An Open Letter to Jon Huntsman

Dear Jon, 

I just got back from your town hall in Exeter and I have to ask: what was that?

You didn’t take questions, you stood on a stage, removed from the people, and when you finally arrived an hour late you blamed some pilot. It was weird waiting for you, too. I never caught his name, but an older gentleman was tasked with keeping the crowd interested. I don’t think it worked. It never works. Boy did I feel bad for him and those few dozen voters seated in the first few rows, many of them grayer than your 51 years, when he asked, “Anybody have any ideas of what we should do in this country? ... I happen to think we’re on the wrong track ... Does anybody think we’re on the right track?”

There were a few murmurs and brief mention of immigration, but then everyone returned to waiting for you to arrive. Luckily a band was playing, and they were good too. But a few strums into Cat Stevens’s “Father and Son” the guy whose name I didn’t get came back on stage, cut into the song (a personal favorite, by the way) and announced, “We’re going to play the music a little bit lower.” What the ... ? Would you have approved of this? Aren’t you supposed to be the rock-and-roll candidate, the high school dropout who tried to make it big with his band but ended up, possibly to MTV's dispair, being a governor and ambassador instead? 

So there we were, like some kind of a Jersey afterthought -- some kind of prop for a campaign’s opening day -- waiting for you to arrive. I figured you’d make up for it, maybe even arrive with watermelon air spray in order to neutralize the sweaty locker-room smell that was beginning to fill Town Hall. I figured you’d make it all better. 

I’m sure you know this, but the key to a good campaign event, especially one wrapped up in an announcement that you’re entering the race, is making it seem like you want to be there, like it matters. Not need to be there, but want to. In other words, don’t let it look like a formality. I know it’s hard considering the way politics is played today. We don’t even have announcements anymore. We have announcements announcing announcements, so it’s hard for events, even campaign kickoffs, not to seem somewhat routine or contrived. 

But you were supposed to be different. You were, as one of your supporters in her introductory remarks put it, supposed to be “superman.”

Your campaign did a good job trying to make the case. As I watched your introductory video I had to remind myself you’re running for President of the United States and not the Most Perfect Man Alive. The narrator said your “decent, calm, wise, firm, disciplined,” and, in a voice that made me think of ranching, rocking chairs, and lemonade in August, let us know you’re “not in it for the balloons” (is that why the confetti that fell at the end of your speech only landed on the press?) A series of words came across the screen as a man on a Motocross bike (that was you, right?) made his way across (what I presumed was) Zion National Park in your native Utah: vitality, know, home, builds, global, forever, conservative, smaller better government, experience, good. Sorry if I missed any. We were also reminded that in the “button-down world of politics” you’re an “anomaly” and that you love music, the Foo Fighters, taco stands, and, most of all, your family.  

I will say, you deserve credit for being there with your family like that. (For those of you that may have missed it, what seemed like the candidate’s entire family was the first to enter Town Hall once he arrived. There were 30 or 40 of them, if not more, standing together under the “Family and Friends” sign.) Why credit, you ask? Well, how many people do you know would be willing to roll out their entire family, in public no less, in front a bunch of strangers? (If you’re like me it ends with the major holidays, inside a bunker.) But of course you’re not like me, and you have a lot to gain by showing the world that you have a loving, normal family. What do they say -- the family that travels the trail together stays together? I hope so. In all seriousness, you seem to have a very lovely family, and it’s hard not to be intrigued by its modernity. (For those who have yet to look him up on Wiki, the Huntsmans two adopted young daughters, one from India, the other from China.)

But like I said, you’re not me. You didn’t wait for you today, and you’re definitely not at home right now sipping out of a recently arrived “MADE in the USA” Team Obama coffee mug -- yup, the one with the president’s birth certificate that the campaign was giving out for $15 donations. I just had to have one. 

There’s another reason why you’re not me, because if you were I’m not sure you would have shown up in the kickoff primary state as if it was an afterthought, a good second place to go after announcing your bid and trying to channel the Gipper in New Jersey. And if you were me I’m not sure you would left without taking, let alone answering, a single voter’s question. 

But more than that, I’m not sure you would go around telling people that we as a people have “lost faith in ourselves,” and that for the first time we’re “less powerful, less compassionate, less competitive, less confident.” I know hope is a dirty word these days, but I don’t see how appealing to what we’re supposedly not is going to help us tap into who and what we are and need to be. I mean, aren't campaigns supposed to be about our hopes and aspirations, about building better tomorrows based on what we can do today? I appreciate you saying this campaign has to be about who is the “better president, not who’s the better American.” But is that where the optimism ends?

I fear, Jon, that you and maybe other candidates are going to ride this we-have-lost-faith-in-ourselves narrative for all it’s worth -- and that we’ll be worse off for it. It doesn’t sound to me like a campaign based on our strengths, but instead our perceived weaknesses. I see the benefit, for the campaign, of a candidate trying to point out what we lack in personal and collective attributes. It allows the candidate to step in, kind of like a superman, and promise to turn things around. Personally, I just don’t buy it. Sure, times are tough, but everyday ordinary people are doing the regular, little things that are characteristic of compassionate and confident human beings. 

I’m not saying we should ignore our problems. We shouldn’t. We waste too much time on video games and Facebook. We shower too much praise on celebrities and sports stars. We eat too much fast food and read too little. We argue instead of debate, vote against one thing instead of for another. We’re also letting a corporate, competitive ethos erode our public education system. But lost faith in ourselves? Nah. We’re too cocky for that. 

It’s our faith in some of you guys and gals running, and those already in office, that has eroded. That's what we've lost. We’ve also lost faith in the system and the parties. It doesn’t seem like it’s ours anymore. It’s theirs - whoever they are, from whatever closed-circuit world they roam. I figured you’d know this, and you’d be, like your video says, wise enough to say it during your first visit to New Hampshire as a declared candidate. Then again, I also thought you’d take a couple questions, give us voters a chance to get to know you, maybe ask what you meant when you said we need to “reestablish what it means to be a teacher in society.” I thought you’d spend some time listening to our concerns. You know, the sort of give and take that has come to define the way it’s done here. Instead we got a pep talk and vague references to things you plan to do during a choreographed visit that lasted half as long as the time we spent waiting for you. 

I guess this all means that in addition to being less compassionate, competitive, powerful, and confident some of us are also a bit more naive than years past. 

Maybe future visits will be different. Either way, get a better pilot next time. 

Best of luck.