Jon Huntsman - A Respectable Reasonable Republican?

Since the Democrats came into having possession of both houses of Congress and the presidency in 2008, the country has dive-bombed to the right. While under George W. Bush's leadership, Democrats were left frustrated by both his domestic agenda and his foreign policy, many would most likely now prefer him to many of the Republicans on display in the primary. One exception to this rule might be Jon Huntsman.

While the rest of the Republican party has bolted straight for the right in a quixotic quest for purity of ideology, Huntsman has remained moderate and civil, a stance that Dana Milibank of the Washington Post suggests will doom him to failure. Milibank may be right, but being doomed to failure in this Republican field may leave Huntsman looking positively peachy for 2016.

Huntsman rejects the premise (expressed by many of the candidates at the Republican debate in New Hampshire) that Obama is an American-hating Europhile. Huntsman refuses to support Tea Party candidates just because they win Republican nominations. His family contributed substantial amounts of money to Harry Reid's campaign in Nevada. And he believes in civil unions for homosexual couples as well as human-caused global warming. Add that up and, as Elspeth Reeve of the Atlantic rightly points out, Huntsman is an absolutely anti-Tea Party candidate.

But when the country comes back to its more moderate senses, which is already beginning to happen as negative attitudes towards the Tea Party increase, Huntsman may be the man to restore some semblance of credibility to the Republican party. While most of the party has decided to embrace its right-wing induced LSD trip to the fanatical, Huntsman has managed to avoid the mess by being a continent away as Obama's ambassador to China. And with the Democratic field not looking particularly strong for 2016, Huntsman may well have a chance at the general election.

Of course, he could get excoriated by the crazed right-wing candidates now to the extent that his political career is over. Or his campaign could be such a disaster (misspelling his own name and the state for the press release about his candidacy) that he can't run again in 2016, but if neither of those things happens, Democrats should be concerned because he could be a quite viable candidate for five years down the road.

Well, actually, Democrats should only really be concerned if they are Democrats of the pre-Obama era, when Democrats stood for liberalism, for increasing the social safety net, for higher taxes on the wealthy, and were against hawkish military intervention abroad. But if we're talking about new-fangled Democrats of the Obama variety, they might not have anything to worry about at all. In fact, they just might vote for Huntsman.