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Stories tagged with “Jon Huntsman”

Politics

Huntsman Drops Out: Is Set To Endorse Romney, Whom He Called ‘Unelectable’

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Jan 15, 2012 at 10:05 pm

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (R) informed his advisers today that he is dropping out of the presidential race. After his third place finish in New Hampshire’s primary, Huntsman declared that he had a “ticket to ride” but it appears the be on a bus owned by GOP front-runner Mitt Romney, whom Huntsman is now expected to endorse. “The governor and his family, at this point in the race, decided it was time for Republicans to rally around a candidate who could beat Barack Obama and turn around the economy,” Huntsman adviser Matt David said in a statement. “That candidate is Gov. Mitt Romney.”

While the statement was not an official endorsement, CBS reports “Huntsman is expected to throw his endorsement to current front-runner Mitt Romney.”

Last week, Huntsman told CNBC that Romney was making himself “completely unelectable.”

Huntsman’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that a powerful group of social conservatives called on conservative to coalesce around Rick Santorum as the anti-Romney candidate this weekend.

NEWS FLASH

BREAKING: Social Conservatives Officially Unite on Rick Santorum As Romney Alternative | Moments ago, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins announced on a conference call that social conservatives had officially settled on Rick Santorum as their preferred candidate for the Republican nomination.  The decision was made today after three rounds of balloting at a meeting of more than 150 social conservative leaders and political activists held over the last two days in Brenham, Texas.  Though the meeting was widely seen as an effort to settle on a candidate to stop Mitt Romney, Romney’s own campaign sent a representative to make an appeal to the group and Perkins said it was “not a bash Romney weekend” and “not a lot of time” was spent discussing him. Jon Huntsman’s campaign was the only campaign not to participate in the meeting.

Politics

Huntsman: Romney Firing Comment Renders Him ‘Completely Unelectable’

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Jan 9, 2012 at 7:49 pm

EXETER, New Hampshire — The Jon Huntsman campaign escalated its attacks on front-runner Mitt Romney the night before the New Hampshire primary, with Huntsman himself telling CNBC host Larry Kudlow that Romney is making himself “completely unelectable.” Romney is taking flak from all GOP opponents, in addition to Democrats, for his comments this morning that he “liked being able to fire people.” Huntsman said earlier that he prefers to hire people, rather than fire them, and his adviser had harsh words this afternoon for Romney when ThinkProgress interviewed him, but Huntsman’s statements on Kudlow represent the strongest attack from the candidate himself yet:

HUNTSMAN: First of all, you’ve got to get elected to office for heaven’s sake, and making statements like that you render yourself completely unelectable. Whether you’re referring to economic policy, it really becomes more of a political issue, when you’ve got the Chicago political machine and $1 billion bearing down on you. You make a statement like, you talk about pink slips, and pretty soon you’re going to lose the high ground.

Watch it:

NEWS FLASH

Huntsman Adviser Slams Romney As ‘Out Of Touch With Average Working People | NASUHA, New Hampshire — John Weaver, a senior strategist to former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (R), slammed Mitt Romney for saying that he “liked being able to fire people,” calling Romney “out of touch” and “unelectable” at campaign stop in Nashua, New Hampshire this afternoon. “The bottom line is…here’s a guy who’s out of touch with average working people,” Weaver told ThinkProgress. “His ties to Wall Street, the fact that he’s taken $32 million from Wall Street, the picture with his Bain partners looking like some Richie Rich guy with money falling out of his pockets…and on top of that, he has an inability to connect with average people.” Touching on the anti-Wall Street sentiment in this election cycle, Weaver added, “I just think he’s unelectable against Barack Obama in this environment.”

Economy

Huntsman: ‘I Will Break Up The Big Banks’

By Pat Garofalo on Jan 9, 2012 at 4:30 pm

Across the board, the GOP’s 2012 presidential candidates have denounced the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, enacted to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. However, none of them has come up with a plan to replace it, save one: former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who is hanging his campaign on a strong showing tomorrow in the New Hampshire primary.

In a Fox News op-ed, Huntsman explicitly said that he would like to “break up the big banks” by imposing a fee on banks whose size hits a certain percentage of GDP:

As president, I will break up the big banks, end future taxpayer bailouts, and restore capitalist principles – competition and creative destruction – to our financial sector.

We will accomplish this by imposing a fee on banks whose size exceeds a certain percentage of GDP, proving them an incentive to slim down and localize.

This is akin to the “bank tax” that lived a short life during the financial reform debate. While it wouldn’t be as clean a break as reimposing the strict divide between investment banking and traditional commercial banking, if it were large enough, a fee like the one Huntsman proposed would provide an incentive for banks to shrink — or if not, could be used to build up a pot of money that could be tapped to dismantle a big bank that is going under, instead of resorting to ad hoc, taxpayer funded bailouts.

As Reuters’ Felix Salmon put it, Huntsman “goes where Obama dares not tread.” Indeed, Obama has never called for breaking up the biggest banks — or “right sizing” them, as Huntsman puts it — preferring instead to craft a regulatory framework in which big banks can exist without having one of their failures doom the wider economy.

But that fact is that the biggest banks are still big enough to pull down the financial system, and while Dodd-Frank went a long way to make it possible to dismantle those banks without taxpayer funds, it didn’t do much to reduce the dangerous co-mingling of investment and commercial banking (which even 90s deregulator Newt Gingrich now admits it was “a mistake” to permit in the first place).

Security

Huntsman Raps Romney: ‘The President Of The United States Is The Commander-In-Chief’

By Ali Gharib on Jan 9, 2012 at 1:09 pm

During Saturday night’s ABC/Yahoo! Republican presidential debate, former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman rapped former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney on failing to recognize the chain-of-command of the U.S. military. By design, the military leadership is subservient to the president, a fact most GOP contenders have ignored throughout the campaign as they sought to portray Barack Obama as weak on national security.

Romney has, as on so many issues, flip-flopped on whether or not a president should defer to his generals in making decisions about war and peace. Initially, he said Obama should defer to military leaders, then walked his position back and said he would listen to the generals’ “input” and make his “own decision.” During Saturday’s debate, Romney didn’t quite return to his initial position, but he did punctuate his statement on a plan for Afghanistan by declaring that he would be “listening to the commanders on the ground.”

Asked to respond, Huntsman, who’s spoken out for a more speedy withdrawal from Afghanistan, lept at the opportunity:

MODERATOR: Governor Huntsman, you have a disagreement?

HUNTSMAN: Yes. I would have to tell Mitt that the president of the United States is the commander-in-chief. Of course you get input and — and advice from a lot of different corners of Washington, including the commanders on the ground.

But we also deferred to the commanders on the ground in about 1967, during the Vietnam War, and we didn’t get very good advice then.

Watch a video of the exchange:

The U.S.’s top military officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey, and other top generals agree with Huntsman. “I find some of those articles about divergence or control of the generals to be kind of offensive to me,” Dempsey recently said. “(A)t the end of the day, our system is built on the fact that it will be our civilian leaders who make that decision and I don’t find that in any way to challenge my manhood, nor my position. In fact, if it were the opposite, I think we should all be concerned.”

Huntsman concluded his comments on Saturday by declaring that “civil war is around the corner in Afghanistan.” He said he doesn’t want to spend more money or lose more troops in that scenario and the U.S. should “move on.”

LGBT

Huntsman Speaks Out Against Santorum’s Polygamy Comments: Treat Everyone With ‘Fairness And Dignity’

By Igor Volsky on Jan 6, 2012 at 12:46 pm

Former Utah governor and GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is speaking out against Rick Santorum’s efforts to link marriage equality to polygamy and urging the former Pennsylvania senator to treat all voters with dignity, Bloomberg reports:

One of the other candidates, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, in an appearance earlier this week compared gay marriage to polygamy, asking voters “what about three men?” Huntsman described that kind of rhetoric as divisive, saying the conversation ought to be based on “fairness and dignity.”

Huntsman is one of the few Republican presidential hopefuls to support civil unions and reciprocal beneficiary rights for same-sex couples, and would allow states to enact marriage equality. He has previously spoken out against homophobia in the campaign, condemning his fellow candidates for allowing a debate audience to jeer an openly-gay servicemember.

Huntsman first embraced civil unions in February 2009, despite supporting a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage in 2004.

Climate Progress

Boston Globe Endorses Huntsman Over Romney, Singling Out Climate and Energy Issues

By Joe Romm on Jan 6, 2012 at 10:43 am

The largest newspaper in the state Mitt Romney once governed has endorsed former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman in the lead up to the New Hampshire primary.

Here’s the key excerpts from the Boston Globe editorial, “For vision and national unity, Huntsman for GOP nominee“:

He has stood up far more forcefully than Romney against those in his party who reject evolution and the science behind global warming….

Strong economic growth put Utah in the top five in job creation during Huntsman’s tenure, while he gave tax credits to companies developing solar energy. He … joined the Western Climate Initiative, which set goals for reducing greenhouse gases.

Of course, even Huntsman has waffled at times — see Call Jon Huntsman “Crazy”: He Flips on Climate Science (and Earns an F in Geography). UPDATE: Huntsman Mostly Flops Back).  But nowhere near as consistently (inconistently?) as Mitt has waffled.

NEWS FLASH

Citing Romney’s Climate Denial, Boston Globe Endorses Huntsman | The Boston Globe, one of the most influential papers for the New Hampshire primary, has endorsed Jon Huntsman over home-state Mitt Romney, in large part because of Romney’s climate denial. While Romney is “trying to appease enough constituencies to get himself the nomination, Huntsman has been bold,” the Boston Globe editors write. “He has stood up far more forcefully than Romney against those in his party who reject evolution and the science behind global warming.” The Globe gave special attention to Huntsman’s pro-climate record as Utah governor as well. “Strong economic growth put Utah in the top five in job creation during Huntsman’s tenure, while he gave tax credits to companies developing solar energy. He offered a sweeping school choice plan, and joined the Western Climate Initiative, which set goals for reducing greenhouse gases.” Although Huntsman has been less of a science-denier than Romney, he has similarly renounced his former support for cap-and-trade and climate action.

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