Some Presidential campaigns make some kind of intuitive sense; others do not. Rick Perry’s run for the Republican nomination this year fell into that former category, Jon Huntsman’s into the latter. Now each has lost their pomp and is one with Ninevah and Tyre. It turns out that, whatever the basis for your campaign, running for the presidency is hard. Perry and Huntsman met identical fates (abject failure) but their respective journeys to the bottom of the polls remain instructive.
Nothing hurt Perry’s prospects more than his decision to enter the race. Until that point evertything was going rather well. Perry appeared the candidate not named Mitt Romney most likely to stop Mitt Romney. Oops. As Ben Smith says:
Perry had evidently never thought much about running for president, and he wasn’t nimble enough to fake it. He was widely labeled a dummy, but this isn’t quite right: Politics isn’t rocket science, but it does require doing your homework. Perry could have spent a couple of years as Barack Obama did: Using his elected office to conduct rolling seminars with policy experts; developing a years-long plan for national office; carefully picking the national issues with which to engage.
Quite so. Perry entered the race late and unprepared. His campaign was opportunistic, not based on any real substance. It was a response to the evident weakness of the Republican field. There was a hole in the race that could be filled by a Perry-style conservative and, this being the case, it might as well be filled by Rick Perry himself. It made sense: a governor from a large state with a credible track record (especially on jobs) whose conservative credentials were, more or less, intact was, on paper, a top-tier candidate. That he had access to piles to cash didn’t hurt either.Instead, Perry got into the race on what amounts to a lark. He leaves it badly damaged, limping home to Texas where he’ll struggle to regain the clout and swagger he projected six months ago.
Like football, of course, politics ain’t played on paper. Perry’s campaign was a Potemkin construction, fabricated by consultants and pundits. The candidate’s heart never really seemed to be in it. You can’t coast to the nomination, especially when you’re a late entrant. In retrospect, Perry never appeared comfortable in the race; he certainly never looked as though he was enjoying it. Texas is a big place but it’s still much smaller than the national stage.
If Perry’s campaign was a response to theory, Jon Huntsman’s never made any kind of sense at all. He too appeared to be running a consultants’ campaign; unfortunately it was based on theories that are quaintly old-fashioned. Hiring John Weaver, best known for his work with John McCain, was where it began to go wrong. Like McCain in 2000, Huntsman appeared to think that being the elite media’s favourite could help him; in fact their support damaged his campaign.
It is hard to think of a less propitious venue for your campaign debut than the pages of Men’s Vogue. Bafflingly, this was the forum for the first major Huntsman profile. The Republican party – at least those parts of it likely to take part in the primaries – is more of a cultural than a political beast. Huntsman’s campaign was spent telling conservatives how stupid they are.
“Call me crazy” he tweeted when he said he believed in evolution and man-made global warming. Well, yes, he was crazy. You don’t often win votes by insulting the people whose votes you seek. This, however, was Huntsman’s crazy approach. Throughout it all, his campaign gave the impression of thinking the candidate was too good for the people whose support it needed.
Moreover, there was the China problem. Given that a good part of the conservative movement considers Barack Obama a barely-legitimate and certainly dangerous president it was always implausible to suppose it would look favourably upon a candidate whose previous job was working for the Obama administration. Huntsman asked people to believe Obama was good enough to work for but not good enough to vote for. This too never made any sense. His actual views on policy were secondary, even irrelevant, when this prevented him from getting through to voters in the first place.
Mitt Romney has been running for President for five years and it shows. He is hardly anyone’s idea of a perfect candidate but he’s done his homework and he’s appreciated the need to appeal the conservative movement’s cultural resentment. He seems just about plausible enough. This may not be enough to prevail in a general election but that’s a different matter.
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