Thursday, February 26, 2009

Std-Ex Editorial: Huntsman Going National

Will Utah's most popular modern era "maverick" governor manage to wrangle his way into contention for the top US government executive spot four years hence?

For those readers who were startled by Governor Jon Huntman's most recent public pronouncements on the subject of GOP congressional leadership's growing "inconsequentiality," this morning's Standard-Examiner has a spot-on editorial on the same general topic:
Huntsman going national
A prospective 2012 Huntsman-Gingrich presidential ticket is mentioned.

Will Utah's most popular modern era "maverick" GOP governor manage to wrangle his way into contention for the top US government executive spot four years hence?

Intriguing political times we live in.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

When will the people of the U.S. figure out that the G.O.P. have always screwed over the American people, but yet they say that they are the moral people in this country.
It is because of their immoral judgment of the financial crisis that has so many to suffer.
So anyone that would like to stand with them in that idolatry go right ahead.

Anonymous said...

Rep. Hansen [D-Ogden] just had another bill clear committee. The SL Trib reports on it here. From the story:

A House panel Wednesday approved a bill that would create the Utah State Railroad Museum Authority, providing another vehicle for capturing tourism dollars for Weber and Box Elder counties. "This could be the impetus for increased tourism in northern Utah," said HB311 sponsor Neil Hansen, D-Ogden.

Jack McDonald, chairman of Ogden's Union Station Foundation board, spoke in support of the measure. "This will provide some chartering and ability to work with state agencies," McDonald said. "It also completes the link between the California, Nevada and Colorado state railroad museums...." HB311 now advances to the full House.


Nice work. Promoting tourism in Weber and adjacent counties in ways that have a good chance, given the approaching 150th anniversary of the driving of the golden spike, of succeeding.

Now, as for Huntsman going national: he may well be a good candidate for the Rs. He leans to the moderate wing of the Republican Party... i.e. leans in the direction in which most voters can be found. He has not changed his tune depending on which audience he addresses and which electorate he's appealing to, as Mitt Romney did switching from cultural liberal to cultural conservative when he stopped being governor of Massachusetts and started eying the White House. And so Huntsman does not carry Romney's burden of being an opportunistic wet-finger-in-the-air hypocrite, willing to trim his sails to every change in what he perceives to be the prevailing winds.

But Huntsman isn't going to be president, or a viable national candidate if he lashes himself to Newt Gingrich as a fount of the "new" ideas the nation and his party are looking for. Not to mention Newt's heavy baggage as a distinctly non-family values candidate. [How many times has he played around on his how many wives now? I've lost count.]

If what happened to the Republicans is that they sold out to the wingnut right and lost their appeal to the middle of the road voters, much as the Dems lost the center in the McGovern years, Huntsman could indeed be a wise choice and represent a way back for the GOP. But not if he saddles himself with Newt. That would make about as much sense as John McCain's announcing that Phil Gramm was his chief financial adviser and probable secretary of the treasury if he became president. If Huntsman hopes to be a viable national candidate, he' have to look in other places for new ideas, I'm afraid.

Whether he can do that and not alienate the mouth-breather right that just invited Joe the plumber, to DC to advise young conservatives on the economy and foreign affairs is doubtful. But to win, Huntsman will have to find some way to do that without lashing himself to the Rush Limpaw "I hope Obama fails!- global-warming-is-a-liberal-hoax" tinfoil hat right.

EX_NYCer said...

UTAH is the biggest problem that Huntsman will face, if he decides...ever...to run for national office.

To checkout what I mean, check out following threads on:

Kirby: Sorry Sen. Buttars, gay rights won't destroy us
http://www.tribtowns.com/comments/read_comments.asp?ref=11774334&PageIndex=49


Create Memorial to MILK
http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,705287395,00.html

YES, I know most of the wacky posters on the Milk Memorial thread. The letter writer is one of the regular TRIBposters group.

Happy reading. This laugh is on me.

Anonymous said...

Huntsman can save his time and his money trying to make a bid for the big office.

He will never make it since he carries the label of Mormonism.

Anonymous said...

Betcha:

I'm not so sure. Consider that the disastrous state of the nation after eight years of Bush/Republican mismanagement was sufficient that an African American was elected president. Many doubted that the nation would put an African American in the presidency at this point, but other circumstances [the sad state of the nation] overcame what might otherwise have been an insurmountable negative for many voters [Obama's race].

The same could happen to Huntsman. If the nation is in dire straits [I don't know that it will be, and hope that it won't. But for the sake of argument, let's presume that four years from now it is.], and Huntsman seems to voters to have solutions, that may overcome uneasiness about his LDS faith. Particularly if he maintains a reputation as a straight shooter, a man who's word can be counted on [as flip-flopper Romney did not]. If he does that, and gives assurances that he will not permit his LDS faith to interfere with his actions as President [the same assurances Kennedy gave], and voters think they can trust his assurances, he may well pull it off.

If the country is not in dire straits three years from now, or if Huntsman seems not to have answers if it is, or if he foolishly lets his reputation as a straight shooter whose word is good collapse [as John McCain allowed his "straight talk" reputation erode in the campaign] then Huntsman's LDS faith may indeed be a hill to steep for him to climb with the general electorate. We'll have to see.

Anonymous said...

frankly, i could never, frankly, stand the thought of a chickenhawk, frankly, who, frankly, sounds like kermit t. frog being a heartbeat away from, frankly, being the leader of the free world. frankly.

Frankly speaking, can you imagine the state of the union address if that were the case? Frankly?

Anonymous said...

Washington, D.C. – Congressman Jim Matheson said he disagrees with President Obama’s announcement today that called for a renewal of the assault weapons ban.

“This type of ban was in place from 1994 to 2004, and numerous studies showed that the ban had no effect on reducing use of guns in committing crimes, and no appreciable impact on reducing gun-related deaths and injuries,” said Matheson.

Matheson said this type of restrictive law doesn’t reduce firearms crime but it does interfere with the public’s right to bear arms.

Matheson is a member of a new task force on gun rights. He said the 10-member group—co-chaired by Dan Boren of Oklahoma and Paul Broun of Georgia—will monitor legislation regarding the Second Amendment during the upcoming Congress.

“It looks as though with this announcement we’ve been handed our first big fight,” said Matheson.

Anonymous said...

Jim Matheson:

And today, the NYTimes had a long article talking about how American gun shops along the border have become the major sources of weapons for the drug cartel wars in Mexico, which are now spreading across the boarder into AZ and NM and CA.

The story, headlined "US Is Arms Bazaar For Mexican Cartels" can be found here. From the story:

PHOENIX — The Mexican agents who moved in on a safe house full of drug dealers last May were not prepared for the fire power that greeted them. When the shooting was over, eight agents were dead. Among the guns the police recovered was an assault rifle traced back across the border to a dingy gun store here called X-Caliber Guns.

Now, the owner, George Iknadosian, will go on trial on charges he sold hundreds of weapons, mostly AK-47 rifles, to smugglers, knowing they would send them to a drug cartel in the western state of Sinaloa. The guns helped fuel the gang warfare in which more than 6,000 Mexicans died last year.....

The gun laws in the United States allow the sale of multiple military-style rifles to American citizens without reporting the sales to the government, and the Mexicans search relatively few cars and trucks going south across their border.

What is more, the sheer volume of licensed dealers — more than 6,600 along the border alone, many of them operating out of their houses — makes policing them a tall order. Currently the A.T.F. has about 200 agents assigned to the task.

Smugglers routinely enlist Americans with clean criminal records to buy two or three rifles at a time, often from different shops, then transport them across the border in cars and trucks, often secreting them in door panels or under the hood, law enforcement officials here say. Some of the smuggled weapons are also bought from private individuals at gun shows, and the law requires no notification of the authorities in those cases....

The authorities in the United States say they do not know how many firearms are transported across the border each year, in part because the federal government does not track gun sales and traces only weapons used in crimes. But A.T.F. officials estimate 90 percent of the weapons recovered in Mexico come from dealers north of the border.

Anonymous said...

Gingrich?

We thought it was Colin Powell?

Anonymous said...

"When will the people of the U.S. figure out that the G.O.P. have always screwed over the American people..."

You mean Republicans like Abraham Lincoln, who was the founder of the modern Republican Party?

Anonymous said...

Brent:

Abraham Lincoln was the first president elected by the Republican Party. He was not its founder. [Several men were involved in organizing the party, most prominent of which was William Seward of NY, widely known at the time as "Mr. Republican." The party ran its first presidential candidate, John Charles "The Pathefinder" Fremont in 1856. At the time, Lincoln was still a Whig.]

Nor did the Republican Party that nominated Lincoln resemble very much the, as you put it, "modern Republican Party."

Anonymous said...

Gingrich... Architect of the contract with America that dragged Clinton kicking and screaming to a balanced budget and other reforms. That was the high point of the Republican party and it's been downhill ever since. I for one would welcome seeing him in there. Especially if Obama's massive spending drives us further into disaster.

Anonymous said...

I ran across the following true history today. It is the real factual stuff you will never learn in one of those "Liberal" colleges like Weber that imports carpetbagger perfessors from the Flatlands to poison the minds of our impressionable mountain youth with their "Liberal" propaganda.

For those that don't know about history ... Here is a condensed version:

Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic
hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of
beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundations of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:

1. Liberals, and
2. Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented,
they just stayed close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement.

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live
off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly B-B-Q's and doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement.

Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as girlie-men. Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the
domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy, group hugs, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that conservatives provided.

Over the years conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass.

Modern liberals like imported beer (with lime added), but most prefer
white wine or imported bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare. Another interesting evolutionary side note: most of their women have higher testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers, personal injury
attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are
liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn't fair to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink domestic beer, mostly Bud. They eat red meat and
still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, athletes, members of the military, airline
pilots and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers
and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained in Europe when conservatives were coming to America. They crept in after the
Wild West was tamed and created a business of trying to get more for
nothing.

Now you know the rest of the story!

Anonymous said...

Oz:

Damn, Oz, I didn't know you were an honor's history graduate of Bob Jones University. Live and learn...

Anonymous said...

Mr. Curmudgeon

I resemble that remark!

I will have you know it was not Bob Jones U that I graduated from but Oral Roberts.

I also took post graduate studies with Tammy Fay Baker. Together they prepared me for a vigorous life of knowing everything that is really important to succeed in this wicked life full of liberals. Oh yes, I also learned gobs about the proper application of makeup.

Anything you want to know about the real world, just ask.

Post a Comment

© 2005 - 2014 Weber County Forum™ -- All Rights Reserved