The New Republic

I don't expect to have anything more to say about Jon Huntsman until he is named Commerce Secretary under either a Romney or second-term Obama administration, but this nugget from today's Washington Post valedictory piece by Phil Rucker and Jason Horowitz was worth passing along:

This past week, even as his candidacy collapsed, Huntsman took to saying he was still “in the hunt.”

But except for some rare flashes, Huntsman failed to demonstrate the killer instincts required to remove Romney from his political path.

“He was a shooter, a target shooter, but he was not a killer,” Huntsman’s younger brother, Peter, said in an interview last year.

He recalled that as children, the two boys would shoot their rifles behind the family estate outside Salt Lake City. “I hunted deer and would shoot rabbits.”

“And Jonny?” interrupted their mother, Karen.

“No,” Peter clarified. “He was more at peace with the rest of society.”

This pretty much nails it. While Huntsman's campaign put out a bunch of pithy ads attacking Romney, and while he would occasionally rise to make jibes against his longtime rival, Huntsman never managed to launch a sustained indictment of Romney, despite the fact that he clearly had his number as much as anyone. In general, it just seemed like he would really rather have been out riding that dirtbike of his across the Utah desert.

To the hunter go the spoils. Which, in the context of the 2012 Republican primaries, can be translated as: to the man who professes being "delighted" in hunting "elk" and "small varmints" goes the nomination.

share this article on facebook or twitter print this article