To that, I would respond with two words: John McCain. Big supporter, in the 2008 campaign at least, of confronting global warming. Big supporter, in the 2008 campaign at least, of comprehensive immigration reform. Huge campaign finance reformer. He liked some Democrats so much that he wanted to pick one as his running mate. And yet, after hundreds of articles were written about why McCain was not conservative enough, after months of talk radio condemnations of McCain, he won the Republican nomination. Why? Because Republicans have a long history of being (small-c) conservative in their selection of nominees. They tend to go for the guy they know, the one they think can win. ~Michael Scherer

It’s these last two that are particularly important, but that doesn’t bode well for Huntsman. There’s no question that defeating Obama is a higher priority for most Republicans than insisting on ideological conformity in a nominee, but that doesn’t mean that Republican voters’ assessments of the candidates’ electability will work in Huntsman’s favor. Most Republicans don’t know Huntsman, and once they get to know him they aren’t going to conclude that he can win.

McCain was considered the front-runner in 2007, and despite running an abysmal campaign he held on and won thanks to name recognition, his previous campaign in 2000, and the three or four-way split of the conservative vote. Even so, the lesson many conservatives drew from the 2008 election was that nominating McCain was a bad outcome. His nomination was premised largely on electability, and he lost, so a lot of McCain critics feel vindicated by that. It doesn’t matter to them that no Republican was going to win in 2008 after the financial meltdown in September. A Huntsman candidacy rests on convincing Republicans to make the same electability gamble on a candidate who is much more obscure nationally, who recently served the Obama administration, and whose religion is a problem for a significant bloc of Republican (and non-Republican) voters. In other words, Republicans will have to believe that Huntsman is more electable than any of the other candidates available when he is already less electable than McCain.

Huntsman running in 2012 would be the equivalent of McCain running in 1996 at a time when many fewer people outside Washington and Arizona knew who he was. Even more than McCain, Huntsman will be and will be perceived as a media-created candidate, because the only people talking up a Huntsman candidacy are journalists (and none of them, as far as I can tell, is conservative). Except for some McCain advisors, there seems to be no enthusiasm for Huntsman among any activists, bloggers, pundits, think tank analysts, political operatives, or other Republican politicians. There has rarely been so little interest in a prospective candidate among members of his own party as there is in Huntsman. Maybe that will change a little, but I doubt it. Granted, Huckabee was an obscure candidate for a long time, but he had the advantage of being able to mobilize evangelicals to support him. In many respects, Huntsman seems to be positioning himself as both the anti-Huckabee and the anti-Romney: he won’t make corporate Republicans nervous with pseudo-populist rhetoric on economic issues, but he isn’t going to dwell on social issues, either. There is no Republican constituency that I can see that is clamoring for someone like that.