Daniel Larison mentions that he, too, has thought before of Jon Huntsman as a kind of Red State Joe Lieberman…but he’s perplexed as to why it is that Democrats like the guy the way they do:
Here’s what puzzles me: why would “wonky lefties” like him? Forget about the Iran and Israel business for the moment. Just look at Huntsman’s record and his proposals as a candidate on domestic issues. He is more or less an older version of Paul Ryan, whom “wonky lefties” certainly do not adore…. Huntsman has been the candidate willing to make meaningless gestures to demonstrate that he is not in lockstep with his party on matters relating to science and environmental policy, but his actual positions on environmental policy in this campaign are essentially no different from the other candidates’ views… The hawkish Republican love affair with Joe Lieberman has been deeply unfortunate in many ways, but at least everyone knows why they are heaping praise on the man. What explains similar liberal adulation for Huntsman? There doesn’t seem to be any policy or political reason for it. Is it simply a bizarre reverse tribalism that inspires liberals to root for a candidate that conservatives have rejected?
Larison is absolutely right to point out that, policy-wise, Huntsman is almost as conservative as they come (he’s pretty centrist on gay rights). But I’m sure he’s also aware of the unpleasant fact that renders the continuing functioning of democracy — however ugly and imperfect it may be — rather miraculous: people don’t vote on policy.
Just as Barack Obama spent much of his primary campaign sounding and seeming like the liberal alternative to Clinton when in reality his positions were often identical or to the right of the current Secretary of State, Huntsman sounds and seems like the Lefty among the 2012 GOP crop. At least to Lefties (and I should note that the criteria for what Lefties in this example think of as being like them is exceedingly self-flattering).
Another way of saying the same thing is that, for a politician, Huntsman seems semi-normal and almost kind of cool. We — Lefties and Righties alike — tend to unconsciously assume that someone we like not only likes us in return but is like us, too. So while it’s probably the case that some Democrats like Huntsman because so many Republicans don’t, I’d guess that what’s happening is actually simpler and even more superficial: they just like the guy, and any policy-based cognitive dissonance is shrugged off or waved away.