Jon Huntsman, the Moderate Radical

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Ezra Klein on Jon Huntsman’s third-place showing in last night’s primary:

Huntsman’s weak finish led many to suggest that the GOP was no place for moderates. But the truth is that Huntsman’s campaign didn’t prove that, or anything like it. For all Huntsman’s signaling and hinting, his policy platform is no more moderate than Romney’s. In fact, it might be less moderate.

Ezra goes on to explain that on a policy level, Huntsman is actually one of the most conservative guys in the race. And he’s right. It’s endlessly annoying to hear pundits refer to him as a moderate kind of guy without, seemingly, knowing anything about his actual political views.

And yet, it’s not entirely baseless. Policy isn’t the only thing that matters, after all, and I’d argue that Huntsman quite likely is moderate in two important ways. The first is the one that lots of people have already pointed out: he doesn’t spend all his time making apocalyptic statements about Barack Obama being the anti-Christ and Democrats leading the United States into penury and decline. He says he believes in evolution and global warming rather than claiming these are vast conspiracies of the scientific community. This kind of thing matters.

But there’s something else that matters even more, and that’s the second way in which Huntsman is genuinely moderate. This is, granted, supposition on my part, but I suspect that Huntsman is more willing to compromise than most of the other candidates. He might want to cut the capital gains rate to zero, but if he could strike a deal with Democrats for a useful bit of tax reform that didn’t include a cap gains cut, I think he’d probably do it. He’s not beholden to the tea party base for anything, he’s not committed to a worldview in which compromise is treason, and as president he’d be free to horse-trade and negotiate in normal presidential fashion. I’m not so sure that, say, Rick Perry or Newt Gingrich would want to, and I’m not sure that Mitt Romney would feel able to. This is a big deal.

Of course, he’s not going to win this year, so none of this matters immediately. But we might see him again in 2016.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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