beastie wrote:I know there is no way that John Huntsman could ever have won the primary, but let's play make-believe. If he had, could he have won the election?
I think he actually would have at least had a chance.
He had the advantage of saying that he didn't take his religion too seriously and so if his wife was to appear on camera showing her upper thighs it would have been less of an issue of hypocrisy.
In actual fact, Huntsman is a far superior diplomat and would have been more readily welcomed by the international community. Could you see Huntsman telling London they're not ready to host the Olympics when he visited London on the even of the games? How about being caught denigrating 47% of the American voting public or telling Palestine they were poorer than Israel becaus they were less righteous?
No, Huntsmen would have been a far superior candidate in all the ways that matter to a public campaign ran in the full heated spotlight of media and world scrutiny.
“We look to not only the spiritual but also the temporal, and we believe that a person who is impoverished temporally cannot blossom spiritually.” Keith McMullin - Counsellor in Presiding Bishopric
"One, two, three...let's go shopping!" Thomas S Monson - Prophet, Seer, Revelator
EAllusion wrote:The fact that Huntsman couldn't get more than a trickle of support in the Republican primaries despite having way disproportionate coverage from the media acting as a wind in his sails suggests we weren't looking at someone capable of putting together a Juggernaut of a political campaign.
Perhaps, but it might just mean there just wasn't a niche in the primary field for a competitor that was any less conservative than the "severely conservative" Romney and the even-more-severely conservatives that gave him a run for his money. Maybe the kind of guy who can only win a trickle of support in the Republican primaries would kick ass in the general election. But it's purely hypothetical and we'll never know—it’s impossible to find out how well somebody would do on the Republican ticket that isn’t first selected by Republican primary voters.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
Analytics wrote:it’s impossible to find out how well somebody would do on the Republican ticket that isn’t first selected by Republican primary voters.
We did have the interesting situation in California where Arnold Schwarzenegger was able to directly run for governor in the recall election against Gray Davis, thus bypassing the Republican selection process.
But it will be very interesting what will happen on the national stage in the next few elections. Change obviously has to come to the Republican party, but will that change come from the leadership, or the "grassroots"?