Jon Huntsman dropped out of the Republican presidential nomination race Monday and endorsed Mitt Romney, a fellow Mormon. Huntsman was this columnist’s choice among the eight or more who are seeking, or have sought, the prize.
The Associated Press ran a very brief resume of his life in the drop-out story — which is fitting in a political obituary:
“Huntsman, 51, was born in Redwood City, Calif., and raised in Utah. His father, an industrialist and at one time a Nixon administration official, founded Huntsman Chemical Corp. in 1982. Now the Huntsman Corp., it reported revenues of more than $9 billion in 2010.
“The younger Huntsman drifted a bit as a young man. He attended high school in Salt Lake City but dropped out to play keyboards in a band. He later attended the University of Utah, then dropped out to serve two years as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan, where he learned to speak Mandarin.
“He returned to the University of Utah in 1981 and later worked as an intern for Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and as a staff assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He left college to join the Huntsman Corp. in 1983, the same year he married Mary Kaye Cooper. He studied international politics at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1987.
“While he served in the administrations of both George H.W. Bush — he was ambassador to Singapore in 1992 — and George W. Bush, Huntsman first won elective office in 2004 as Utah’s governor. He was re-elected by a 3-1 margin in 2008, then resigned the following year to be America’s top diplomat in China.
“Huntsman and his wife have seven children, including one adopted from India and one adopted from China.”
HUNTSMAN WAS, as his biography clearly shows, superbly qualified to be president. A two-term governor with top-flight credentials in foreign policy; family man, young, full of energy and self-confident enough to eschew attack politics for reasoned argument, he seemed to me and a few others to be what the Republicans needed to get the party back into the national mainstream.
It was not an opinion widely shared. Huntsman barely registered on national Republican polls. He skipped Iowa and concentrated on New Hampshire. There he won 17 percent of the vote — his first showing in double digits in any contest or survey — which put him in third, behind Romney and, for gosh sakes, Ron Paul.
Perhaps being bested by Paul was the convincer.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
