The game is the game, you know? And one of the rules of the Presidential Primary Game (Press Edition) is that there’s more space to be filled than there are sensible things with which to fill it. (This, plainly, is a problem exacerbated by the intertubes.) This being so, ’tis the season for the traditional game of “Taking a Second Look at People Who Won’t Win The Republican Presidential Nomination”.
Exhibit A, courtesy of Ryan Lizza, this Eric Erickson piece at RedState reconsidering Huntsman. Exhibit B, this is picked up by the smart lads at Business Insider. One more flurry of Huntsmania and we’ll have a bona fide media trend. And, like most such trends, it will be bogus but fun.
We’ve been here before and there’s nothing wrong with that. Way back in 2004, desperate for something vaguely fresh to say, plenty of otherwise sensible folk allowed themselves to write nonsense about the second coming of Joe Lieberman. That was never supposed to be taken seriously for the excellent reason that it was always a preposterous notion. But it filled space and allowed for the sucking of fresh thumbs. The same can be said for this revival of interest in Jon Huntsman.This ain’t nothing, but nor is it more substantial than a hill of beans.
None of this has much to do with Huntsman’s qualities. They, though scarcely trivial, are not really part of the game. Instead it’s just another sign, of the type seen every four years, that everyone is running out of stuff to say and so returning to genre classics. There’s nothing wrong with that and it’s all good, clean fun. But Jon Huntsman, second look or not, is no more going to be the Republican nominee than Donald Trump or Herman Cain and there’s not much, at this stage, he can do to change that.
Indeed, aside from helping out bored pundits, the main reason to talk about Huntsman is to use him as a means of expressing dissatisfaction with Mitt Romney. That’s Mitt’s problem but it’s not actually anything that benefits Huntsman very much. He’s just the proxy for it and a guy performing a minor but useful role for the punditocracy.
PS: Unlike most people, I have met an actual Huntsman supporter. In Manchester, to boot! Granted, this was Manchester, Lancashire not Manchester, New Hampshire and said supporter was an Englishman not an American but, hey, you can’t have everything and this must be just about and almost better than nothing.
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