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Huntsman’s “Country First” Dodge

Michael Tomasky doesn’t accept Huntsman’s “country first” defense of his service in Beijing: Actually, I think Romney had an excellent point. Ambassador to China is a big job. It’s not ambassador to Barbados. It meant Huntsman really was working—and for the Obama administration, not “for America.” As a liberal voter, I’d be far less inclined […]

Michael Tomasky doesn’t accept Huntsman’s “country first” defense of his service in Beijing:

Actually, I think Romney had an excellent point. Ambassador to China is a big job. It’s not ambassador to Barbados. It meant Huntsman really was working—and for the Obama administration, not “for America.” As a liberal voter, I’d be far less inclined to support a Democratic candidate who’d taken a major job with a Republican administration. That’s not toxic partisanship. That’s having some basic political principles [bold mine-DL]. I always thought it very strange that Huntsman took the job. Obama—who I assume could have found a Mandarin-speaking Democrat if he’d really tried—clearly saw him as a potential threat for 2012 and was obviously trying to box him in. And it worked.

It’s refreshing to see someone else distinguish between patriotism and the bipartisanship fetish with which it is often confused. I always thought Huntsman’s acceptance of the appointment was easy to understand. This was a position that appealed to him personally for a number of reasons, and he was well-qualified for it. The administration’s political motivation in side-lining him was obvious and could not be missed. What never made sense was the idea that Huntsman could take the position and then turn around and seek the Republican nomination to run against the man who had appointed him.

Speaking of partisanship and putting “country first,” I recall an episode from one of the debates a few months ago when Huntsman attacked the administration’s handling of relations with China. In a debate filled with other inaccuracies, Huntsman’s misrepresentation of U.S.-Chinese relations was one of the more remarkable because he had been an active participant in cultivating the relationship. As Josh Rogin reported in August 2011:

Adding to the inaccuracy, Jon Huntsman called for more engagement with the Chinese government. “We need a strategic dialogue at the highest levels between the United States and China,” he said. “That’s not happening.”

As Obama’s former ambassador to China, Huntsman surely must know that there have already been two rounds of the “U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue,” which was initiated in 2009, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and included over 200 U.S. officials and a similar number of Chinese government representatives.

In fact, Huntsman even participated in the dialogue in Beijing in May 2010 and wrote a blog post about it, where he said that Clinton and Geithner “both told me they viewed the dialogue as a broad success. I couldn’t agree more.”

That’s not to mention that Obama and President Hu Jintao have met personally 9 times, Clinton meets with her counterpart Yang Jiechi on a regular basis, and Vice President Joe Biden will travel to Beijing next week to see Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping.

As misrepresentations of the record go, this is probably a fairly harmless one, but what it showed was that Huntsman was perfectly willing to indulge in partisan sniping aimed at the administration’s handling of the relationship with China to which he had contributed for two years. On the one hand, he wanted credit for his experience as ambassador, but he also wanted to use that experience to score fairly cheap partisan points to distance himself from the administration that gave him the job. Later when he was criticized because of his role as ambassador, he retreated behind McCain’s self-congratulatory slogan.

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