Huntsman Jumps In!

Jon Huntsman’s presidential candidacy will likely generate increased scrutiny due to both his imminent formal campaign announcement and his surprise second place-finish in the recent Republican Leadership Conference straw poll, in which supposed frontrunner Mitt Romney placed fifth despite an outright win last year.

Interestingly, his stint during President Obama’s administration as ambassador to China has emerged as a contentious issue for partisans of both parties. Most of the criticism of Huntsman’s diplomatic service, however, has been shallow political posturing.

When the president tapped him for the ambassadorship in 2009, Huntsman had already been laying the groundwork for a potential national campaign. U.S. News and World Report described

Huntsman as the only possible Republican candidate that made Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, “a wee bit queasy.” As such, when the president appointed Huntsman to the diplomatic post little more than a week after Plouffe’s pronouncement, many saw the move as a cunning political calculation. “Brilliant,” GOP strategist Mark McKinnon remarked at the time, “Keep your friends close and your enemies in China.”

To be sure, Huntsman--  a seasoned diplomat and excellent Mandarin Chinese speaker -- was very well-qualified. But as Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter later opined on the reasoning behind the appointment, “Whether Obama wants to admit it or not, when he surveyed the Republican Party for who had talent…and could potentially pose the most threat for him in 2012, believe me, Obama would prefer to run against Romney or Huckabee or Palin than against Jon Huntsman.”

It is therefore somewhat ridiculous that White House officials were supposedly “furious” at what they deemed to be Huntsman’s “audacious betrayal” in stepping down to explore a run, as reported by Politico, considering how the appointment was steeped in political considerations in the first place.

On the other side of the political spectrum, conservative blogger Erik Erickson has essentially echoed the absurd argument that Huntsman was disloyal to the president for even thinking of launching a campaign while serving as ambassador.

The fact is that as Huntsman did not actually coordinate campaign activities, he was well within his rights to muse about his future in public service. Only in a Stalinist regime could we expect public servants to be absolutely loyal to the person of the president, as opposed to their own conscience and the nation as a whole. In America, principled dissent has long been a hallmark of our democracy.

If Huntsman believes he can do a better job as president than the incumbent, then all power to him.

Of course, White House officials and the president himself have been publicly attempting to kill his candidacy with kindness. “I’m sure that him having worked so well with me,” President Obama has remarked, tongue-in-cheek, “will be a great asset in any Republican primary.” Indeed, some partisan Republicans play right into the Obama campaign’s hands and characterize Huntsman as a stooge of the president.

Huntsman, however, also served with distinction in the administrations of three Republican presidents – Ronald Reagan, H.W. Bush, and W. Bush – in addition to that of President Obama. Clearly, he takes public service seriously.

“My president asked me to serve in a time of war, in a time of economic difficulty in this country,” Huntsman commented on the subject. “I’m the kind of person, when asked by my president to stand up and serve this country...I do it. And we were honored to serve two years.”

And now that he is formally seeking the honor of serving as president himself, he has already begun to detail key differences with the incumbent on fiscal policy and the management of the war in Afghanistan.

Ultimately, regardless of whether or not either of the extremes is true and Huntsman’s time as ambassador was a case of him being supremely disloyal or slavishly loyal to President Obama, what matters to the nation is the quality of his service.

On that note, Huntsman has earned accolades for his ambassadorial tenure. Although he was “unfailingly urbane and diplomatic in public,” as The Christian Science Monitor put it, he was an aggressive advocate for US interests in China behind closed doors.

Indeed, Huntsman both charmed and unsettled the Chinese government. He was consistent in his defense for human rights, going as far as criticizing the government’s record outright in his last public speech in China as ambassador. And in a private cable to the president, he pushed for a harder stance on North Korea’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

Huntsman, for his part, seems unfazed so far by criticism of his record in general. “It’s OK. You [have] got to be who you are and march forward,” he remarked in response to questions about the political wisdom of his policy views. “Some people will like it.” Hopefully, those people see him elected president.