In an interview with POLITICO, the Utah governor says his party needs to change - bigtime. Huntsman takes aim at GOP

There was at least one 2012 presidential contender missing from the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington this weekend, traditionally a testing ground for any Republican even remotely considering a White House bid.

That could be in part because Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. risked getting booed off the stage for some of his views.


Largely under the radar of the national media and even out of sight of many in his own party, Huntsman, 48, is emerging as an articulate, unapologetic and unlikely spokesman for a new brand of Republicanism, one that seems out of vogue at a time when many in the GOP attribute their fall from power to a deviation from right-wing orthodoxy.

Huntsman thinks the party's challenge is more profound, owing less to its excessive spending practices during the Bush era than to sweeping demographic and political changes that threaten to consign

Republicans to a long-term minority status and confine their appeal to narrow sections of the country.

The party needs to be more intellectually rigorous, and to compete for the votes of the young, the elites and minorities, he said in an interview with POLITICO. To do so, the GOP needs to tack toward the middle on environment, gay rights and immigration. And, yes, Ronald Reagan is to be admired – but as much for his oft-overlooked pragmatism as for his conservative principles.

It’s a view that places him out of step with the prevailing conservative sentiment among most members of the GOP base, but it’s also one that makes Huntsman, a wealthy Mormon scion, the first 2012 Republican primary prospect to unabashedly embrace a middle ground somewhere between moderate Northeastern Republicanism and Sun Belt conservatism.

“We need to pull up the stakes of the tent and draw them out a little bit,” he told POLITICO, while in town for the National Governors Associaton meeting.

Huntsman’s model comes not from the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions, but instead resembles a Republican brand of Clintonism: practical solutions, softened rhetorical edges aimed to appeal to the center and an overall modernization of a party badly in need of a new image.

“I would liken it a bit to the transformation of the Tory Party in the U.K.,” Huntsman explained. “The defeat in ’97, John Major to Tony Blair, after years of strong, conservative rule with Margaret Thatcher setting the mark. They went two or three election cycles without recognizing the issues that the younger citizens in the U.K. really felt strongly about. They were a very narrow party of angry people. And they started branching out through, maybe, taking a second look at the issues of the day, much like we’re going to have to do for the Republican Party, to reconnect with the youth, to reconnect with people of color, to reconnect with different geographies that we have lost. You cannot succeed being a party of the South and a couple of Western states. It just – it isn’t long-term sustainable.”

Implied but unsaid was that one of the leaders of that effort to reform the Tory party was David Cameron, the youthful opposition leader who is now poised to become Prime Minister when the next national election is called in Great Britain.

That Huntsman has a similar aspiration also goes unmentioned – he only jokes that he’ll start showing up in Iowa and New Hampshire if they have good motocross races on which he can ride his beloved dirtbike – but is also plain to see.

By the standards of David Brooks’s Traditionalist vs. Reformer dichotomy, Huntsman falls squarely in the second category – perhaps the only potential 2012 candidate to unambiguously do so.

He has little use for the congressional wing of his party and believes their arguments often fall on deaf ears beyond Washington.

“We will be irrelevant as a party until we become the party of solutions and until we become the party of preeminence,” he said. “It’s easy to fall back on gratuitous rhetoric and that’s kind of what this town is all about.”

To become viable again to the 40-and-under bloc that went overwhelmingly for President Obama and will comprise the future voting majority in the country, Huntsman argued the GOP must shift on two issues as generational as they are political: gay rights and the environment.

The two issues “carry more of a generational component than anything else,” he said.

Huntsman, the father of seven, points to his own children, all of whom were born after Reagan’s second term began, to underscore the shift.

“Just sit around your dinner table with your kids, as I do, my teenagers and college kids, and you’ll get a sense of the world for what it is and what it is becoming,” he said. “And it’s a whole lot different than the dinner conversations I used to have with my parents, that grew up during the ’50s.”

After running for governor in 2004 as a supporter of a ballot measure that year that not only banned gay marriage but also civil unions, Huntsman made national news earlier this month by saying that he had changed his mind on civil unions.

Reminded that many in his state disagree with his view – one Salt Lake Tribune poll pegged it at 70% -- Huntsman fired back without hesitation.

“Many agree, and I think the Republican Party will ultimately have to take a lot of competing ideas and blend them into some sort of governing philosophy,” he stated. “That, above all, begins to broaden the base of the party.”

On the environment, Huntsman was just as outspoken and tied the issue to broader problems his party is encountering with educated voters.

“We cannot become the anti-science party and succeed,” he said. “We have to be intellectually honest as a party, and I think we’ve drifted a little bit from intellectual honesty in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, for example, where they would use rigorous science to back up many of their policies, and in this case many of their environmental policies. Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency... .A lot of intellectual rigor went into the policies of those days, and we’ve drifted a little bit from taking seriously the importance of science to buttress much of what we’re doing today, whether it’s basic research and development [or] whether it’s looking at climate science.”

Without acknowledging and addressing issues like climate change, Huntsman said the party stands to lose not only the youth vote but also the constituencies that once formed core GOP’s strongholds--what he called “the old suburbias.”

These are the counties -- highly educated, socially moderate and affluent -- that began favoring Democrats as cultural conservatism came to dominate GOP thinking, often trumping the tax issues on which Republicans had typically won over such voters. Obama won them overwhemingly last fall, cementing the trend.

Two decades ago, those places were reliably Republican--and enamored of Ronald Reagan-style conservatism. Huntsman recalled a different Reagan than some of the party’s true believers.

“I think he has been, in some cases, misinterpreted,” said Huntsman, who was a junior White House staffer in his administration. “Reagan was a person of solid beliefs, but he was also someone with – with a solid dose of pragmatism.”

Huntsman, a fluent Mandarin Chinese speaker who was once Ambassador to Singapore, cited Reagan’s shift to a more moderate stance on China but also hinted at areas where the conservatives of today may find fault with their sainted Gipper.

“He wasn’t afraid to negotiate with the evildoers in the world,” said Huntsman, using a word associated with another president who was emphatically opposed to engaging America’s enemies. “You know, in some cases we shy away from confrontation, meeting people on the world stage. He sat down with Gorbachev.”

On immigration, Huntsman used what amounts to the Scarlet A for many modern-day conservatives.

“He’s also the man, in 1987, who decided that the policy of amnesty would be one way of properly addressing our immigration policy,” Huntsman recalled. “Everyone sort of bowed and accepted that. Today, we don’t.”

Huntsman himself signed a hard-line immigration bill last year but is now saying that he doesn’t think it should take effect this year.

So just how, exactly, is a moderate on such core cultural issues as gays, the environment and immigration supposed to be competitive in a conservative-dominated GOP primary?

Though he may appeal to centrist elites, that doesn’t exactly mean much in Sioux City.

Huntsman said he doesn't expect to be a lonely voice encouraging the party toward the center.

“It will be a whole lot of people who will probably want to expand the horizons so that we include more people into our party,” he said, again citing the Tory model. “There’s no other way to get it done.”

Compounding his challenge, though, is Huntsman’s religion – he hails from a rich and powerful Latter Day Saints family with deep roots in Utah.

As Mitt Romney showed in 2008, a Mormon background can be a hindrance in running in evangelical-dominated early primary states such as Iowa and South Carolina.

On this, Huntsman said Romney, who himself may well run again in 2012, had made it easier for future Mormon candidates.

“Every election cycle will bring new dynamics, people who have never before been in the race, whether it is ethnicity or whether it’s culture or whether it’s religion,” he said. “And in every attempt, you chip away a little bit more at those stereotypes, at those misunderstandings and it paves the way for, you know, the three or four or five behind, who ultimately will make it happen.”