Jon Huntsman: The anti-Rush?

The party needs to be more intellectually rigorous, and to compete for the votes of the young, the elites and minorities, he said in an interview with POLITICO. To do so, the GOP needs to tack toward the middle on environment, gay rights and immigration. And, yes, Ronald Reagan is to be admired – but as much for his oft-overlooked pragmatism as for his conservative principles.

It’s a view that places him out of step with the prevailing conservative sentiment among most members of the GOP base, but it’s also one that makes Huntsman, a wealthy Mormon scion, the first 2012 Republican primary prospect to unabashedly embrace a middle ground somewhere between moderate Northeastern Republicanism and Sun Belt conservatism…

By the standards of David Brooks’s Traditionalist vs. Reformer dichotomy, Huntsman falls squarely in the second category – perhaps the only potential 2012 candidate to unambiguously do so.

He has little use for the congressional wing of his party and believes their arguments often fall on deaf ears beyond Washington.

“We will be irrelevant as a party until we become the party of solutions and until we become the party of preeminence,” he said. “It’s easy to fall back on gratuitous rhetoric and that’s kind of what this town is all about.”