Daniel Larison has had it just about up to here with all this Jon-Huntsman-as-reasonable-moderate crap:
Yes, Huntsman has gone out of his way to make people perceive him as relatively more moderate than the rest of the field, and his greatest support comes from moderates and independents, but it’s just not true that he is on the “opposite side” of the spectrum from Santorum. If his record and his campaign proposals tell us anything they would show that Huntsman is largely to the right of Santorum or at least as conservative as he is on fiscal and economic issues. For the most part, he is in agreement with Santorum on abortion, and he signed legislation as governor that proves it….
Huntsman supporters are excited by Huntsman’s supposed “nuance.” Leave aside the complete lack of nuance in his positions on Iran and Israel for a moment, and consider how silly this is. On entitlement reform, Huntsman was the first and remains one of the few to endorse Ryan’s budget plan without significant changes. His economic plan has won praise from The Wall Street Journal‘s editors. Despite creating the impression that he doesn’t pander to the party’s main factions, he has been eagerly checking almost all of the required boxes. On the whole, these aren’t “nuanced” or dissident views, but instead tell each faction more or less what it wants to hear.
A small tweak to the above I’d like to raise is the fact that Executives are often only as liberal or conservative as their legislature allows — and one would struggle to find a state more conservative than Utah. So it’s not necessarily the case that Huntsman would be as far-right in another context as he was in Utah, or that that was his preferred, in-a-perfect-world course.
Still, he’s definitely not much of a moderate in terms of policy. He’s rather laid-back and even human-seeming in interviews, and I’d imagine that’s much of the reason why people tend to assume he’s so milquetoast. One thing is clear, though: it’s definitely wrong of me to say he’s like a GOP version of Joe Lieberman; Joe Lieberman was never so ideologically reliable.