Huntsman's Ryan Plan Mistake

Written by David Frum on Monday June 20, 2011

Jon Huntsman is a responsible reform-minded Republican -- but by embracing the Ryan plan he may be setting himself up to follow in the footsteps of Rudy Giuliani.

The entry of Jon Huntsman into the GOP races inspires great hope for governance-minded Republicanism. Here is a candidate who is intelligent and responsible, who rejects the "all-out war" model of politics, who shows that a father of seven can also be culturally modern and who has integrated the environment into his priorities. All excellent!

But Huntsman has from the outset imposed a dangerous and unnecessary disability on himself. It's the same one that felled the Rudy Giuliani campaign in 2008, so I speak from painful experience here.

Giuliani had deviated from the ultra-conservative line on abortion, gun rights, and same-sex marriage. He did not feel he could afford any more deviations from ultra-conservative orthodoxy than those. So Giuliani -- who could have been the candidate for the voters of Queens and Staten Island, a champion of the Republican middle class -- ended up as Mr. Conservative on all tax and economic issues.

The same fate seems to be overtaking Jon Huntsman, alas. Having bucked the party on greenhouse gases and same-sex unions, Huntsman has signed up for 100 percent endorsement of the Ryan plan.

I can see the logic. Genuflecting at the Ryan altar is deemed inescapable and essential for credibility in 2012. A social conservative like a Mike Huckabee might (barely) evade the obligation, but a libertarian-stye candidate like Huntsman cannot and dare not. To the extent that Huntsman has his eye on a second run in 2016 -- well by then the Ryan plan will be forgotten by the general electorate even as it pays dividend in continuing fiscal credibility with the party faithful. So: I get it.

The trouble is, however, that this solution defines the problem in purely party-political terms. The Ryan plan answers a narrow Republican concern: how do we push taxes even lower in the face of the impending retirement of the baby boom). It disregards the broader national concern: how can we sustain and enhance the standard of living of the American middle class against the downward trend in middle-class incomes of the past dozen years? The Ryan plan tragically abdicates this question.

We need reform-minded Republicans like Jon Huntsman to confront that question with at last a credible response.