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The case for Jon Huntsman's conservatism « The Enterprise Blog

blog.american.com12/4/11

Jon Huntsman in the 1980s, along with President Ronald Reagan and Rep. … Jon Huntsman clearly isn't a candidate super comfortable with escalating the 2012 elections into a climactic clash of ideologies. He's too cool, too …

Jon Huntsman Won't Kiss Donald Trump's Ring, Or 'Any Other Part …

www.mediaite.com12/5/11

Jon Huntsman gift-wrapped an unfortunate visual, telling anchor Martha McCallum that he's not going to kiss his (Trump's) ring, and I'm not going to kiss any other part of his anatomy. Huntsman was responding to the claim …

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This is Part 16 of a look at possible GOP candidates that might run well against Obama in 2012.

Part 1 looked at Mitch Daniels Part 2 looked at Tim Pawlenty

Part 3 looked at Chris Christie Part 4 looked at Mitt Ronney

Part 5 looked at Sarah Palin Part 6 looked at Mike Huckabee

Part 7 looked at Rudy Giuliani Part 8 looked at Michele Bachman

Part 9 looked at Donald Trump Part 10 looked at Paul Ryan

Part 11 looked at Ron Paul Part 12 looked at Newt Gingrich

Part 13 looked at Herman Cain Part 14 looked at Rick Santorum

Part 15 looked at Rick Perry

Mr. Huntsman is most often addressed as "governor" because he was the two-term governor of Utah.

If like many others you’ve never heard of him then read on:

He became fluent in Mandarin Chinese during two years he spent in Taiwan as a young Mormon missionary.
He worked in the Reagan White House.
In the George H.W. Bush administration, he worked first on trade matters and then as Mr. Bush’s ambassador to Singapore.
During the second Bush presidency, he was deputy trade representative.
And in 2004 he was elected governor of Utah, re-elected in 2008.
Then in 2009 he accepted President Barack Obama’s offer to be the U.S. ambassador to China.

His father Jon Huntsman Sr’s first company, Huntsman Container, hit the jackpot by creating the "clamshell" burger box, which was adopted by McDonald’s and he is now the billionaire founder of Huntsman Corp., a chemical company.

It should be no surprise then that a man with this résumé, which is notably similar to that of George H.W. Bush, might choose to run for president.

His immediate problem is however that the vast majority of the public have no idea who he is.

Who Is Jon Huntsman?

The Economy

If there’s a short version of Mr. Huntsman’s core message, it’s that America needs to start competing again, and very aggressively, in the global marketplace.

"We need to get back in the game", he says, citing the lapse of free-trade momentum as a primary failing of the Obama years, "because if we don’t do it, China will move ahead with free-trade agreements as they are in Latin America, built around procurement practices that benefit Chinese companies".

The Military

"Now we have one out of every six defense department dollars going to Afghanistan. We’ve achieved much of what we set out to do. We’ve been able to rout the Taliban from power. We’ve been able to disrupt to a large extent al Qaeda. We’ve had free elections going back to 2004. And we still have 100,000 troops on the ground. The future well-being of the United States is likely not going to be fought on the prairies of Afghanistan. It’s likely to be the result of our ability or inability to compete competitively across the Pacific against the rising giants".

Washington.

"I think the appropriate role of the federal government is to carefully measure out the nation’s competitiveness. When are taxes too high and making us less competitive than our major trading partners? When do we reach the point of onerous regulation and have to throttle back so we can maintain a competitive posture?". "As a country we should maintain a level playing field for the states. Equip them with what they need to survive and be competitive and then be attentive enough to learn from them when it comes to possible national models".

Health

Mr. Huntsman says he favors repeal of the Obama health-care law and he’d block-grant Medicaid back to the states.

"Let states determine what the percentage of poverty levels are, and let public officials rise or fall on how local citizens feel about those decisions. They’re in a much better position to understand their vulnerable populations than at the federal level".

Energy And Subsidies

He thinks the recent natural gas finds in the U.S. "completely change how we operate and how we view our economy. I believe this is just revolutionary. Why not take advantage of something we control, when it’s derived from our reserves, it employs our people and enhances our economic base?". Look, we’re never going to be totally energy independent. You can talk in those terms but we’re always going to be accessing raw materials from elsewhere in the world. But we can do better than 60% of imported oil".

"I don’t like subsidies. I’d like to see us phase out all subsidies. Maybe a nudge in terms of a tax incentive like we did in Utah to convert cars to natural gas".

How Will He Try To Convince The Voters?

"When people look at what we’ve done", he says, "they’re going to say, ‘He’s a conservative problem solver’, I’m going to point people in the direction of what we’ve done as governor. I’m pro-life, strongly pro-Second Amendment. I think there are enough voters who will say, ‘I may not like everything, but there’s enough here to like’".

He adds a final point on his own behalf:

"I’m not trying to make things up as we go. I’m drawing from my own experiences, where I’ve seen it work. I want to make sure that what we advocate and say we believe in can be tied back to real-world experience. So when people say, ‘What do you stand for, what do you want to do?’ I can say, ‘Here, 1,2,3, here’s what I did as governor of a state’. I think that’s going to help people to connect the dots".

As we now all know or should do by now, President Obama is an Afro-American, the son of a Muslim father and a one-time resident of Indochina which is predominantly Muslim.

The upside to this of course is that it makes it much more difficult for the Islamic world to typecast him as a son of the “Great Satan” especially because his middle name is Hussein.

Rightly or wrongly however, President Barack Obama is getting a lot of praise heaped on him right now by much of the Muslim world because he chose the Saudi-owned Arabic TV news channel Al-Arabiya on which to make his first formal television interview.

So what’s wrong with that?

Well when you give interviews to foreigners that are basically hostile to your country it’s probably not a great idea to firstly criticize your own country and secondly praise the one that despises you, but that is what Obama basically did.

He said,

“All too often the United States starts by dictating and in the past on some of these issues we didn’t always know all the factors that were involved. So let’s listen. Well, here’s what I think is important. Look at the proposal that was put forth by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. I might not agree with every aspect of the proposal, but it took great courage to put forward something that is as significant as that. I think that there are ideas across the region of how we might pursue peace”.

The U.S. was previously dictatorial and the Saudi king had been courageous.

Obama went on to say,

“But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task. So what we want to do is to listen, set aside some of the preconceptions that have existed and have built up over the last several years. And I think if we do that, then there’s a possibility at least of achieving some breakthroughs. But I think that what you’ll see is somebody who is listening, who is respectful, and who is trying to promote the interests not just of the United States, but also ordinary people who right now are suffering from poverty and a lack of opportunity. I want to make sure that I’m speaking to them, as well”.

So even though America did the following praiseworthy things Obama gave the impression to haters of the U.S. that America had only been bad!

” American saved Kuwait.
” Spoke out against Russia on behalf of the Chechens.
” Tried to save the Somalis.
” Bombed, Christian European Serbia to save the Kosovan and Bosnian Muslims.
” Helped the Afghans fight the Soviets.
” Is still fighting the Taliban.
” Overthrew Saddam Hussein and is still fighting in Iraq.
” Invested billions fighting disease in Africa much of which is Muslim.
” Aided tsunami victims.

And the list goes on and on and Bush can list many things to his credit.

” The U.S. was not hit by terrorists for seven years.
” Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation was stopped.
” Libya gave up its nuclear program.
” Syria mostly left Lebanon.
” Al Qaeda’s leadership is scattered and less effective.

Throughout the almost two years of political campaigning it was tacitly understood that mentioning Obama’s ancestry and middle name were off-limits.

Obama however does not feel himself limited by this tacit understanding,

“Now, my job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world, that the language we use has to be a language of respect. I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries. The largest one, Indonesia. And so what I want to communicate is the fact that in all my travels throughout the Muslim world, what I’ve come to understand is that regardless of your faith, and America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, non-believers, that regardless of your faith, people all have certain common hopes and common dreams.

The bottom line is that Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush all tried hard to promote peace in the Middle East but amongst the major obstacles to peace are religious intolerance, illiberality, violent aggression and complicity in the promotion of terror by Syria, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

The above mentioned countries know only too well the role that they’ve played for their own political reasons and Obama knows it too but he has already set out to placate them with the downside being that he will mostly likely make a bad situation far worse.

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