Parts of the conservative blogosphere suddenly seem to be waking up to the fact that Jon Huntsman actually has a pretty conservative background and - indeed - policies. For instance, RedState founder Erick Erickson has gone from being one of Huntsman’s fiercest foes to kinda sorta coming round to him enough that his words can be used in Huntsman’s own advertizing. And it looks like the former ambassador to China has found a new card to play in his effort to woo conservative hearts in these crucial days before the new year.
RedState’s Leon Wolf recently conducted an interview with Huntsman in which the former Utah governor lost no opportunity to tout his Wall Street Journal-approved tax policies. But it was when the subject moved to China’s “one child” policy that Huntsman really pulled out all the stops. Until earlier this year he was - of course - Obama’s ambassador to China, and he also has an adopted daughter who is Chinese — Gracie Mei Huntsman. China’s policy is much loathed by many American right-wingers, and Christians in particular. It was presumably with this in mind that Huntsman made his rather dramatic play:
Q. What, if anything should be done by the United States to encourage China to change its “one child” policy?A. Well, uh, I probably did more than anybody. Uh, because my daughter Gracie was known by 1.3 billion people in China. Everybody heard her story. They knew that we had adopted her and given her life. Uh, they knew that she got to seek a great educational opportunity - a young, pretty, brilliant girl who was, I mean, it was all the time in China. I dare to say that our one act of adopting a girl, as United States Ambassador to China, in many minds - and this would be impossible to quantify - but I tell you, may have had more of an impact in that country, one thing, than all the speeches combined of U.S. government officials over the years.
Earlier this year Vice President Joe Biden found himself in hot water with social conservatives for seeming to accept the underlying principles of the policy (even though he was in fact critiquing it for different reasons). With his grandiose claim, Huntsman has moved about as far away from that as it’s possible to get.
Polls have shown him gaining some momentum in New Hampshire pretty much ever since he stopped tweeting snide insults at the GOP base. He’s yet to experience a boomlet of Newt-like or even Cain-like proportions, but now that such a thing doesn’t seem utterly impossible he’s courting the Christian right instead of mocking them.
Thomas Lane
Thomas Lane is an associate editor at Talking Points Memo. He previously produced and reported for the BBC from its UN Bureau in New York. He is a dual citizen of the US and the UK.
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