Jon Huntsman

Peter Nicholas of The Wall Street Journal is playing dumb. He played it straight when When Politico’s Mike Allen asked Obama campaign manager Jim Messina “which Republican would have had the best shot at beating your boss?” and Messina said Jon Huntsman.

“We were honest about our concerns about Huntsman,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said at a Politico breakfast event Tuesday. “I think Huntsman would have been a very tough candidate.” This is like praising the last player at the end of the bench.

"Tone deaf" Republicans are too conservative, or so said CNN's panel on Friday's Starting Point. CNN's Don Lemon remarked, "I think unless the GOP becomes the GNP, which is the Grand New Party, they're on the verge of extinction because they're tone deaf."

All three guests agreed that the GOP needs to move to the center. How's that for intellectual diversity? Anchor Soledad O'Brien started it off by lauding "one of the very best tweets" from the election, CNN regular Abby Huntsman saying (surprise!) her dad Jon Huntsman should have been the party's nominee. [Video coming soon. Audio here.]

Pseudo-conservative and liberal media darling Joe Scarborough is known for his whacky theories but on Thursday’s Morning Joe he posited a new one that puts the icing on the cake.

Speaking with co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist, the MSNBC host said that if the GOP had selected former Utah Governor Jon Hunstman, the Republican Party would have done much better against President Obama.   [See video below break.  MP3 audio here.]

Is Jon Huntsman headed the way of Charlie Crist?  When the 2016 Dem convention rolls around, will we see the also-ran GOP presidential nomination-seeker on the podium, seconding Hillary's nomination? You've got to wonder after Huntsman's toadying performance today as he made the MSNBC rounds.

After appearing on Morning Joe earlier, Huntsman turned up on Andrea Mitchell's show.  Mitchell posed a laughably-loaded question, bashing Mitt Romney's response to the Obama administration's handling of the embassy attacks. The haughty Huntsman was only too happy to play the useful idiot, concurring that there was "a lot to the criticism"  and ripping Romney as an "impetuous candidate" in a time of foreign policy crisis. View the video after the jump.

It's no secret that Jon Huntsman was the liberal media's Republican darling during primary season. Now he is skipping the GOP convention and has joined the liberal Brookings Institution, and CNN let his daughter Abby, a network regular, voice her father's disdain for today's Republican Party on Tuesday's Starting Point.

Consider her acerbic take on Huntsman introducing Sarah Palin at the 2008 Republican National Convention: "That's one of his least favorite clips." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Dean Reynolds filed a glowing report on Tuesday's CBS This Morning promoting comedian Stephen Colbert's mock campaign against super PACs. Reynolds led the segment by stating, "Before we say that a comedian could have no serious impact on a presidential campaign, let us remember that six days after a poll came out here showing Stephen Colbert slightly ahead of Jon Huntsman, Jon Huntsman quit the race."

After inflating Colbert's supposed impact, the correspondent continued by claiming that "so far, Colbert's effort is not displaying what you would call a light touch." Reynolds then played a clip from an ad released by the comedian's "Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow" super PAC, which blasts GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a "serial killer. He's 'Mitt the Ripper.'"

“With Huntsman gone,” ABC’s Jonathan Karl despaired Monday night, “the field of Republican candidates has lost the only candidate who favored civil unions for gay couples and said he was concerned about climate change.” In his World News report, Karl recalled how Hunstman once “tweeted: ‘To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.’”

Over on the CBS Evening News, Jan Crawford noted how Huntsman was more popular with the news media than with Republicans: “Huntsman’s campaign never really took off, except among newspaper editorial boards.”

Tuning in Morning Joe today, I half expected to discover on the set some professional mourners imported from North Korea, keening and crying over the political demise of Jon Huntsman.

Huntsman had had the Morning Joe crowd from hello.  The overwhelming winner of the bien-pensant MSM primary was amazingly popular—except with actual Republican voters, who didn't dig his moderate positioning and a tone that some found . . . well, how do you say "supercilious" in Mandarin?  Taking today's cake was Joe Scarborough finding Huntsman's "moderate temperament" Reaganesque, and claiming that in rejecting Huntsman, Republicans have "turned their backs" on Ronald Reagan.  Video after the jump.

Former New Hampshire governor John Sununu on Wednesday scolded the media for falling in love with Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman.

Appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Sununu said, “The fact is you missed the whole story here” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

As NewsBusters has been reporting, Chris Matthews has clearly joined the Anyone But Romney for Republican presidential nominee crowd.

Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe Tuesday, the Hardball host enthusiastically endorsed one of the former Massachusetts governor's New Hampshire primary rivals actually saying on live television, "If I were voting here I’d vote for Huntsman because he’s American" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

An hour before CNN screamed “Breaking News” Thursday night over the Boston Globe’s endorsement of Jon Huntsman (basically for not being “pushed” to the right like Mitt Romney), the CBS Evening News trumpeted the presidential bid by Huntsman who “has flown under the radar, despite his impressive resume. He's the chopper-riding popular two-term Governor of Utah with a picture-perfect family...”

Reporter Bill Whitaker’s glowing story hailed Huntsman’s economic plan as “deemed best of the campaign by the Wall Street Journal,” before approvingly touting: “Unlike most of the Republican field, he believes humans contribute to climate change.” Whitaker soon cued up Huntsman to confirm: “You’ve also called yourself ‘the sane Republican.’”

On Friday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer highlighted The Boston Globe endorsement of Jon Huntsman, and noted how, "Joe Klein in Time magazine wrote this about him...'He has proposed the most thoughtful roster of policy initiatives of any candidate in the race.'" Lauer then wondered: "People say this guy is a great candidate. Why hasn't he broken through?...why aren't more people talking about him?"

Lauer directed that question to Meet the Press host David Gregory, who explained: "I just think that a lot of people view him as slightly discordant in this particular primary season. He doesn't have Tea Party support, he's certainly not a favorite among the conservative base." Gregory added: "A lot of people like him who are taking a hard look, are enough people taking a hard look?"

MSNBC's supposedly conservative host Joe Scarborough on Tuesday continued his months-long attack on the Republican presidential candidates.

After telling his Morning Joe viewers that he would consider voting for potential third party candidate Ron Paul if Newt Gingrich won the nomination, Scarborough said he could "in five minutes write a list of 200 Republican members of the House of Representatives" more qualified than "the presidential candidates that are running right now" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

ABC’s Christiane Amanpour just can’t comprehend why Jon Huntsman, with his “eminently sensible” anti-conservative positions, could be losing to Newt Gingrich who is full of “bombast” and “does say some pretty alarming things, some might say outrageous things.” More upsetting, Hunstman is supposedly “reversing” himself on those “eminently sensible positions.” 

Interviewing Huntsman, who appeared from the Granite State, Amanpour noted on Sunday’s This Week that “you are at the bottom of the pack despite the fact that some independents, for instance, in New Hampshire call you the sanest one running,” yet “ what you’re offering does not seem to be resonating. It appears that the Newt Gingrich, sort of bombast and brash in your face against Obama, is what’s resonating.”

CNN's liberal anchor Fareed Zakaria whacked Republicans in an interview clip that aired on CNN Friday, asserting that the GOP primary "wants people to say incendiary things." Zakaria's full interview with faux-conservative presidential candidate Jon Huntsman will air Sunday on Fareed Zakaria GPS.

Zakaria set the table for Huntsman, the liberal media's favorite GOP candidate, to blister the rhetoric of the GOP field as unsustainable. "[T]here is a market for people to say slightly outrageous things," Zakaria noted of the GOP primary. "So you just refuse to say those kinds of incendiary things?" he asked of Huntsman. [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

The liberals on PBS's Inside Washington Friday were all giddy at the thought of Newt Gingrich as the Republican presidential nominee.

So sure this would be good news for the president he adores, syndicated columnist and PBS fixture Mark Shields said this would result in the "landslide reelection victory of Barack Obama" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Was Brooke Baldwin's kid-glove treatment of candidate Jon Huntsman a harbinger of things to come in CNN's Tuesday night debate? The CNN host tossed the liberal media's favorite GOP candidate softball after softball in a Tuesday afternoon interview – while conservative candidate Michele Bachmann was asked Tuesday morning if she regretted running for president.

In an cushy interview during the 3 p.m. hour of Newsroom, Baldwin heaped praise on the Republican who supports same-sex civil unions and who ripped conservatives as "anti-science" for not believing in global warming. The CNN host fawned over Huntsman's "lovely" daughters and slobbered that "you seem pretty unflappable, and if I may, governor, downright nice." [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

Bill Maher spent the bulk of his final program of the season Friday disgracefully attacking any Republican he could think of.

Early in the panel segment of HBO's Real Time, the host went into a tirade about the former governor of Utah saying, "Jon Huntsman can suck my c--k" (video follows with transcript and commentary, strong vulgarity warning):

Jon Stewart, on Thursday's Daily Show, repeatedly mocked Rick Perry for his, as he put it, "brain turd" moment at this week's CNBC debate. However, Perry wasn't the only GOP candidate Stewart made fun of. Everyone from Perry to Santorum took a hit. The only candidate Stewart didn't mock was Mitt Romney, whom the Daily Show host declared to be the winner of the whole race. "It's over! Indecision 2012 Mercy Rule Edition. Because in presidential primaries, as in little league, if one team is up 10-0 in the third you call it a day an you head over to Friendly's for some Fribbles and some food poisoning."
                                             
Stewart initially teased his audience with the Perry clip by calling it: "Rick Perry's now infamous ABC Wide World of Sports agony-of-defeat-worthy brain turd." Then he went on to savage the other GOP contenders on his November 10 show. (video after the jump)

Joe Scarborough has escalated his running war with the conservative blogosphere.  Clearly stung by being branded a RINO—among other things—Scarborough lashed out at "conservative bloggers" this morning.

Springboarding off his handicapping of the GOP presidential primary, in which he asserted that only Romney, Gingrich and Huntsman have a shot, Scarborough said: "I'm right all the time. And I know my Republican party better than you know your Republican party and it pisses you off and I understand why it would. Because you're always calling me a RINO and I'm always right about my party and you're always wrong."  Video and more after the jump.

If the liberal media were allowed to select the Republican presidential nominee, there's little doubt who he'd be: come on up, Jon Huntsman!

On today's Morning Joe, Mark Halperin claimed Huntsman "has as good a chance as any of the other candidates to test Mitt Romney" in New Hampshire.  Mika Brzezinski took the Huntsman-love a large step farther, flatly proclaiming that Huntsman "has all the goods."  Vexed by Huntsman's nearly-invisible primary polling numbers, Mika admitted: "I don't get your party."  Video after the jump.

There are softballs and then there are softballs.

On Sunday's Meet the Press, host David Gregory teed one up for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that was specifically designed to mock the Republican presidential candidates while allowing her to brag uninterrupted about the foreign policy successes of Barack Obama (video follows with transcript and commentary):

MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Friday interviewed 2012 presidential candidate Jon Huntsman and smeared the rest of the Republican field as "crazy," asserting that the Utah Governor is the only "sane" choice. This prompted Huntsman to reply, simply, "Thank you."

The Hardball anchor knocked Michele Bachmann as "looney tunes" and wondered how Huntsman could "sit next to a person who says there shouldn't be any taxes and have a reasonable conversation with her?"  [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Piers Morgan, likely without knowing it, made quite a statement about America's news media Monday.

In an interview with Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman on the CNN program bearing his name, the host said, "I've never seen any candidate who has got better press or had more people say he's a great guy, he'd be perfect, who was polling so low" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

For most Americans, the 2012 presidential campaign will be experienced on television, and voters will evaluate the candidates based on their performances at televised debates, daily news coverage, and in long-form interviews. Even with all of the changes in the media landscape over past several years, the most-watched regular forums for candidate interviews are the broadcast network morning news programs — NBC’s Today, ABC’s Good Morning America, and CBS’s The Early Show, with a combined weekday audience of more than 13 million as of the second quarter of 2011.

If Time magazine were really interested in what a conservative Reagan family member thinks of the GOP 2012 presidential field as it stands now in terms of living up to his father's political legacy, it could have easily asked conservative commentator Michael Reagan for his thoughts on last night's primary debate at the Reagan Presidential Library.

Instead, the magazine tapped liberal Reagan daughter Patti Davis who, predictably, concluded that none of the candidates, with the possible exception of left-leaning Jon Huntsman, fit the bill:

From "Looking for Ronald Reagan -- and Not Finding Him" (emphasis mine):