James Poulos thinks he has identified the reason why Huntsman’s campaign has gone nowhere:

Look at Huntsman mastermind John Weaver, best known for his time atop Campaign McCain. His contempt for the conservative establishment falls like poison rain from nearly every remark he offers the (salivating) press. “It’s a fork in the road between seriousness and circus,” he told Dana Milbank last month.

Really? If so, Huntsman would be better off not running at all. Not only is it impossible to purge politics of its silliness. It’s unseemly to portray oneself, Obama-style, as the only adult in the room. The politicization of the culture war is a two-way street. What does it say about an essentially mainstream conservative like Huntsman that he entrusts his brand and his electoral fortunes to a man who wants him to run against his own appeal to the Republican base broadly understood?

The plan to copy the McCain 2000 campaign has never made much sense to me, but this is really more of a symptom than a cause of Huntsman’s electoral woes. Had Huntsman surrounded himself with an entirely different staff and run an entirely different campaign, it is doubtful that he would be doing much better. Huntsman started receiving favorable national coverage in early 2009 when he made a point of distancing himself from the preposterous Republican leadership in Washington. At the same time that he was ridiculing them as hopeless, which they really were, they were capitalizing on popular discontent with the administration that Huntsman soon decided to align himself with when he accepted the post in Beijing. When the rest of the party was embracing reflexive opposition to Obama as the key to political success, Huntsman was serving in the Obama administration, and nothing he did after he got back from China was going to bridge that gap. He also bet heavily on the belief that the party’s mood was going to change dramatically in a way that would reward the candidate of “seriousness,” and that clearly didn’t happen. The Weaver-led, McCain-style campaign is just a continuation of this basic misreading of the party’s direction over the last few years.

Michael has done his best in his original TAC profile of Huntsman and his latest article to present the former governor and ambassador’s conservative record, and he has a solid argument on the merits. Unfortunately, Huntsman wasn’t all that well-known nationally, and for the most part he has been introduced to the primary electorate as the Republican who has received the most glowing profiles from Washington-based media outlets and “centrist” and left-leaning journalists. If most Republicans know much about him, they know that he was appointed ambassador by Obama, and they probably know that he tacked to the left on a few issues despite being an overwhelmingly popular governor in an overwhelmingly Republican state. Many conservatives would say that it is bad enough when Republicans in “purple” and “blue” states do this, but at least one can understand that it might have been politically expedient, but to do it in Utah seems inexplicable.