And then there was the talk about that other guy, who actually was about to enter the race—a guy who possessed the rare capacity to make Romney’s blood boil.
7
THE TEST-TUBE CANDIDATE
JON AND MARY KAYE HUNTSMAN, decked out in tuxedo and gown, sashayed down the steps of their new townhouse just north of Dupont Circle and strolled across Connecticut Avenue to the Washington Hilton. They were headed to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. This would be the night Obama dismembered Trump, but for them April 30 would be memorable for more than that. Forty-eight hours earlier, the Huntsmans had returned to America after spending much of the past two years in Beijing, where Jon served as ambassador to China. Tonight would be a welcome home and a coming-out party—and the start of a misadventure as strange and surreal as any in the annals of presidential politics.
Surreal was the word that kept running through Jon’s head as he and his wife swept into the hotel ballroom that Saturday night. In Beijing, Huntsman had been subsumed into a world of lusterless confinement, surrounded by military intelligence officers in an embassy so secure it felt like a prison, about as distant as one could be from the Beltway hurly-burly. Now here he was, smack-dab in the middle of the most glamorous, garish event on the Washington social calendar. And, making matters infinitely weirder, everyone wanted . . . to talk to him.
Huntsman had been to the Correspondents’ Dinner before, when he was governor of Utah. He and Mary Kaye strutted down the red carpet and were ignored (as flashbulbs popped for Madeleine Albright). As ambassador, he’d been just as anonymous. But since January, when Huntsman dropped an unsubtle hint in a Newsweek interview, speculation had been raging that he was coming back to the United States to seek the Republican nomination—and, ultimately, a face-off with his current boss and benefactor.
Huntsman knew that the presidential buzz about him was building, but he hadn’t expected it to transform him into the belle of this particular ball. Colin Powell came up, all smiley and chatty, and said hello. David Gregory asked him to appear on Meet the Press. (Really? thought Huntsman. Never been invited on someone’s show before.) Even Trump shook his hand and welcomed him to the race. My gosh—Don Trump, the guy I read about, Huntsman mused. Maybe this thing is real.
As guests of Mike Bloomberg, Jon and Mary Kaye arrived at their table, where they were seated with Valerie Jarrett. Dealings with the Obamans had been fraught since the conjecture started that Huntsman might be aiming to unseat POTUS. Jarrett greeted the Huntsmans with iciness, through clenched teeth. Obama, in his routine onstage, took a gentle jab at Jon’s fluency in Mandarin, suggesting English was his second language. Seated at an adjacent table, Axelrod leaned over, eyebrow arched, and said, “Welcome back. I see you have a big speech coming up”—a commencement address in the key Republican primary state of South Carolina.
“Well, if you have any suggestions for me, let me know,” Huntsman awkwardly replied.
“I’m sure you have plenty of help,” Axelrod said.
Everyone in politics was aware of who was helping Huntsman: a fifty-two-year-old Texan strategist named John Weaver, who had guided McCain’s outside-the-box campaign in 2000. A longtime rival of Rove, Weaver had a large network of loyalists and a matrix of enemies just as extensive. He was tall and disheveled, murmuring and furtive. By his account, he had taken a flier and assembled a campaign-in-waiting for Huntsman’s return, raising issues of both legality and appearances. The Hatch Act, on the federal books since 1939, restricted election activities by executive-branch officials; by custom and tradition, those involved in foreign policy and national security abstained absolutely from domestic politics. Weaver publicly insisted that there had been no coordination or even contact between him and Huntsman about a 2012 bid. But the Obamans assumed there was more to the tale. Much more.
Weaver was at the Hilton, too. He had run into the Huntsmans on the way in, but shooed them off in a mild panic. (“Governor, please keep walking.”) Arriving at his table, Weaver discovered that one of his seatmates was Plouffe.
“I just met my candidate,” Weaver said innocently.
Plouffe rolled his eyes.
When the dinner was over, Weaver repaired to the hotel bar with a posse of operatives he had recruited to the campaign-in-waiting. No one was certain whether Huntsman was actually running; they hoped to meet with him Monday to find out.
Midnight had passed, amber liquor was flowing, and Weaver’s crew was on its way to seeing double—when the strategist checked his e-mail and scurried out of the bar. Minutes later he returned, phone in hand, and gathered his belongings.
“Guys, I gotta go,” Weaver said. “He wants to see me first thing tomorrow morning.”
• • •
THE REPATRIATION OF Jon Meade Huntsman Jr. was an irresistible story. He was fifty-one years old, with a charming spouse, seven attractive children, oodles of foreign policy expertise, and a glittering résumé that included stints in the administrations of Reagan and both Bushes, as well as experience as an executive at his family’s chemical firm. Elected governor of the Beehive State in 2004 and reelected four years later in a landslide, he was fiscally conservative, pro-gun, and anti-abortion, but moderate on issues such as the environment, immigration, and gay rights. The heterodoxy was one element of what made him intriguing. Another was the impudence of turning on Obama. But most compelling were his ties to the man he would have to roll over to claim the Republican nomination.
As former governors, multimillionaires, and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Huntsman and Romney had much in common. With their lean frames, chiseled features, ramrod postures, and salon-model hair, they looked as if they were related—and were, in fact, distant cousins. They were scions of what one scholar of their religion described as “two royal families of Mormonism,” two clans entwined for generations, once warmly but no longer.
The bonds stretched back to the faith’s founding. Parley Pratt, a contemporary of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and one of the church’s earliest missionaries, was Huntsman’s great-great-great-grandfather and Romney’s great-great-grandfather. Huntsman’s mother, Karen, roomed at the University of Utah with Mitt’s sister, Jane. Karen’s father, David Haight, was the boyhood best friend of Mitt’s dad, George, with whom Huntsman’s father served in the Nixon administration.
Jon Huntsman Sr. kept a lower profile than Romney père, never holding elective office. But he amassed a far greater fortune, founding a packaging company that invented the clamshell box for the Big Mac, then building the conglomerate that made him a billionaire and one of the wealthiest Mormons on the planet. Gruff, impressive, philanthropically munificent, he had a mind-bogglingly ecumenical array of friends: Margaret Thatcher, Dick Cheney, Harry Reid, Warren Buffett, Michael Moore, and Glenn Beck, who once described him as having “the character of George Washington.” Senior’s eldest boy and namesake, whom he called Jonny, was the apple of his eye.
With the help of the father’s political connections, the son rode the fast track. Under Bush 41, Jon was named ambassador to Singapore at thirty-two, making him the youngest U.S. plenipotentiary in a century. But in 1999, his next aspiration—to be the rescuer of the scandal-ridden Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City—was derailed. In seeking the job, Jon squared off against Mitt, whom (incredibly) he had never met. Huntsman Sr. pushed hard for Jonny. The Romney forces fought back with an intense lobbying campaign, accusing the Huntsmans of pursuing the plum to advance Jon’s political ambitions, and reportedly enlisting the Mormon church hierarchy in Mitt’s cause.
Utah governor Mike Leavitt led the search committee, and his decision to pick Romney left the Huntsman family livid. In The Salt Lake Tribune, Huntsman Sr. assailed Mitt as “politically driven” and “very, very slick and fast-talking,” comparing him to Bill Clinton. Huntsman Jr. would complain for years thereafter that he’d been “used” to make a closed process look open, that Romney’s selection was “precooked.”
By the time Romney was gearing up for his 2008 run, the storm seemed to have blown over. Mitt began consulting Jon about foreign policy and trade. Huntsman Sr. signed on as a finance chair to Romney’s PAC. In mid-2005, Huntsman Jr. was quoted in a Salt Lake City newspaper saying, “I’ll do whatever I can” for Romney. “Mitt would make an excellent [presidential] candidate. I’m probably the only governor who has come out this early.” Face to face, he assured Romney of his support.
Yet Huntsman soon started feeling taken for granted, as though he wasn’t part of Mitt’s inner circle. He complained to his gubernatorial chief of staff, Jason Chaffetz, that Romney was just going through the motions—that if Mitt won the White House, he would feel inhibited about naming a fellow Mormon as secretary of state, a job for which Huntsman pined.
McCain, by contrast, was courting Jon like crazy, inviting him on a trip to Iraq in March 2006. When Huntsman returned, Romney, who had picked up murmurs that Jon might be wavering, called to check in. Jon told him all was well. But a few weeks later, with no warning, Huntsman announced that he was backing McCain, joining the Arizonan’s team as a national co-chair.
When Romney heard the news, he hit the roof. Perfidy was a part of politics—Mitt knew that—but he expected better from a Huntsman. He thought of Haight, Jon’s late maternal grandfather and a Mormon apostle, one of the church’s high elders. Mitt had helped him raise money for Brigham Young University; Haight was a giant. What would he have said about this?
Romney got Huntsman on the phone and told him what he thought, hissing the nastiest personal insult he could conjure: “Your grandfather would be ashamed of you!”
Mitt wasn’t finished—his next angry call was to Huntsman Sr.
Your son betrayed us, Romney said. We brought him inside, shared strategy with him. He said he was on our team. Now he’s done this without even having the decency to call me first.
The Huntsmans proffered all manner of justifications for the about-face. Jon Jr. argued that 2008 was shaping up to be a national security election, and that McCain was the better candidate to prosecute those issues. Jon Sr. complained that his son had been kept out of the Romney loop.
Give me a break, Mitt thought. Jon had flipped because he’d decided McCain was more likely to win. It was that simple, and that craven.
From that moment on, Mitt emitted nothing but bile about Huntsman. He was a man of no accomplishments. He had inherited his money, not earned it. He was in politics only because his father had concluded that he had no aptitude for business, and he had become governor only because of Senior’s throw weight and the strength of the family name in Utah. Moreover, Huntsman was a “Jack Mormon,” the equivalent of a Catholic who forgoes mass. (Jon and Mary Kaye were known to enjoy their white wine—more than a glass, every night.) Ann Romney was equally contemptuous, calling Huntsman “cold and arrogant.”
The Huntsmans vice versa’d the vitriol. Their family had built their fortune by making stuff; Mitt got rich by shuffling paper. The Huntsmans were worldly and open-minded when it came to religion; the Romneys were parochial and dogmatic. Jon was in politics for the sake of public service; Mitt was in it for the sake of Mitt. Watching Romney’s performance in 2008—the flips, the flops, the ceaseless attacks on McCain and the other Republicans—Huntsman thanked heaven he had jumped ship.
Being on board the USS McCain was good for Huntsman in other ways, too. It earned him a featured slot at the GOP convention, where he gave the nominating speech for Palin (clumsily, but still). It placed him on the campaign trail around the country that fall, raising his national profile. And it introduced him to Weaver, who had exited McCainworld during a fractious period in the campaign, but not before striking up a friendship with Jon.
The two men discovered they shared a sense that their party had veered off track, which was only reinforced by McCain’s drubbing by Obama. Huntsman and Weaver agreed that Republicans had to appeal to young voters and Hispanics or risk irrelevance. That meant putting a halt to the party’s hard line on social issues, denialism on climate change, and restrictionism on immigration. Huntsman had been moving in this direction already in Utah; now he and Weaver started talking about taking his act to the big stage.
Within days of Obama’s victory—and Huntsman’s Utah reelection, with 78 percent of the vote—Jon was out there showing leg to the national press. In February, at Weaver’s instigation, he took a trip to South Carolina; a visit to Michigan was scheduled for May. Romney was still lying low, but everyone assumed that he wouldn’t be for long. The Mormon rivals appeared to be on a collision course for 2012, with all of the drama that implied.
“They’re Cain and Abel,” a Republican strategist told a reporter. “Two brothers, so similar, but also willing to do anything to get at each other. And in the end, one of them winds up dead.”
The Obamans, however, had a different idea about the timing of the funeral.
• • •
JEFF BADER PONDERED THE QUESTION for a moment before offering an answer. It was the last week of April 2009, and Bader, the senior Asia hand on Obama’s National Security Council staff, was being asked by a White House personnel officer if he had any bright ideas for filling the ambassadorship to China. “Well,” Bader said, “let me suggest a Hail Mary for you: Jon Huntsman.”
“Who’s Jon Huntsman?” came the reply.
Bader had struck up a friendship with Huntsman in 2001, when they both worked in the U.S. Trade Representative’s office under Bush 43. Now Bader ran through Huntsman’s vitae, noting that Jon was a serious Sinophile, fluent in Mandarin. Okay, the personnel officer said, let me run the idea up the chain of command. An hour later, Bader was told that Rahm Emanuel was eager to pursue it.
Emanuel had two unimpeachable reasons to be excited about sending Huntsman to Beijing: he was eminently qualified for the job, and it would be a symbol of bipartisanship. But the chief of staff also saw a bonus benefit: eliminating a potential 2012 rival. Emanuel and Messina doubted that Huntsman could gain the approval of the GOP nominating electorate, but if he did, the guy could be trouble—so why not pack him off to the other side of the planet?
Emanuel reached Huntsman by phone on May 2 while Jon was in Michigan flashing his gams to Republican voters. Weaver was steaming ahead with plans to set up a PAC for Huntsman and recruiting operatives in the early states. But when Emanuel proposed the Middle Kingdom mission, Jon was intrigued, and even more so when Obama called personally and offered him the job three days later.
Just as the White House had mixed motives for wanting him in China, Huntsman was animated by impulses that were by turns idealistic and calculating. He had long dreamed of holding the Beijing post. Both Huntsman and his wife had been smitten with Obama since they first met three years earlier at Coretta Scott King’s funeral. (When Jon and Barack clasped palms, Mary Kaye stargazed, Somewhere, somehow, you two will come together again.) The idea of being part of a Lincolnian team of rivals with 44 was intoxicating to Huntsman.
Still, he also gamed out the opportunity in terms of his presidential ambitions. With one of his closest Salt Lake City confidants, Zions Bank CEO Scott Anderson, Huntsman raised the concern that joining the administration would mark him with a scarlet O among conservatives. Yeah, it might, Anderson said. But moderates and independents will like the idea that you put aside party to serve your country. And presiding over America’s most important geopolitical relationship was a surer route to national prominence and credibility than being governor of Utah. “You don’t get many Jimmy Carters who come along from a small state and win the White House,” Anderson said.
Four days after Obama’s call, Huntsman huddled with the president at the White House and accepted the job—then immediately called Weaver. “I apologize for wasting your time,” Huntsman said. “We’ll see what happens when I come back. I don’t know when that will be.”
Weaver assumed that Huntsman 2012 was a dead deal. The rest of Washington presumed the same, hailing the Obamans for t
heir shrewdness in dispatching a nascent threat. “They Shanghaied the bastard!” Chris Matthews cried on Hardball. “Isn’t that smart?”
Huntsman decamped for China that August, sending a gushing letter to Obama (“You are a remarkable leader”) on his departure. The next time the two men saw each other was in November—in Shanghai, funnily enough. The White House aides accompanying Obama, including Axelrod, Bader, and Jarrett, noted Huntsman’s keenness at schmoozing the press corps, but they thought nothing of it. In public, Jon expansively praised the president, and in private he was still more effusive. Remarking on the ferocity of the Republican opposition to Obamacare, he said, “I don’t recognize my party.”
For the next year, the Obamans were happy as clams with Huntsman, whose ambassadorial performance they considered superb. The only question was how long he would stay in the job.
The answer came in the first week of October 2010, when Huntsman notified the White House that he would be returning sometime in the middle of 2011. Emanuel had just exited the building, so Huntsman told Jarrett instead. The Chinese capital was wearing on his family; two years there would be long enough.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” said Jarrett. “What do you think you’re going to do next?”
Huntsman said he wasn’t sure.
“Would you still be interested in government service?” Jarrett asked. “We’d hate to lose you.”
Actually, yes, Huntsman said. “I might have some ideas of doing government service.”
“Where are you going to live?”
“I’ll probably be in Washington.”
Double Down: Game Change 2012 Page 17