Cold-Blooded

Obama has a nice-guy personality that he presents to the world, but his political instincts have always been pretty hard-core. He won his initial State Senate race by forcing everyone else off the ballot after getting their official signatures disqualified. That's what I'm reminded of by today's move sending Utah Governor Jon Huntsman to Beijing as the US Ambassador to China. Aside from being qualified for the job by spending a lot of time in Asia and speaking fluent Mandarin, Huntsman is a rising young star in the Republican Party mentioned often as a potential 2012 Presidential candidate. Just a couple weeks ago, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe labeled Huntsman the biggest threat to Obama in 2012. So the President up and co-opted him.

Huntsman may be playing a long game, getting the imprimatur of a popular President and setting up for a future run way down the road. But I tend to reject the idea that the GOP primary voters would nominate anyone who took a job in the Obama Administration. At any rate, in the short-term, Obama just neutralized the guy his campaign manager saw as the toughest opponent to his re-election.

I wish he would use this kind of strategy against the ConservaDems...

The Governor Of Utah Is Too Moderate FAIL

Jon Huntsman, the Republican Governor of Utah, sid this to ABC.

With the party reeling from Sen. Arlen Specter's defection, a prominent moderate Republican governor is warning that GOP leaders in Washington have failed to offer a positive alternative to President Obama's initiatives.

"You can't just say no. You can't just obstruct or obfuscate," Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said in an interview with ABC News. "Instead of just kind of grousing and complaining, it would do us all a whole lot of good if we actually started engaging directly in finding compromises and common ground and shared solutions." [...]

"When you are devoid of the ideas, or the content that would allow you to articulate or paint a better future, you have no choice other than to fall back on 'no, we are not going support it, it cannot be done,'" Huntsman said.

Huntsman is young, wildly popular in Utah, and conservative on all but a few issues.

So of course, he's been excommunicated from the party.

Joanne Voorhees, the chairwoman of the Kent County Republican party in Michigan, has "abruptly canceled" an upcoming fundraiser with Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, Jr. (R). Voorhees "said that hosting the moderate Utah governor would mean abandoning the party's conservative principles." The cancellation comes as Republicans are pushing for a more narrow party focused on hard-right principles.

They're really crawling into a spider hole.