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Huntsman and Conservative Media

Conor Friedersdorf identifies conservative media outlets as important factors in the demise of Huntsman’s campaign: As much as I agree with Larison that Huntsman miscalculated repeatedly in his campaign, I cannot separate the strategy he pursued from the media environment on the right, for if cable news and talk radio lavish attention on fiery Palins […]

Conor Friedersdorf identifies conservative media outlets as important factors in the demise of Huntsman’s campaign:

As much as I agree with Larison that Huntsman miscalculated repeatedly in his campaign, I cannot separate the strategy he pursued from the media environment on the right, for if cable news and talk radio lavish attention on fiery Palins and Bachmanns, if Republican voters respond to the red meat speeches of Perry, if Cain explicitly and proudly touting his own ignorance wasn’t enough to end the fawning treatment he got from Greta Van Susteren, if Rush Limbaugh was going to praise Newt Gingrich despite his myriad transgressions against conservative orthodoxy because he knew how to zing liberals, isn’t it in many ways understandable for Huntsman to say to himself, “Neither my personality nor my temperament nor my time in the Obama Administration enables me to outdo these people at their own game, so I’m going to model my run on the last guy who had success despite not winning the talk-radio primary”?

There is something to this. As Michael’s TAC profile explained, Huntsman’s temperament is diplomatic rather than combative, and that created the (false) impression that he was more politically moderate than he was. A diplomatic temperament doesn’t generate excitement or anger, so it’s not very useful for talk radio. I continue to find it amazing that the far more liberal Chris Christie is treated with fawning admiration by the same people who automatically reject Huntsman simply because he gets angry and yells at the “right” kinds of people. It’s probably true that Huntsman would not have won over talk radio and other conservative media outlets had he refrained from appearing to needle his own side.

So Conor has a point that the nature of conservative media today influenced Huntsman’s choices, and it also shaped the way he was perceived by conservatives, but the fact that he felt compelled to choose the McCain route tells us that he faced a number of obstacles, perhaps even more than McCain faced when he ran the first time. McCain had his well-known POW experience, roughly two decades in Congress, and the unusual status as the man in Barry Goldwater’s seat in Arizona behind him when he launched his challenge against Bush. Outside Utah, Huntsman was known to political junkies and people interested in foreign policy, and to very few others. Huntsman had a mostly conservative record, so he probably assumed that he already had credibility with conservatives, but most conservatives didn’t hear about this record until long after they had formed their first opinions of him, and by that time it was too late.

Jonathan Bernstein questions Conor’s interpretation:

But when it comes to Jon Huntsman, it’s pretty clear to me at least that Fox News and the rest of them were perfectly in accord with the rest of the party. After all, Huntsman exits the campaign after earning practically no high-visibility endorsements from party actors (I think he managed a few minor ones in New Hampshire, but that’s about it). Nor do I expect that he raised a lot of money from the party network.

Don’t forget about Tom Ridge! When Ridge endorsed Huntsman, I felt sure that the latter’s cause was doomed. An endorsement from Ridge gives almost everyone on the right something to dislike. He was the first DHS Secretary, where he presided over an enormous, consolidated bureaucracy that should never have been created, and spent years harassing the American public with ridiculous color-coded alerts. Ridge was famously pro-choice and politically moderate, so his endorsement was as close to the kiss of death as a Republican candidate could receive since Arlen Specter left the party. He had the unfortunate distinction of being one of the more prominent American advocates for de-listing the MEK, which doesn’t say much for his judgment or that of Huntsman as it relates to Iran. The Ridge endorsement and the Huntsman campaign’s touting of it represented the campaign’s problems in microcosm. More to the point, the fact that Huntsman had no other endorsements from nationally-known Republicans apart from Ridge was a sign that there was no interest in what Huntsman was offering.

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