Sunday Reading
by digby
When Walter Shapiro tweets that we should read something for the great writing, it’s a really good idea to listen. Case in point, this profile of Jon Huntsman in the Weekly Standard.
Among the campaign’s consultants was the adman Fred Davis, a veteran of various John McCain campaigns who most recently gained fame for the mysterious “demon sheep” ad he produced for the California senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina last year. (The ad featured a pasture full of sheep and a guy in a sheep’s costume and was, of course, catnip to bored-stiff reporters but less appealing to voters, whose sensibilities haven’t yet evolved into postmodernism, even in California.) I see that the 2012 Political Reporter’s Stylebook requires that upon first reference Davis must be called “unconventional,” although “maverick” is allowed as a substitute under some circumstances. True to form, the scene Davis staged for Huntsman’s announcement was unconventional in the conventional manner.
The event had the feel of an unsubtle satire dreamed up by some snotty 1970s aging-hippie movie director—Robert Altman, say—to prove that political candidates are just pretty-boy airheads engaged in a show-biz sham. In addition to the lifted lamp of Lady Liberty and the overdone backdrop, there was the handsome candidate and his excellent hair, tossed Kennedily by a gentle wind off the river. There was the lovely wife wreathed in smiles, accompanied by a raft of offspring who looked as if Madame Tussaud’s “Brady Bunch” exhibit had sprung wondrously to life.
Wow — “tossed Kennedily”.
Read the whole thing and not just for the writing. Read it for the thesis that Hunstman is a joke mostly because he foolishly made the miscalculation that 2008 was a repudiation of conservatism:
Lucky for Republicans, the “broad discussion about the future of our party” never took place. Instead, Obama’s liberalism gave them a chance to position themselves as unhyphenated conservatives, the kind that existed before rethinking. (It’s good to remember that the Bush-era party the rethinkers wanted to rethink was itself a product of rethinking, a hyphenated conservatism called “big-government conservatism.”) In 2010 Republicans were swept back to power without moving a muscle, ideologically, and the issues that Huntsman wanted to place at the top of the party’s agenda, education and the environment, have fallen low on the list of voters’ concerns, as they always will when times are rough. Matt Bai in the New York Times compared Huntsman the 2011 presidential candidate to a cave man transplanted from his own time to ours. From early 2009 to 2011 is hardly a geological epoch, but it’s true—to switch metaphors—that as 2012 approaches the rethinking man’s candidate looks like last year’s model.
We’ll see. I have to say that as much as liberals (and some sort-of moderate style Republicans) may have misread the 2008 election, the conservative misreading of 2010 is epic.
But the writing sure is enjoyable.
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