The Huntsman Candidacy

[Peter Chattaway]

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/the-huntsman-candidacy/

by Ross Douthat
June 22, 2011, 2:13 pm

Can a moderate Republican win the G.O.P. nomination? That’s the question everyone’s asking with regard to Jon Huntsman, who formally announced his candidacy yesterday, and the answer is a resounding yes. From George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole through George W. Bush and John McCain, the modern-day Republican Party has a long tradition of picking nominees whose records and positions place them to the left of True Conservatism, at least as defined by movement institutions, talk radio and the like. Even in the age of the Tea Party, there’s reason to imagine this pattern persisting: Many Republican primary voters hold heterodox positions (for instance, on tax increases on the rich) relative to the official conservative line, several of the crucial early primaries allow independents to cross over and vote, and in races against incumbent presidents there’s a high premium on electability. It’s certainly possible for a Republican to be too liberal for the primary electorate, and often a moderate candidate has to flip-flop on a key issue (or six) to appease the party’s interest groups. But the historical record suggests that there’s more room between Rush Limbaugh and the center than many commentators (and politicians) seem to think.

But note that most of the winning moderates I just listed came into their races as frontrunners, with massive establishment support. Huntsman doesn’t have that kind of frontrunner status, which means that the real question for his candidacy is slightly different: Not whether a moderate Republican can win, but whether a moderate can win as an insurgent. This is a trickier case, but here too there’s a model: The McCain campaign in 2008, which crashed and burned early and then turned into a come-from-behind affair, in which a man the base mistrusted on almost every issue nonetheless emerged victorious at the end of a long drawn-out slugfest. And sure enough, Huntsman seems to be following the McCain ‘08 playbook, hoping to upset Mitt Romney in New Hampshire, eke out a win in South Carolina, and then ride the momentum from those wins all the way to the nomination.

But there’s a further wrinkle, which is that the Mitt Romney of 2012 has a very different profile than the Romney of 2008. In ‘08, Romney labored — with some success — to brand himself as Mr. Conservative, and woo movement voices and institutions to his banner. After “Obamneycare,” though, that path to the nomination has been closed, and this time around Romney seems to be running a campaign premised on competence rather than ideology, positioning himself as the heir to George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, and all the other moderate Republicans who held off populist challengers on their way to the convention. In other words, Huntsman doesn’t just have to thread the moderate-as-insurgent needle, he has to do it against a moderate frontrunner whose profile — competence, business experience, Mormonism — is remarkably similar to his own. If Romney were still the candidate of talk radio and Jim DeMint, Huntsman might be able to outflank him in states like New Hampshire by positioning himself as the more electable and more independent-minded candidate. But as it stands, it isn’t clear how a rich handsome well-coiffed Mormon RINO distinguishes himself from the more famous, better-funded rich handsome well-coiffed Mormon RINO who’s currently leading in the polls. (Maybe his anti-interventionist positioning will do the trick, but in a domestic-oriented campaign season, that seems somewhat unlikely …)

This may explain why the former Utah governor has spent the last few weeks staking out unexpectedly (and somewhat implausibly) right-wing positions on economic issues, explicitly endorsing the Ryan budget and (alas!) embracing the balanced-budget amendment boondoggle. He’s trying to get to Romney’s right, because that’s the only place he sees real domestic-policy running room. But while that running room exists, it’s by no means clear that Huntsman of all people is the right guy to make that move work — especially since he risks alienating his natural constituency in the process. And if the question the Huntsman campaign is testing is “can a moderate Republican win the nomination by rebranding himself as the ‘true conservative’ insurgent in a race against a moderate frontrunner,” I suspect that the answer is no.