{"id":10812,"date":"2011-08-08T18:46:41","date_gmt":"2011-08-08T22:46:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=10812"},"modified":"2011-08-08T18:46:41","modified_gmt":"2011-08-08T22:46:41","slug":"huntsman-charting-mccain-path-without-the-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/10812\/huntsman-charting-mccain-path-without-the-record\/","title":{"rendered":"Huntsman Charting McCain Path Without the Record"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Washington Examiner<\/em><\/a> reports that GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is trying to retrace the steps Senator John McCain (R-AZ) took to the 2008 nomination.\u00a0 Citing his moderate stances on just about everything, Huntsman and his advisors (many former McCain hands) avoiding the conservative-dominated Iowa caucuses and hoping for \u201ca good showing\u201d in the New Hampshire primary.\u00a0 Thereafter Huntsman hopes to win the South Carolina and Florida primaries with a pure economic message.<\/p>\n

What a riot.\u00a0 McCain was the undisputed national security candidate last time around, and was able to paper over many of his moderate-to-liberal heresies with a compelling military background.\u00a0 By contrast, Huntsman has been a well-connected ambassador to the Far East (China and Singapore), and has never served in uniform, let alone suffered torture.\u00a0 Moreover, McCain won the New Hampshire primary by 6 percentage points over Romney.\u00a0 Alternatively, Huntsman wants a \u201cgood showing\u201d?\u00a0 Hopefully, that\u2019s more than the 1.8 percent he\u2019s polling nationally<\/a>, or else he won\u2019t make it to South Carolina.<\/p>\n

The truth about the Huntsman campaign is that it features a candidate in search of a constituency.\u00a0 Anyone in the Republican Party who is repelled by the Tea Party and trusts Wall Street more than Main Street is already voting for Mitt Romney.\u00a0 Huntsman is a slightly different version of the same formula.<\/p>\n

If history is any guide, the GOP tends to give the presidential nomination to the next guy in line.\u00a0 In 2008 it was John McCain.\u00a0 In 2012, it will be Mitt Romney.\u00a0 Only a big name with big money like Texas Governor Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann seems poised to spoil the party.\u00a0 Refusing to campaign to an entire wing of the Republican base by skipping the Iowa caucuses isn\u2019t at bottom a campaign strategy \u2013 it\u2019s an acknowledgement that Jon Huntsman is the answer to a presidential question no one is asking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Washington Examiner reports that GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is trying to retrace the steps Senator John McCain (R-AZ) took to the 2008 nomination.\u00a0 Citing his moderate stances on just about everything, Huntsman and his advisors (many former McCain hands) avoiding the conservative-dominated Iowa caucuses and hoping for \u201ca good showing\u201d in the New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[914,928,2725,721,2652,160,2705,1272],"class_list":["post-10812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-2012-presidential-election","tag-conservative","tag-iowa","tag-john-mccain","tag-jon-huntsman","tag-mitt-romney","tag-new-hampshire","tag-south-carolina"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10812"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10815,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10812\/revisions\/10815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}