CHAPTER 24

IN THE LEAD-UP TO the 2012 presidential campaign, Jon Huntsman was the potential Republican presidential candidate whom President Obama’s reelection team feared the most. Huntsman’s pedigree as an accomplished, attractive, reform-minded governor of Utah was so compelling, in fact, that some observers wondered whether Obama had been seeking to exile him from the American political scene by choosing him to be ambassador to China in 2009. That appointment, however, amounted to the addition of another impressive credential on Huntsman’s résumé when he decided to enter the race in the spring of 2011. That his billionaire father, Jon Huntsman Sr., was widely expected to bankroll his candidacy was all the more evidence that he could be a serious contender.

John Weaver, who had been John McCain’s top strategist during the 2000 New Hampshire triumph, set the gears in motion for Huntsman to leave Beijing and return to the United States to helm a campaign that had already been built for him. But from the day of his announcement, when members of the media were provided with credentials that spelled Huntsman’s first name incorrectly, just about everything that could go wrong did. By early fall, Huntsman’s once-promising prospects were already tumbling toward irrelevance, requiring him to dramatically scale down his ambitions. In late September, he packed up his national headquarters in Orlando and decamped to New Hampshire, where he planned to bank everything on winning the primary. McCain had twice provided a blueprint on how to pull this off, and with much of the party aligned against the front-runner, Mitt Romney, it appeared to be a gambit that had at least some chance of success. In short order, however, it became clear that Jon Huntsman was no John McCain.

What Huntsman offered the Republican electorate was a dose of sanity in a deeply unsettled Republican race that was replete with colorful characters of dubious viability. With Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain and arch-conservative congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota taking their own unlikely turns at the front of the pack, the soundtrack for the 2012 race for the GOP presidential nomination might have been circus music. Yet Huntsman proved ill-equipped to take advantage of the madness. It wasn’t just the extent to which he oddly sought to downplay his conservative record that made him look anemic, his inconsistent style of campaigning also held him back. One day, he would make it a point to emphasize that he was the adult in the room—the responsible leader who’d always take the substantive high ground in the race. The next, he was characterizing GOP front-runner Mitt Romney as a “perfectly lubricated weathervane” who “doesn’t believe in putting his country first.” Huntsman did have one powerful asset working in his favor: the media wanted a real race, and with a series of other long-shot Republican contenders rising and falling in quick succession, he looked like the candidate who was best positioned to give Romney a scare in New Hampshire.

As it turned out, Romney never had reason to be particularly concerned, even as he maintained a slightly improved version of the quirky style that he had exhibited during his 2008 run. When he was campaigning in New Hampshire, the hard-charging former Massachusetts governor made it a point to return to his home in the Boston suburb of Belmont almost every night. After one stint on the trail, Romney told Susan Duprey, who served as chief of staff for his wife, Ann, about how much he was looking forward to getting back to Belmont. “As soon as I get home,” Duprey recalled the multimillionaire candidate telling her, “I’m going to open my suitcase, and I’m going to separate my clothes into the dark pile and the light pile, and then I’m going to put them into the washer.” It’s an endearing tale in retrospect, and it’d be a stretch to say that Romney was more concerned about doing his own laundry properly than he was maximizing his time on the campaign trail in New Hampshire—but perhaps not much of one.

Huntsman, meanwhile, was gunning for second place in New Hampshire, and he was making some progress on that front. On the Sunday before Primary Day, I trailed the bomber-jacket-clad, Kennedy-handsome candidate around the state. After months of inconsistency and depressingly low turnout at his events, the energy that was suddenly surrounding Huntsman became palpable and contagious. And no one felt it more viscerally than the candidate. At a jam-packed coffee shop in Hempstead, he leaped onto the counter and beamed down at the crowd. “They say this state loves an underdog,” Huntsman called out. “Ladies and gentlemen, here is your underdog!” His supporters roared. Later that night, he packed a crowd of over three hundred people—mammoth, by Huntsman’s standards—into a town-hall meeting in the liberal college town of Keene. They were fired up there, too. Huntsman was clearly feeding off the energy, as he appeared to be peaking just at the right time. Would this go down as the latest installment in the long volume of soaring New Hampshire comeback stories? No, it would not. But the manner in which it all fizzled out would be memorable.

On Primary Night, the Huntsman campaign booked the Black Brimmer—a cramped and divey two-story bar and “night club” on the corner of Elm and Lowell Streets in Manchester. As inconclusive exit polling numbers and the requisite, anecdotal observations about turnout started coming in that afternoon, Huntsman’s national spokesperson, Tim Miller, swung by the venue to talk through logistics with the members of the advance team, who were responsible for setting up the press risers, stage, and other basic elements of this low-budget celebration. One of these young advance staffers mentioned to Miller that he had procured a couple of confetti cannons to punctuate the occasion, in the event that there was reason to celebrate. Miller absorbed this information and then gave his directive: If Huntsman somehow finished in first place, it barely merited mentioning, they would not only douse the place in a thick coating of confetti, the campaign team might consider burning down the bar in celebration. If he got second place, Miller added, the young staffer should launch the confetti at will. It’d be a clear moral victory, and they wanted to project enthusiasm heading into South Carolina.

Third place? That was tricky. Huntsman had bet it all on New Hampshire, and it was difficult to see any realistic path forward for him if he couldn’t place or show. Still, it had been a long, tough campaign, and the campaign might be eager to commemorate a moral victory, even if it was of questionable value. Miller decided that in the event of a third-place showing, the confetti launch decision would be contingent on what kind of bronze medal they’d earned. If Huntsman finished in a close third—one that could reasonably be deemed just about as good as a second-place showing, he would then seriously consider authorizing a confetti launch. But if it was a distant third-place finish, he told the young staffer, hold the confetti.

It turned out that the Huntsman party attracted a much bigger crowd than the campaign had expected—much of it members of the media. The venue was packed to the walls, and everyone’s hopes seemed to get a little higher with each passing hour that the bar stayed open and the beer bottles piled up. Still, no one on hand appeared to be especially surprised or disappointed when Huntsman ended up finishing in a distant third place—twenty-two points behind Romney and six points behind the second-place finisher, Ron Paul. With no real operation or base of support to speak of in any of the states ahead, Jon Huntsman’s campaign was over.

Back at his private suite, Huntsman powwowed with top aides and family members to decide whether he should continue on to South Carolina as planned. He decided that he at least wanted to let the dust settle overnight and keep his options open. There was no particular rush to get out of the race at that point and just enough uncertainty about the results to make “sleeping on it” a reasonable judgment, even if he was all but certain that there was no path forward. Because he wasn’t going to bail out right away, it was clear that Huntsman needed to strike an optimistic tone when he spoke that night. “Maybe I’ll stay in,” after all, wasn’t a reasonable message to convey to his supporters. He had to project enthusiasm.

When he took the stage at the Black Brimmer, Huntsman—like countless losing candidates before him—beamed with the fervor of someone who’d just won the Super Bowl, the Nobel Prize, and the World Cup all at once—not a presidential hopeful who had just lost his most important state to Ron Paul. “I’d say third place is a Ticket to Ride, ladies and gentleman!” Huntsman, the passionate classic rock fan, declared to the rowdy crowd, who might have replied, “Beep beep, beep beep, yeah!” had he added that the bar was staying open for another hour.

Then it happened. I was somewhere in the back of the room, and so I didn’t see it right away. But I remember hearing a quick popping sound, and then the confetti started raining down from above. Unbeknownst to Miller, the young advance staffer had gone rogue. The campaign may have been over, but that confetti was not going to waste.

Within minutes, the Romney campaign began circulating a video clip of Huntsman’s third-place confetti launch internally. The moment instantaneously became a running punch line for Romney’s director of operations, Will Ritter. Every time Romney would go on to lose a primary or caucus state, Ritter would repeat the same warning to his young staff: “Don’t blast the cannons!”

In New Hampshire, not every runner-up can be a Comeback Kid.