Huntsman Steps Into the Republican Vacuum
By MATT BAI
NYT Magazine
‘I’m not sure there’s any way to be prepared for something like this,” Jon Huntsman told me last month. He was reflecting on his debut a few days earlier as a prospective presidential candidate: a gorgeous Thursday evening in New Hampshire when his chartered plane touched down at a little airport and a waiting Suburban whisked him off to Jesse’s, a hillside steakhouse a few miles from the Dartmouth campus. As the recently departed ambassador to China and a former governor of Utah, Huntsman has some experience with polite, state-run media and small cliques of capital reporters. When he stepped out of the car, he had in mind that sort of familiar scene.
What Huntsman encountered, instead, was a crush of boom mikes and jostling reporters holding their digital recorders aloft — the kind of pulsing mass an elected official might expect to run into on the courthouse steps if he’d just been arraigned on charges of lewd behavior. Maybe 75 voters crowded into the back room at Jesse’s, under the low-hanging canoe and the mounted fish and the twin bear statues looming in back, but it was hard for them to get close to Huntsman, and some of them seemed more preoccupied with scoping out the assembled television pundits anyway. (“All I care about is Carl Cameron,” a woman remarked as the Fox News correspondent readied himself a few feet away.)
Huntsman spoke for a mere six minutes, without a microphone, before answering a smattering of questions with practiced, diplomatic vagueness. He introduced his wife, Mary Kaye, and two of his seven children: Liddy, who had just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania; and Gracie Mei, his adopted daughter from China who was celebrating her 12th birthday. The wait staff rolled out a chocolate-mousse cake with 12 candles. Earlier, Huntsman trapped a ladybug in his hands and presented it to her as a gift. “We are the quintessential margin-of-error potential candidate,” he told the crowd. “We’re in the early stages of due diligence, where you get around and have conversations with good people, where you share a little bit in the way of ideas, you reflect upon where your country happens to be. And that takes you into the future, where ultimately you make a decision we never thought we would be making.”
(More here.)
NYT Magazine
‘I’m not sure there’s any way to be prepared for something like this,” Jon Huntsman told me last month. He was reflecting on his debut a few days earlier as a prospective presidential candidate: a gorgeous Thursday evening in New Hampshire when his chartered plane touched down at a little airport and a waiting Suburban whisked him off to Jesse’s, a hillside steakhouse a few miles from the Dartmouth campus. As the recently departed ambassador to China and a former governor of Utah, Huntsman has some experience with polite, state-run media and small cliques of capital reporters. When he stepped out of the car, he had in mind that sort of familiar scene.
What Huntsman encountered, instead, was a crush of boom mikes and jostling reporters holding their digital recorders aloft — the kind of pulsing mass an elected official might expect to run into on the courthouse steps if he’d just been arraigned on charges of lewd behavior. Maybe 75 voters crowded into the back room at Jesse’s, under the low-hanging canoe and the mounted fish and the twin bear statues looming in back, but it was hard for them to get close to Huntsman, and some of them seemed more preoccupied with scoping out the assembled television pundits anyway. (“All I care about is Carl Cameron,” a woman remarked as the Fox News correspondent readied himself a few feet away.)
Huntsman spoke for a mere six minutes, without a microphone, before answering a smattering of questions with practiced, diplomatic vagueness. He introduced his wife, Mary Kaye, and two of his seven children: Liddy, who had just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania; and Gracie Mei, his adopted daughter from China who was celebrating her 12th birthday. The wait staff rolled out a chocolate-mousse cake with 12 candles. Earlier, Huntsman trapped a ladybug in his hands and presented it to her as a gift. “We are the quintessential margin-of-error potential candidate,” he told the crowd. “We’re in the early stages of due diligence, where you get around and have conversations with good people, where you share a little bit in the way of ideas, you reflect upon where your country happens to be. And that takes you into the future, where ultimately you make a decision we never thought we would be making.”
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home