No.
Jon Huntsman’s Love Letters (to Obama & the Clintons)
Huntsman: Climate Change Has Established Scientists Associated With It
Jon Huntsman's Cap and Trade, Stimulus Support and Individual Mandate Past Catches Up to Him
Posted on 12/02/2011 9:53:00 PM PST by St. Louis Conservative
(snip)
Jon Huntsman inexplicably chose to debut as the Republican for people who rather dislike Republicans, but his program is the most conservative. He endorses Paul Ryan’s budget and entitlement reforms. (Gingrich denounced Ryan’s Medicare reform as “right-wing social engineering.”) Huntsman would privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Gingrich’s benefactor). Huntsman would end double taxation on investment by eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends. (Romney would eliminate them only for people earning less than $200,000, who currently pay just 9.3 percent of them.) Huntsman’s thorough opposition to corporate welfare includes farm subsidies. (Romney has justified them as national security measures — food security, somehow threatened. Gingrich says opponents of ethanol subsidies are “big-city” people hostile to farmers.) Huntsman considers No Child Left Behind, the semi-nationalization of primary and secondary education, “an unmitigated disaster.” (Romney and Gingrich support it. Gingrich has endorsed a national curriculum.) Between Ron Paul’s isolationism and the faintly variant bellicosities of the other six candidates stands Huntsman’s conservative foreign policy, skeptically nuanced about America’s need or ability to control many distant developments.
Romney might not be a Dewey. Gingrich might stop being (as Churchill said of John Foster Dulles) a bull who carries his own china shop around with him. But both are too risky to anoint today.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I’m sympathetic to the personal challenges Will has kindly shared with the World, but I have yet to experience the insightful, political ‘Wow’ he’s alleged to convey. Perhaps my cynicism has eclipsed the beltway rumors.
So have I.
Suprising.
It's all academic. Obama will be CIC until Jan 20, 2017.
Just out of curiosity, how is a guy who calls conservatives "anti-science" and refers to himself, not as the conservative, but as the "center-right" candidate, somehow become "THE option" for conservatives ?
I'm not even knocking him for working in the Obama administration, I'm more curious how someone who portrays themselves as a moderate (his words, not mine) and "center-right" or "right of center" (again his words not mine) becomes the option for people who are conservative ?
Even better, how is he supposed to pull this off after insulting conservatives directly ?
George Will needs to take his meds and eat his soup.
George Will has on occasion seemed like a Conservative only due to the contrast from the 5 Leftist usually arrayed against him. He’s an inside the beltway idea of a ‘Conservative’. Will is a useful idiot and pure Statist/Prog.
I’m delighted that you have decided to support Jon Huntsman.
Ultimately, this is going to come down to whether we want to ‘vent’ or whether we want to ‘win’.
Romney is utterly vulnerable against Obama for reasons that the Huntsman campaign is already exploiting and are well documented on this site. Even Newt’s staunchest fan would admit that he brings a fair amount of baggage to the table.
When you brush away all the image stuff, when you brush away the tangential fluff, and you get down to a candidate’s record and his policy positions, Huntsman seems the wisest choice every time.
Huntsman has tried to eschew the moderate label. He isn’t too keen on any ‘label’ that the media might bestow. If anything, he is trying to portray himself (accurately as his record shows) as a consistent conservative. Have a look at the ads his campaign have created against Romney’s flip-flops, and the ad that his Super PAC broadcast in New Hampshire. They’re all about being a conservative.
Comparing his policy positions and past to that of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, it is difficult not to conclude that Will, on this topic at least, has a point.
As for your other point, if you felt insulted, then I don’t blame you for not warming to the guy. I didn’t take his comments that way. I agree with his basic premise that the Republican Party cannot allow itself to be painted by the Democrats and the media, as the ‘anti-science’ party. Because that’s the spin they are taking. Now THAT I find insulting.
George Will has squandered our patience for years now as conservatives, I don't even listen to him anymore. His last great call before anyone saw it ( 3 or 4 yrs before it happened if my memory is correct) was that GM was going to go broke, not Europe. Funny thing is Europe is their now...
This is why I stopped reading George Will long ago.
Years back Will was the one eyed king in the valley of the blind. There were no other “conservative” writers around and he looked like Reagan. Now he just looks like .... well George Will a man willing to make a fool of himself to meet a deadline.
No.
Jon Huntsman’s Love Letters (to Obama & the Clintons)
Huntsman: Climate Change Has Established Scientists Associated With It
Jon Huntsman's Cap and Trade, Stimulus Support and Individual Mandate Past Catches Up to Him
With FReepers like you, O will be elected for life. We need to go out and DEFEAT the MARXIST. I'm not a Huntsman supporter, but if it's him or O, I'llvote him.
Also, Huntsman’s admitted strategy in New Hampshire is to get Democratic voters to raid the primary and vote for him.
Will’s been in Washington DC so long he’s become addicted to the Kool-Aid. No better way to get invited to parties on the Beltway than to bash conservatives.
Bull.
I don’t have a problem with Huntsman’s views. Unfortunately Huntsman has made it clear he has a problem with my views.
With Romney faltering, time to turn to Huntsman I guess. Anything to stop a conservative from winning the nomination.
Stop. Just stop.
The is nothing at all “conservative” about Huntsmann. His big govt statist solutions on everything from Bank Regulation to the myth of global warming expose him as just another Democrat Lite RINO.
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