En qué ha fallado Huntsman

The New York Times:

Huntsman is branded as the Republican field’s lonely moderate, of course, which is one reason why he’s current languishing at around 3 percent in the polls. But as Michael Brendan Dougherty noted in a summertime profile for the American Conservative, Huntsman’s record as Utah’s governor isn’t “just to the right of other moderates, it is to the right of most conservatives.”

Huntsman has none of Romney’s health care baggage, and unlike the former Massachusetts governor, he didn’t spend the last decade flip-flopping on gun rights, immigration and abortion. Meanwhile, on many of the highest-profile issues of the primary season (the individual mandate, Paul Ryan’s House budget, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), he has arguably been more consistently conservative than Gingrich.

At the same time, because Huntsman is perceived as less partisan than his rivals, he has better general election prospects. The gears and tumblers of my colleague Nate Silver’s predictive models give Huntsman a 55 percent chance of knocking off the incumbent even if the economy grows at a robust 4 percent, compared to Romney’s 40 percent.

In theory, then, Huntsman seems like he could occupy the sweet spot that Gingrich claims to have all to himself. In practice, though, his campaign to date has been an unmitigated disaster.

This isn’t for want of substance. On issues ranging from foreign affairs to financial reform, Huntsman’s proposals have been an honorable exception to the pattern of gimmickry and timidity that has characterized the Republican field’s policy forays.

But his salesmanship has been staggeringly inept. Huntsman’s campaign was always destined to be hobbled by the two years he spent as President Obama’s ambassador to China. But he compounded the handicap by introducing himself to the Republican electorate with a series of symbolic jabs at the party’s base.

He picked high-profile fights on two hot-button issues — evolution and global warming — that were completely irrelevant to his candidacy’s rationale. He let his campaign manager define his candidacy as a fight to save the Republican Party from a “bunch of cranks.” And he embraced his identity as the media’s favorite Republican by letting the liberal journalist Jacob Weisberg write a fawning profile for Vogue.

This was political malpractice at its worst. Voters don’t necessarily need to like a candidate to vote for him, but they need to think that he likes them. Imagine a contender for the Democratic nomination introducing himself to liberal voters by attacking Planned Parenthood, distancing himself from “left-wing nutjobs” and giving a series of interviews on Fox News, and you have the flavor of how Huntsman’s opening act was perceived on the right. The substance mattered less than the symbolism, which screamed: I want your vote, but I don’t particularly care to be associated with your stupidities.

The campaign hasn’t repeated these mistakes, and Huntsman’s debating style — initially unctuous and tone-deaf — has improved with time. (His to-and-fro with Romney over Afghanistan in last week’s foreign policy debate was his best moment yet.) He’s polling at 11 percent in New Hampshire, his make-or-break state, which is much better than his national numbers. And every so often, a prominent conservative activist or blogger will write a “second look at Huntsman?” post: There was one from RedState’s Erick Erickson a few weeks ago, and one from HotAir’s pseudonymous Allahpundit last week.

In a sense, Huntsman’s best hope may be his relative invisibility. With name recognition numbers that lag his rivals by almost thirty percent, there’s still time for him to introduce himself to primary voters afresh.