Why have they run this campaign, and not some other? It isn’t as if there aren’t options. And it isn’t as if a different strategy, selected at random, would be likely to perform worse.
Look at Huntsman mastermind John Weaver, best known for his time atop Campaign McCain. His contempt for the conservative establishment falls like poison rain from nearly every remark he offers the (salivating) press. “It’s a fork in the road between seriousness and circus,” he told Dana Milbank last month.
Really? If so, Huntsman would be better off not running at all. Not only is it impossible to purge politics of its silliness. It’s unseemly to portray oneself, Obama-style, as the only adult in the room. The politicization of the culture war is a two-way street. What does it say about an essentially mainstream conservative like Huntsman that he entrusts his brand and his electoral fortunes to a man who wants him to run against his own appeal to the Republican base broadly understood?
It says his real strategy is simply to lodge in people’s minds in a far more unflattering light than the one in which Dougherty presents him: as the last-ditch alternative to the least palatable candidate of all, Mr. Well-Lubricated Weathervane himself, Willard “Mitt” Romney.
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