“When you settle back here, come see us,” Jarrett said. “Because we’d love to have you.”
• • •
THE NEW TOWNHOUSE WAS one sign that Jon’s planning was more advanced than he was letting on. A four-story, five-bedroom, Federal-style beauty in the tony Kalorama neighborhood, it had served as the set for Top Chef: D.C. The Huntsmans had purchased the place for $3.6 million back in June but kept the transaction quiet. It wasn’t the only thing they were keeping that way.
Contrary to everyone else’s assumptions, Huntsman never believed that accepting Beijing took 2012 off the table. In his conversations with Anderson before he left, he was clear-eyed that the White House was, in part, attempting to sideline him. Anderson suggested that, if “the stars aligned,” Jon could come back after two years and run. “If you win, that’s fabulous, and if you lose, it sets you up well for 2016,” his friend contended. Huntsman agreed.
I won’t let myself be written off by going over there, he said. I can play this game.
His gamesmanship had begun even before he set off abroad. Approached by an Academy Award–winning producer about making the Huntsman family’s excursion the focus of a documentary on U.S.-China relations, Jon and Mary Kaye were delighted and provided extraordinary access. The cameras shot them surrounded by packed boxes in their house in Utah and unpacking in Beijing; the crew made eight trips to China to gather footage. Huntsman saw the movie as a way to maintain his visibility back home. His hope was that it would debut at the Sundance Film Festival—in January 2012.
Even seven thousand miles away from Washington, the looming campaign found its way to his doorstep. The American CEOs who turned up at the embassy all wanted to talk politics. Their growing disdain for Obama was matched by their revulsion at the hair-on-fire rantings of the Tea Party. They were lukewarm on the cold fish Romney and desperate for a temperate internationalist to save them. You should run, they said to Huntsman. Business would stand behind you.
If the blandishments turned Huntsman’s head, the caliber of the blandishers inflated it like a balloon. To his family and intimates, he excitedly recounted their names: Jeff Immelt, Henry Kravis, and Jamie Dimon, who, Jon reported, was especially passionate about his taking on Obama.
The encouragement of his family mattered even more. Huntsman’s three twentysomething daughters—Mary Anne, Abby, and Liddy—thought Romney was a sham and wanted their dad to make a run at him. Mary Kaye amplified their sentiments. Ever since the Salt Lake City Olympics uproar, she had considered Mitt a clammy creature of the Mormon mafia. (Her family was Episcopalian.) The idea of Romney as the Republican nominee struck her as intolerable, especially when her husband was available.
Jon held his cards close even with his family; as ambassador, his phone calls and e-mail were under surveillance, his residence possibly bugged. But in the fall of 2010, Mary Kaye began e-mailing Weaver and asking about 2012. Sometimes two or three times a day the missives hit his inbox: What’s the state of the race? Who’s in? Who’s out? What do you think? She referred to her husband as “HE,” a code that probably would not have provided much protection had the communications been exposed. Weaver knew how close the couple was. He assumed that Jon was using his wife as a proxy and a backchannel, especially as her messages became more pointed: that they were planning to return in the spring, that her man might have “another run in him.”
Weaver had never given up the ghost on Huntsman. That August, he had helped Anderson set up a Utah-based fund-raising entity called R-PAC, thinking more about 2016 than 2012. But Mary Kaye’s e-mails suggested a new timetable—and so did an invitation to meet with her and Jon the week before Christmas in Washington, when the couple would be bunking in their new home on a holiday break from Beijing.
Weaver wasn’t the only top-shelf national strategist to receive such a summons. On December 17, the Huntsmans sat down in their D.C. living room with Nick Ayers, an up-and-coming young operative who had spent the previous four years as executive director of the Republican Governors Association—and was now on the hunt for a presidential campaign to manage. Mary Kaye did most of the talking; Jon was more circumspect, pointing out to Ayers that he had to “be careful how I do what I do and even what I say to you.” But he also made clear that he was seriously considering a run.
The next morning, Weaver replaced Ayers amid the cardboard boxes in the Huntsman abode. Having researched the Hatch Act, Weaver wasn’t surprised that Mary Kaye took the lead. But Jon was more forthcoming than he’d been the day before. He talked about his view of the field: that it amounted to Romney and a bunch of Tea Party yahoos. He talked about his respect for Barbour and Daniels, asking Weaver if he thought either would get in. (No.) He talked about timing, about staffing, about money, about how to deal politically with his service to Obama. While Huntsman prefaced many of his comments in the conditional—“If I decide to move forward”—he was signaling about as subtly as an airport ramper waving orange batons.
Weaver got the message. Two days later he was on a flight to Salt Lake City for meetings with Huntsman’s chief of staff from Beijing, Neil Ashdown, and with Anderson about R-PAC, which would now be converted into a vehicle for a shadow campaign until Jon’s return stateside.
Back in Washington, however, Huntsman’s semaphoring was spinning out of control. With Weaver’s voice still echoing in his living room, Jon conducted an interview with a Newsweek reporter, who asked about his presidential intentions. “I’m really focused on what we’re doing in our current position,” Huntsman said. “But we won’t do this forever, and I think we may have one final run left in our bones.” Pressed to rule out 2012, he “decline[d] to comment,” said the magazine.
The Newsweek piece appeared on January 1. The West Wing instantly erupted. In seventeen days, Chinese president Hu Jintao was coming to Washington for a state visit; Huntsman was slated to attend the state dinner feting him. Now America’s ambassador to China was indicating he might be quitting his job to challenge Obama. The story was bound to stir up all the wrong kind of interest.
Jeff Bader was baffled and concerned. A few months earlier, over dinner in Beijing, Huntsman had employed a similar one-more-race-in-me locution—but specifically said he was referring to 2016. Bader picked up the phone and rang Huntsman, who was now back in China. What’s this story about? Bader asked. It’s going to get attention. We need to know what to say.
“I can’t help what people write,” Huntsman said. “I’m just saying ‘No comment,’ and you should say ‘No comment.’”
“Jon, look, we can’t just say ‘No comment,’” Bader replied. “That’s just not gonna fly.”
“Well, if people don’t want me to come back for the state visit, so be it. I won’t come back.”
Bader was unsettled; he had never heard his friend sound so defensive. The next day, he called NSC director Tom Donilon and said, “Tom, I know Jon pretty well. It’s clear to me that there’s something going on here. You may want to talk to him.”
Donilon took the matter to Obama first. The president’s reaction was relaxed but unequivocal. Look, he said, I have no problem with people running for president. But they can’t run for president while they’re working as ambassadors in this administration. It’s either-or.
Donilon conveyed that message to Huntsman. Makes perfect sense to me, Jon said. As long as I’m your ambassador, I’m your ambassador and nothing else.
The Obamans were right that the press would find the topic too titillating to avoid during the state visit. At a joint press conference of the two presidents in the East Room on January 19, the AP’s Ben Feller, standing right behind Huntsman, asked Obama what he made of the speculation that “the gentleman in front of me . . . might run against you in 2012.”
As Huntsman shriveled in his seat, Obama gently twisted the knife. “I couldn’t be happier with the ambassador’s service, and I’m sure he will be very successful in whatever endeavors he chooses in the future,” the president said. “And I�
��m sure that him having worked so well for me will be a great asset in any Republican primary.”
Some of the Obamans were even sharper. At the state dinner that night, Axelrod sidled up to Huntsman and probed him. Huntsman squirmed and said, “Well, this is all blown way out of proportion”—a non-denial that annoyed Axelrod for its shiftiness. For months thereafter, Axe would stalk into the Oval Office, brandishing stories about Huntsman 2012, braying to Obama, Have you seen what this guy has done now?
Bill Daley, at this point new to his job as chief of staff, was even less amused. On January 27, after reading a Washington Post article on Huntsman’s inner circle, including Weaver, Anderson, and Ashdown—“a team of political operatives and fundraisers [that] have begun informal talks and outreach to ensure he could rapidly ramp up”—Daley phoned Huntsman in the middle of the night in Beijing.
“This is a pretty shitty way to treat someone who gave you the opportunity of a lifetime,” Daley flared. Huntsman stammered something about being unaware of what all the fuss was about.
“Go down the hall and ask your chief of staff,” Daley grumbled, and hung up.
Two nights later, the Huntsmans were back in Washington for the annual Alfalfa Club Dinner. From the stage, Daley went after Jon again, this time with humor rather than the hammer. “It’s also good to see . . . our ambassador to China,” Daley needled. “Or as we call him around the White House: the Manchurian Candidate.”
Jon was abashed; Mary Kaye, mortified. The situation was becoming untenable. On January 31, they had lunch with Bader and his wife at Cafe Milano, in Georgetown. Huntsman handed his friend his letter of resignation, effective May 1, to submit to the White House.
Obama expressed no surprise, and little irritation. Huntsman was doubtless being disloyal, the president told his aides, but more striking was the fancifulness of the quest on which the ambassador was embarking. Among the potential GOP challengers, Obama remarked to Plouffe, “he’s the sanest of the group.” But how could that be an asset in seeking the nomination of this Republican Party?
• • •
HUNTSMAN’S SANITY WAS the least of Weaver’s problems. From a standing start, the strategist had three months to assemble an organization, create momentum, and begin fashioning a national brand for a candidate who was virtually unknown to the Republican electorate. A candidate who lived on the other side of the world, who hadn’t firmly committed to running, and with whom Weaver was effectively prohibited from conferring. Man.
Weaver didn’t shrink from the task. He sank his canines in deep. Though the press fixated on his brooding idealism, Weaver was at bottom a hard-boiled operator. He knew the game, the players, the secret passageways, and the way to win, even if he didn’t always reach the finish line. He had no compunction about bending the rules; those who played strictly by the book were suckers, he thought. In 2000, McCain’s operation saw itself as a pirate ship, and Weaver was its remorseless captain. (He referred to himself as “the icy hand of death.”) Now a different metaphor applied. In the absence of a candidate, he and his acolytes were building a test-tube campaign, with Weaver as the chief mad scientist.
Their laboratory announced that it was open for business on February 22, with the launch of a website for the newly rechristened Horizon PAC. While making no mention of Huntsman, the site’s home page featured a bright red H and the coy slogan MAYBE SOMEDAY. Its unveiling was accompanied by an e-mail to reporters from a PAC staffer describing the committee as a “campaign-in-waiting.”
The site stirred up a flurry of stories raising thorny questions: about whether it was proper for such a PAC, which could accept unlimited contributions, to be financing what appeared to be the precursor of a presidential campaign; about the possibility that, if Huntsman was encouraging the outfit’s activities, he was violating the Hatch Act. Weaver insisted that Horizon PAC’s purpose was to raise money for a new generation of conservative candidates. As for Huntsman, the strategist told Politico that his last contact with the diplomat had come in the form of a Christmas card. “There’s no other channel, there’s no Wo Fat from Hawaii Five-O, there’s no carrier pigeons,” he said. “None of that.”
In truth, Horizon PAC was doing nothing to identify like-minded candidates to fund (and never would); its function was to pay the salaries of Weaver’s crew and lock up consultants for a Huntsman presidential campaign. While there were no carrier pigeons roosting on Weaver’s window, by February he was talking regularly with Huntsman Sr., who said that he communicated with his son every day—and who visited him in China that spring and discussed the impending race. I’m a riverboat gambler, the elder Jon told the younger. Romney will be the favorite, but I like your odds.
The test-tubers also had other open channels to Beijing. They started an e-mail list for the daily distribution of news clips about the shadow campaign; among the recipients were Ashdown and Mary Kaye. Mrs. Huntsman monitored the clips closely, continuing to pepper Weaver with e-mails about the race to come. After Politico ran a story about Jon’s youthful dabblings in a rock band, she indicated that the ambassador was “a bit worried about” the piece. She pushed to enlist elite opinion-mongers to Jon’s cause. (“Peggy Noonan would be a good one to write something,” she suggested.) She kept Weaver abreast of efforts to set up a meeting between her husband and David Gergen. She worked with the team to finalize arrangements for Jon’s commencement address in South Carolina in May.
The clips Mary Kaye was receiving showed that the test-tubers were doing a bang-up job of generating buzz. The doubts about Romney and the nonexistence of exciting alternatives had created a vacuum, and Weaver’s lab mates aggressively stepped in to fill it. Press hand Tim Miller massaged the Beltway media, whispering scooplets to Politico and tweeting Huntsman tidbits. Adman Fred Davis toured the country, urging donors to hold off on Mitt until Jon’s return. Turning Huntsman’s status as a missing person to their advantage, they stoked the image of him as international man of mystery.
The careful burnishing of the Huntsman brand seemed to falter only once—with the April revelation, by the conservative Daily Caller, of the “remarkable leader” letter he sent to Obama when he set off for China. Many assumed that the missive had been leaked by the administration, but it was actually the work of the test-tubers. Having dug the letter up in Huntsman’s gubernatorial archive in Utah, they wanted to lance the boil before his return.
In Beijing, Mary Kaye was upset at the reaction to the story on the right. (“The uniqueness about HE is his civility and respect for others,” she e-mailed Weaver. “He is tough but diplomatic. The fact that one is criticized for being gracious, instead of filled with hate for someone who might be of a different party, is very sad.”) But in the White House, Plouffe was struck by the savviness of the move. Where the hell did that letter come from? he thought. Followed by, This son of a bitch is pretty smart.
All the while, Weaver was scaling up the campaign-in-waiting at a breakneck pace. To make up for Romney’s head start, Team Huntsman had to get big fast. By the end of April there were a dozen staffers, five outside firms, and thirty-two fund-raising consultants (including one dedicated solely to raising money from the gay community) on the Horizon PAC payroll.
Weaver was legendary for his capacity to burn through cash; his profligacy had been one cause of his split with McCain. But he assured his crew that finances would be no problem this time. In his talks with Huntsman Sr., Weaver said, the old man had flatly declared, “My son will not lose because of money,” pledging that he would plow big bucks into the PAC and eventually into a pro-Huntsman super PAC. He also promised that he would be the campaign’s de facto finance chair, tapping his millionaire and billionaire pals, and claimed that dozens of Huntsman relatives would open their checkbooks, too. And all of that was apart from Jon Jr. himself, who Weaver asserted was worth north of $100 million and ready to pony up for his campaign.
Most of Weaver’s lab assistants had never laid eyes on Huntsman. Their labors on his behalf
required a willing suspension of disbelief—which was enabled by the dancing dollar signs before their eyes. The shadow campaign’s fund-raiser, Jim McCray, conceived of “Daddy Huntsman,” as they all called him, as a latter-day Joe Kennedy. We’re gonna fly around the country in his G5, McCray fantasized. We’re just going to fucking crush it.
For the press and the rest of the political realm, the Huntsman family’s loadedness lent Jon’s putative candidacy a final measure of credibility—further fueling the aura of anticipation that awaited him at the Correspondents’ Dinner. He was handsome, he was smart, he was raring to go. And by self-funding his campaign, he could match Romney dollar for dollar.
The morning after the dinner, Weaver and one of his people, Susie Wiles, walked over from the Hilton to Huntsman’s home and rang the bell. Jon answered the door in a flannel shirt and jeans.
“Hi, I’m Susie,” Wiles chirped, extending her hand. “I’m gonna manage your campaign.”
And with that, the test-tube phase abruptly ended—and something even more bizarre began.
• • •
APART FROM A QUICK breakfast with Rupert Murdoch, Huntsman spent his first day in years as a private citizen in a marathon meeting with his soon-to-be campaign team. Brutally jet-lagged but hot to trot, he signed the paperwork to form an exploratory committee. “We’ve decided we want to do this,” he announced.
Huntsman had never worked with consultants or operatives back in Utah, let alone high-end hired guns. He was dimly aware of Weaver’s reputation as a mercurial fomenter of internal strife; Cindy McCain had recently passed through Beijing and warned him and Mary Kaye to watch their backsides. But Huntsman had already placed a lot of faith in Weaver, and the team assembled in his living room seemed first-rate. He accepted them lock, stock, and barrel, with no questions asked, and issued several directives: that his campaign be civil, substantive, and have “no drama.”
The next three weeks were a parade of public triumphs for Huntsman, as supply met pent-up demand. In Washington, he paid courtesy calls on Capitol Hill and found senators stacked up to meet him; receptions with lobbyists and young D.C. professionals were standing room only. In New York, he was greeted by a receiving line of the business elite: Kravis, Ron Perelman, Herb and Jeanne Siegel, Jimmy Lee. His foray to South Carolina on May 7 was a resounding hit. “‘The consensus was, Holy crap, this guy looks like a president,’ said one [insider],” CNN’s Peter Hamby wrote. “‘I have never seen anybody sweep into this state . . . and get as much accomplished in forty-eight hours.’”
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