Republicans continue to buy into conspiracy theories about blue-hatted takeovers of everything from golf courses to home school curriculum, they may find themselves unelectable as well. (Or at least we can hope.)

Welch wants to “identify those who can bring adult supervision back to the party,” a category that obviously includes no one at Buckley’s old rag. He notes that Buckley “saw the danger the Birchers posed to the party, and in 1962 he wrote a devastating essay in National Review that condemned them.” National Review would no sooner publish a comparable essay today than it would endorse Barack Obama for president. If he truly wants to steer the GOP back to a course of sanity, he should ask why.

OWS Is Not The Tea Party (And That’s Not a Good Thing)

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson writes today that Democrats should show caution in embracing the Occupy Wall Street movement. Liberals tend to equate tent cities and picket lines with idealism, he says, but “[m]any others, however, define idealism as something different from squatting in a park — as voting, walking precincts, volunteering in the community, supporting good causes and persuading their neighbors. These citizens may even share the discontents of Occupy Wall Street while rejecting its methods and culture.” At Slate, Anne Applebaum expresses roughly the same sentiment when she writes that the Occupiers have much in common with the indignados of Spain and the mobs in Greece:

In New York, marchers chanted, “This is what democracy looks like,” but, actually, this isn’t what democracy looks like. This is what freedom of speech looks like. Democracy looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, rules, laws, a judiciary, and many unglamorous, time-consuming activities, none of which are nearly as much fun as camping out in front of St. Paul’s cathedral or chanting slogans on the Rue St. Martin in Paris.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the Wall Street protests (and I have to say I disagree), it doesn’t take a genius to recognize the danger in what Applebaum calls the “refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions.” The Occupiers claim that both parties are equally corrupt, that there are few differences between Republicans and Democrats. (To this, I would ask which party ran Elizabeth Warren out of Washington, or which party is trying to gut Dodd-Frank.)

In its avoidance of the establishment, Occupy Wall Street has thus far been content to (sort of) influence the national dialogue. If it really aspires to change political and economic reality, it will not only have to engage in the grubby work of setting goals and outlining demands but begin to work the more traditional levers of power. The Tea Party, to which Occupy Wall Street is often compared, made the transition from populist uprising to D.C. gamc-changer by co-opting the Republican Party. GOP insiders like Karl Rove dismissed the movement until the Tea Party marshaled its resources to defeat Republican incumbents viewed as insufficiently conservative. Three-term Utah Senator Bob Bennett laughed off his Tea Party challenger but went down in the primary, and sitting senators from John McCain to Olympia Snowe have moved rightward in an attempt to ward off similar challenges.

The Tea Party is powerful because it gets results. The no-compromise stance of the House freshmen forced John Boehner to reject President Obama’s last-minute offer of a “Grand Bargain” on the debt ceiling, and brought the country to the brink of default. Republicans ignore the Tea Party at their own peril, but there is currently little at stake for politicians who don’t follow #OWS on Twitter. As long as the protesters disdain electoral politics, New York Senator Charles Schumer, one of the biggest beneficiaries of financial-sector largesse, will not have to worry about Occupy Wall Street endorsing a more liberal alternative. Without playing the political game, there are limits to what the protesters can achieve. That might be OK with them; there’s little indication that the masses in Zucotti Park are interested in working within the system or developing a legislative agenda. After all, writing laws and devising bank regulations requires compromise, something that the so-called “99%” haven’t thus far encouraged. When the signs held aloft bear slogans like “Nationalize the Fed!” one has to wonder whether the protesters even know what Ben Bernanke does, or what percentage of the “bailed out” banks have paid back their tax-dollar lifelines.

This not to say that the movement will never develop political pull, but at the moment it is actually deliberately rejecting such involvement — which is fine, if it doesn’t aspire to be anything more than a street protest. The Occupiers say that the system is broken, that it no longer responds to the voices of average people, but the Tea Party — for better or worse — is living proof that the political establishment can be bent to popular will. Liberals argue that the Tea Party is bankrolled by the Koch Brothers, who have never had a problem getting the attention of the Powers That Be, but the fact remains that there are a lot of Americans who sincerely believe that Obama has put the country on the road to socialist ruin. These are the people whose voices are currently being heard in Washington. Occupy Wall Street can make its voice heard as well, but only if it climbs off its high horse and admits that the system is not so much broken as as designed to cater to those who manipulate it best. Right now, budget-cutting conservatives are winning. For liberals to have a fighting chance, they have to at least be willing to play the game.

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.

Huntsman Shoots Self in Foot, Campaigns on Crutches

Huntsman at the Aug. 11 Iowa debate (photo via politifact.com)

The Times reports today that the EPA has become the favorite punching-bag of the Republican presidential field. This is not exactly news, considering raising questions about theories as basic as evolution is par for the course among conservatives, but what is unusual is the degree to which supposedly “moderate” candidates are beginning to echo hard-liners like Rick Perry, who said Wednesday that climate change “has not been proven and from my perspective is more and more being put into question.” John M. Broder of the Times writes that Jon Huntsman “thinks most new environmental regulations should be shelved until the economy improves.” Huntsman, doing the Romney two-step away from his previous conservation-minded incarnation as governor of Utah, is increasingly adopting the rhetoric of the right.

Given that Michelle Bachmann just won the Iowa Straw Poll, with fellow extremist Ron Paul not far behind, it may come as no surprise that the entire Republican field – and, to be honest, the political spectrum in general – has shifted to the right. But Huntsman puzzles me. It’s clear he can never win the nomination, as he’s basically an apostate as far as the Tea Party is concerned, yet he tacks to the right and abandons whatever environmental credentials he may have in order to appeal to the GOP. Any number of clichés apply here: cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, penny-wise but pound-poor. Huntsman has inserted himself into a lose-lose situation that trades a potential political future for a doomed political present. In spite of his efforts to woo the conservative wing of his party, he retains enough integrity not to bend on the issues on which evangelicals and deficit hawks demand orthodoxy. In his first debate, Huntsman reiterated his support for civil unions, a stance which will not poll well among Michele Bachmann’s home-schooling, evolution-denying enthusiasts. Though he toed the radical party line by joining his fellow debaters in rejecting a hypothetical budget deal that would favor spending cuts over increased revenues by a 10-to-1 ratio, he was the lone candidate to endorse, albeit grudgingly, the agreement to raise the debt ceiling. With positions like these, Huntsman is kidding himself if he thinks there’s the slightest chance that he’ll be facing President Obama in 2012.

Even if he did tack dramatically to the right, a la Mitt Romney, he would be dogged by the same accusations of flip-flopping inconsistency that have haunted the former governor of Massachussetts. As governors, neither man had the luxury of burnishing their conservative credentials by, say, lodging protest votes against raising the debt ceiling while simultaneously relying on more moderate members of their party to avoid national default (I’m talking to you, Michelle Bachmann). Guided by the realpolitik necessary to run an entire state, Huntsman talked up conservation and Romney committed the inexpungible sin of instituting a universal health care system that Republicans view as the precursor to “ObamaCare.” Neither Romney nor Huntsman can tout the sort of neoconservative gubernatorial record that Rick Perry of Texas, who attributes his state’s housing- and oil-fueled boom to his pro-business, small-government leadership, can brag about. (Texas, it should be mentioned, has the highest percentage of uninsured children in the U.S. You’d think Massachussetts would make an edifying comparison, but there’s that RomneyCare albatross again.)

At any rate, though Huntsman is trying valiantly to convince the unconvincible that he wouldn’t be the presidential equivalent of former Supreme Court Justice David Souter, the message doesn’t seem to be taking. Not only is he no closer to being nominated, but he has also diminished himself in the eyes of moderates and common-sense conservatives who might otherwise regard him as the sort of rational, cool-headed Republican that this country is sorely lacking. Huntsman might have made a good candidate in 2008, when his polished reserve would have worked as an interesting parallel to Obama’s own scholarly attitude, but 2012 is not 2008 – or 2010, for that matter. In the two years following Obama’s election, the rise of the Tea Party has radically altered the face of the Republican party. It isn’t just that there are more Congresspeople eager to shrink government until Grover Norquist can drag it into the infamous bathtub; it’s that, to paraphrase the famous Time headline, “we are all Tea Partiers now.” Even formerly sober fiscal conservatives have been obliged to nod robotically as Paul Ryan calls for the end of Medicare. John Boehner walked away from a “grand bargain” that would have reduced the deficit by $4 trillion over ten years because he could not ask House Republicans to raise taxes by a red cent. There is simply no place in the GOP of day for a candidate like Jon Huntsman.

That brings me to the question of why Huntsman has chosen to run in 2012 at all. When Obama appointed Huntsman ambassador to China, the new president assumed he had taken a potential opponent out of the running. It’s too soon, however, to know if Obama’s assumption was wrong. Huntsman’s return to politics is shadowed by his service to a Democratic president, and while his conviction that “if I’m asked by my President to serve, I’ll stand up and do it,” is admirable, the fact remains that, in the eyes of Republican caucus-goers, he is still yoked to the big-government, socialist-conspiracy policies of the Obama administration. Why run now, when the ink is barely dry on Huntsman’s last government paycheck? The wiser tactic would be to preserve his bipartisan bona fides, wait out the Tea Party mania, and hope the atmosphere in 2016 is less nutty. Huntsman is intelligent and electable, but perhaps not in the current environment. To do backflips to win over the right wing of the GOP is extremely short-sighted. Second acts are possible – again, see Mitt Romney – but not common. Huntsman may not get another whack at the nomination, especially if he turns in an embarrassingly dismal performance in this round. Romney is indeed making his second push for the nomination, but he was not blown out of the water by John McCain in 2008. It was briefly conceivable, after a couple early victories, that Romney would emerge as the Republican pick. His status as 2012’s putative front-runner relies on the fact that he made a strong showing four years ago. Huntsman, who is polling in the single-digits and who struggled to distinguish himself amid the Pawlenty-Bachmann and Paul-Santorum brawls of the first debate, may not come out of this election cycle with such solid credentials. My (unsolicited) advice to Huntsman: get out, stay out, and find a way to keep your face in the public eye until 2016. It’s possible that Huntsman is worried that four years is a long time for a governor without star status to be out of the spotlight, and that concern is legitimate. Scott Walker, the Wisconsin union-buster, and Chris Christie, who enjoys lobbing bombs at New Jersey teachers, may have enough of a national reputation to make a comeback after a couple years in the wilderness, but it’s not clear that Jon Huntsman will leave a similar impression. He may feel that 2012 is the only chance he’ll get. Politics, however, is more than the presidency; serving on one of the myriad commissions or panels that breed like rabbits in Washington would be one way to stay relevant. If he returned to Huntsman Corp, he could be an outspoken advocate for free trade, or fashion himself as a private-sector emissary to the government in the mold of Jeffrey Immelt or Henry Paulson. When Warren Buffett and George Soros opine on the economy, their remarks make the news, and while Huntsman is not exactly on Buffett’s level, he could present himself as a critic and potential reformer of the White House’s economic policies.

Even in a calmer election cycle, one in which candidates aren’t threatening the head of the Federal Reserve with bodily harm (Rick Perry) or promising to padlock the doors of the EPA (Michelle Bachmann), Huntsman would not be the perfect candidate. His coolness can translate as condescension, and after Obama, aloofness may be the last quality Americans are looking for in a president. There is also, of course, the Mormon “problem,” which, depending on the success of Mitt Romney, may or may not be an actual problem for the evangelicals and other conservative Christians that make up the Republican base. But Huntsman is a worthy – and sane – enough candidate that it is disheartening to watch him squander his political future for a couple minutes on stage with Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul. The 2016 has the potential to be Huntsman’s sweet spot, but with the decisions he’s making in 2012, we may never get the chance to find out.