The Next McCain?

He liberalized liquor laws that were crafted 40 years earlier with the church’s help and had befuddled drinkers ever since. And he committed Utah  to a regional cap-and-trade effort to combat climate change, to the outrage of Utah’s coal, oil, and gas industry.

If this all sounds very McCain-like, that’s not a coincidence. Huntsman became McCain’s national co-chairman during the last election, prompting much griping as most Utah Republicans were lining up behind Mitt Romney, who ran the state’s 2002 Winter Olympics.

Since last year’s Republican wipeout, Huntsman has criticized of the party the way McCain once did. Galled by the stranglehold of the religious right, he has challenged the party to open itself up to young voters and new ideas. He’s a fan of motocross, and has a collection of guitars and drums in the basement of the governor’s mansion.  His message resonated in some quarters, and his national profile in recent months had climbed, as Republicans from around the country approached him for speaking engagements and urged him to run for the White House. He met recently with former McCain strategist John Weaver, architect of McCain’s insurgent 2000 campaign and an adviser on the 2008 reprise.

The China dispatch maybe be a short-term detour, but one with little downside. “2012 looked almost impossible for him, despite how well he’d been doing getting publicity,” says Kirk Jowers, a University of Utah political-science professor and attorney who has worked with both the McCain and Romney camps. Huntsman supported for federal stimulus (unlike Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford), which makes him a hard sell with primary voters, and having Romney in the campaign could split the Mormon donor base that both men would lean on.

But 2016? Jowers finds that “very interesting, giving Huntsman the chance to burnish his credentials in the mold of another China ambassador: George H.W. Bush. “The ambassadorship to China… changes the whole way the country will look at Jon Huntsman,” says Jowers. “He goes from being a small-state governor to being a real global diplomat and the person who was entrusted with arguably the country’s most important foreign policy at a very critical time.”

Plus, by that point, the landscape will have changed, and working with the Democrats—something that McCain has made a habit of, but which seems a fatal quality among the base now—might be much more of an asset. Rest assured, this son of billionaire whose company produced the Styrofoam containers that housed eggs and Big Macs for decades, might be going halfway around the world, but he’s not going anyplace far politically.

“I think there was a desire that my father had to see what was over the next peak,” says Peter Huntsman, the soon-to-be ambassador’s brother. “I think of lot of what drives Jonny in Asia is to continue that challenge.”

Robert Gehrke, the senior government reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune, has covered Utah politics for 14 years, including seven years from Washington, D.C.