Infighting

For the infighting to really become significant in a policy sense, you’d need some members of the House and Senate to try to put what Crist and Huntsman are talking about into practice. ~Yglesias

Yes and no. This brings us back to Huntsman’s point in his Washington Times interview, which is that the Congressional GOP is so completely irrelevant to developing and/or advancing a new policy agenda that it will be left to Republican governors to lead the party away from the abyss. If Huntsman intends to enter a future presidential race as a moderate reforming Western governor (where have we heard this before?), the Congressional GOP’s embrace of McCain’s losing campaign themes is ideal, because it keeps Congressional leaders from getting credit for ideas he has been working on and makes his agenda seem much newer and possibly more interesting than it would otherwise be. He could try to repeat Bush’s 2000 triangulation against the Congressional GOP.

Of course, this is all a moot point, because the combination of policy reformer/relative social moderate/Mormon is probably a triple loser in any future primary competition, which distinctly limits the reach of Huntsman’s reform agenda unless one of the other relatively moderate governors takes up his arguments.