Double Down: Game Change 2012 (24 page)

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.

•   •   •

J
EFF 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 their 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.”

“When you settle back here, come see us,” Jarrett said. “Because we’d love to have you.”

•   •   •

T
HE 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.”