Our political Quote of the Day comes from The New Republic’s Walter Shapiro, in a post that needs to be read in full. He asks whether Jon Huntsman will become the new Wesley Clark.
He writes:
While the pyrotechnics accompanying the presidential rollout were impressive (two dozen TV cameras chronicled a GOP candidate hovering at 1 percent in the national polls), Huntsman’s words themselves were flickering sparklers rather than skyrocketing Roman candles. …
…..The reason for dwelling on Huntsman’s anodyne rhetoric is because his presidential campaign remains curiously inchoate. I am perplexed whether there is more—or less—to Huntsman’s political persona than meets the eye.
It is tempting to see a mature moderation in Huntsman’s seeming reluctance to embrace tax cuts as the cure for all national ailments from crab grass to middle seats in coach. Despite an overt Reagan homage in his announcement speech, Huntsman limited himself to a single ambiguous line about the Republican Party’s transcendent cause: “We must make broad and bold changes to our tax code and regulatory policies.” But does this restraint really signal a centrist policy orientation or does it simply reflect that this former ambassador has not yet had the time to develop a tax-cut plan?
And at the end of his piece:
Political railbirds face an occupational hazard in over-analyzing Huntsman’s presidential prospects since a national poll by the Pew Research Center last month found that only 35 percent of GOP voters recognized his name. For all of his blue-chip fund-raising support, for all the eagerness of the press pack to anoint him as a top-tier contender, for all the nervousness in the Obama White House about his candidacy, Huntsman remains an unproven political commodity being rushed into the test markets of the primaries. The obvious parallel is not Henry Cabot Lodge, LBJ’s ambassador to Vietnam, who won the 1964 New Hampshire primary on a write-in vote. Rather it is Wesley Clark, who pole-vaulted into the 2004 Democratic race based on elite dissatisfaction with the other contenders and never found a way to offer voters more than his star-spangled resume.
AND:
As the only Republican in the race with serious foreign-policy experience (as opposed to, say, running the Winter Olympics), Huntsman has the potential to forge new ground in the slow-starting GOP ideas primary. As a personable contender who is likely to boast ample campaign cash even though he has said he will not self-fund, Huntsman will get his chance to be heard amid the GOP cacophony. But what will he say and how will it resonate with Republican audiences? Even as he becomes the latest surprise entry in the 2012 GOP field, Huntsman currently remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Now go to the link and read it in its entirety.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.