COMMENTARY | Jon Huntsman, the Holden Caulfield of American politics who famously quit high school to start his own rock band, has bowed out of the hunt for the Republican nomination, leaving the presidential race to phonies. Huntsman's exit gives Mitt Romney, whom he endorsed in his farewell speech broadcast on C-SPAN, a slight boost in South Carolina as moderate Republicans now have no alternative.
A win in South Carolina will provide Romney, whom Huntsman in his farewell called the best equipped nominee to beat Barack Obama, with unstoppable momentum.
The nomination of Romney will set up a November matchup between the two biggest phonies in American politics. Obama, elected as an anti-war progressive who'd return the Democratic Party to its New Deal roots, morphed into Bush 44, governing as a center-right president who kept on George W. Bush's secretary of defense to continued prosecuting W.'s wars.
Obama increasingly tacked right in what he called the spirit of bipartisanship but that many on the left saw as cowardly capitulation to the obstructionist Republicans in Congress. He has shown himself to be a politician who will say or do practically anything, including signing a Defense Reauthorization Act that rolls back the right to habeas corpus, to position himself for re-election.
He will be matched by Romney, who proved during the Jan. 8 debate in New Hampshire when he attacked Huntsman for serving as Obama's ambassador to China that he will say anything to get elected.
Thomas Hardy in The Mayor of Casterbridge wrote that a man's character is his destiny. November seemingly will feature two politicians who might excel at raising billions of dollars in campaign cash but fail the character test. Huntsman has a great deal of character, which likely is why his most enthusiastic supporters in New Hampshire seem to have been ex-Democrats who had registered as independents to show their disgust with Obama, whom they had voted for in 2008.
Presidential politics is a topsy-turvy word, where fair is foul and foul is fair, to quote Shakespeare's Weird Sisters. The democratic process has yielded up two of the biggest phonies in American political history to contend for the greatest office in the world.
Somewhere, in a small corner of New Hampshire where J.D. Salinger slumbers in eternal rest, the shade of Holden Caulfield weeps, not for himself, but for his country.
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