Huntsman Running a Noble, Doomed Campaign

The Republican nominating process, “controlled by the religious warriors and anti-government agitators who dominate straw polls, has reached its logical conclusion,” writes Dana Milbank of the Washington Post: A former pizza exec who "likes to joke about electrocuting illegal immigrants" and has no government credentials is topping the polls, while Jon Huntsman, a former governor and ambassador, is an afterthought. “It’s a new world,” an only-a-little-bitter Huntsman tells Milbank. “You throw out anyone with any connection to real-world experience in government.”

Huntsman is going all-in on New Hampshire—what he calls a “Vegas move”—in a last, desperate fight for the political center, banking on a state where only a third of primary voters are to the far right. Of course, with his campaign out of money and national polls putting him at 1% to 2%, it probably won't work, but Milbank hopes it does. Because “a system that rejects a Jon Huntsman in favor of a Herman Cain isn’t a primary process,” he writes. “It is a primal scream.” (More Jon Huntsman stories.)