Posted on 05/16/2009 8:45:22 AM PDT by james.richardson
In a brief ceremony at the White House today, President Barack Obama tapped Utah Governor John Huntsman to serve as United States Ambassador to China -- his chief envoy to the world's most populous country.
Reelected in 2008 by a record margin as a moderate Republican in an exceedingly conservative state, party elites and strategists were quick to point to the rising star as a potential challenger to the president. But given today’s interesting political calculus, the prospect of Huntsman now staging a challenge to Obama is exceptionally low.
Having carved out a reputation as a would-be-modernizer and pragmatic conservative on divisive social issues, Huntsman was right to test the waters. It seems he waded a little too deep for Obama’s comfort, however.
No less than the chief architect of Obama’s campaign David Plouffe has expressed concern over Huntsman’s budding portfolio. While he admits no potential candidate makes him “shake in his shoes,” he concedes the potential of a Huntsman bid leaves him a “wee bit queasy.”
By all accounts, Huntsman stood a good chance at securing the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, if only for the fact that he is the conservative antithesis of Obama: He’s a moderate, young, and attractive politician. Those are the grounds on which Obama won, and those are the grounds on which they fear he’ll lose it in 2012.
By co-opting Huntsman, Obama will have successfully pacified the lone Republican 2012 challenger, thereby ensuring a stable route to victory. Then, of course, is the knowledge that he’ll likely receive Republican praise for his gesture of bipartisanship, however politically shrewd it may be.
Obama is an impressively calculating politician, perhaps more so than his former opponent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As such, he realizes a nomination of this nature will offer Huntsman the last needed ingredient for presidential success: foreign policy bona fides.
Ambassadorships are not token appointments, and certainly not those to emerging economic and military superpowers. Before he was elected to the Offices of Vice President and later President of the United States, George H. W. Bush served as Ambassador to China from 1974 to 1975. If Plouffe is "queasy" now, Obama just ensured he'll be reaching for Pepto with some frequency in eight years.
After running the greatest candidate-centered campaign of history, Obama is principally focused on his reelection campaign in 2012. It is of little concern, then, that he will have propelled Huntsman to the national stage in 2016 by no doing of his own. The Obama campaign is interested in building an Obama-coalition, not a Democratic-coalition. With the candidate gone and the movement over, the 2016 Democratic nominee will be tasked with the unenviable undertaking of reassembling a diverse coalition of voters, one liable to have already fractured when campaign promises were either not met or broken in the course of governing.
If a lasting Democratic majority was not, in fact, built on the heels of the Obama campaign, and Democrats must weather electoral losses in 2016, President Obama will surely take solace in the knowledge that his legacy as a two-term president remains intact.
“Better they lose than I,” I suspect he said to his advisors when mulling this nomination.
Cross-posted at Skepticians.com.
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