Where is Huntsman's Passion?
It seemed a weirdly fitting protest.
A single truck pulled an electronic billboard around and around the block. The billboard denounced Republicans for Environmental Protection - and their guest speaker, Gov. Jon Huntsman - as a "RINO stampede." The truck promoted a group called JunkScience.com, run by a curious character called Steven Milloy.
The billboard's message did not pack much punch, but the deliberate waste of gasoline? Now, that was calculated to annoy.
Inside the Capitol Hill Hyatt Regency, a couple hundred supporters and friends of the group sat down to dinner and a speech of welcome by Rob Sisson, president of REP; followed by a short and witty award acceptance by Rep. Dave Reichert (R., Washington); and then a keynote by Gov. Huntsman.
Huntsman covered three main topics: the burden of federal debt (he stressed his support for the Boehner plan), the slowdown of economic growth under President Obama ("the president is a good man, but on the most important challenge of our time, he has failed us"), and the urgency of including environmental and energy issues in a modern Republicanism.
Huntsman recalled that he had recently departed the most polluted city on earth: Beijing. On bad days, he said, it's literally impossible to see across Beijing's wide streets. The whole planet, he said, lives downstream from China's pollution. You are breathing it now.
Good stuff, but Huntsman missed (or so it seemed to me) a chance to infuse that observation with emotional power - and a to draw a distinction between himself and his competitors for the GOP nomination.
A few weeks ago, I heard radio host Mark Levin launch into one of his famous mad-delicatessen-owner tirades against the intrusiveness of the federal government. Among Levin's complaints: the federal government even dictates what children's pajamas can be made of!
I thought: can anyone seriously regard non-flammable children's pajamas as an expression of government over-reach? I doubt it. But some people in today's GOP do talk that way. Huntsman could draw on his China experience to talk eloquently about what it is that we need government to do as well as what we need it not to do. As ambassador, Huntsman daily confronted the economic and human waste and wreckage caused by China's disregard of the most minimal standards of social protection: melamine in the milk, high-speed trains that crash and kill, mangled workers, deformed babies.
Huntsman is not polling well in the GOP primaries. Yet he is lucid and knowledgeable, and on the issues surely closer to most Republicans than Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann. With a little more metaphorical gasoline in his tank - maybe some of the gas wasted by the JunkScience man - he could still be going places.
