Huntsman’s resignation, echoes of the past
So when John Huntsman resigned officially as U.S. Ambassador to China the other day it was widely assumed that he did so in order to make way for a potential Presidential bid in 2012. The Obama administration was pretty notable in it’s early days for stressing merit to the degree that they handed out a lot of key jobs to people who were not political allies of the President. If Huntsman runs it will be notable for someone from the other party being given a serious policy job in an administration, which usually carries the expectation of political blandness if not loyalty, to resign in order to challenge the erstwhile boss. But of course this kind of thing happens more in an intra-party setting, and the episode reminded me of George H. W. Bush’s time as “ambassador” in China. As the 76 election approached, Bush was positioning himself and had a lot of allies. It was of course widely assumed that he wanted to be nominated as VP even if he did not opt to challenge Ford for the nomination – and the political legend has always gone that Don Rumsfeld, the Ford’s chief of staff, came up with the maneuver of pulling him from China to go to the CIA at the last minute. He is supposed to have been counting on Bush senior’s unstinting sense of public service and love for national security issues to make him accept the CIA job and get out of the way politically. Whatever the calculus was, it worked. Bush went to the CIA for 357 days as Director – and apparently loved every minute of it from his own recollections. Too bad we didn’t think of that fast enough with Ambassador Huntsman…
