Or maybe he wants to play spoiler against Romney? I wonder if there is some history between them, perhaps going back to the Olympics. Some enterprising journalists should start digging around. ~Steven Hayward

Hayward’s suspicions seem to be correct, but it doesn’t take much digging. Once the Huntsman 2012 talk started up again, I noticed this report in The Salt Lake City Tribune describing the bad blood between the Huntsmans and Romney over Romney’s selection to oversee the Salt Lake Games after the corruption scandal exploded. Paul Rolly described the start of the feud:

When Salt Lake City’s 2002 Winter Olympics bid committee was hit with an international bribery scandal while the city’s Winter Games preparations were still under way, committee head Tom Welch and his chief deputy Dave Johnson were dumped, so local community and government leaders needed a new honcho.

Romney, sired by Mormon royalty whose father George, the former Michigan governor, had been a presidential candidate, was chosen to right the ship. The Olympics were a great success and Romney used that experience to launch a successful bid for governor of Massachusetts and later a run for president in 2008.

But when Romney was selected, the Huntsman family publicly declared that he was part of a corrupt bargain.

Jon Huntsman Sr., the billionaire Utah philanthropist and father of the would-be presidential hopeful, publicly decried the pick at the time and said his son had been manipulated and deceived by the Utah king-makers, including then-Gov. Mike Leavitt.

Huntsman said the selection of Romney made it clear there was a deal between him and Leavitt from the beginning, but Jon Huntsman Jr., who already had impressive credentials as a former U.S. ambassador, had been asked to apply for the job just to give the appearance that there was an honest search.

Leavitt and the other leaders denied there was a secret deal with Romney, but the ice storm between the Huntsman and Romney camps was evident.

Rolly goes on to tell how Huntsman’s decision to back McCain soured the relationship again:

Later, when Romney was contemplating his 2008 presidential bid, Huntsman Jr. was a foreign affairs adviser to Romney. But when the Republican front-runners were set and the campaign began heating up, Huntsman, who had become the governor of Utah, was an early endorser of Romney foe John McCain, the senator from Arizona who eventually won the nomination.

Sources close to both camps told me at the time that Huntsman got an unfriendly call from his fellow Mormon Romney after he announced his endorsement of McCain, and was called an unprintable name.

I wouldn’t put it past McCain and his allies to do what they could to sabotage Romney. McCain seems to take an unusually intense personal dislike of his political competitors, and much of his modern political career has been the result of acting out one grudge or another, but he has normally directed his ire at the politicians who defeated him. The idea that he would be trying to undermine Romney with Huntsman is an entertaining story, but it doesn’t really make sense. Many of Huntsman’s would-be campaign advisors come from McCain’s camp, but they are simply gravitating to the candidate perceived as the most moderate in the field. I don’t see what Huntsman would get by running against Romney just to get back at him because of old rivalries. A Huntsman candidacy would work to Romney’s disadvantage, but Huntsman would have to have more of a reason to run than that.