Barrett: Media pitch in to help RINO Huntsman prove his existence

If a phenomenally irrelevant presidential candidate falls in the woods and nobody cares, why does he get round-the-clock news coverage?

I refer to the media's hyperactive attempt to transform "Republican" Jon Huntsman into a legitimate contender for the GOP nomination.

Huntsman, a former Utah governor who until recently served in the Obama administration, misses few chances to sneer at conservative principles, whether on climate change or illegal immigration.

His standing in surveys on GOP hopefuls is accordingly dim:

* A Gallup poll put support for Huntsman's presidential bid at a zesty 1 percent.

* So did a CNN/Opinion Research poll.

* And a Quinnipiac poll.

* To round out the four-fer, he got 1 percent backing in a Rasmussen survey, too. That put him ahead of only U.S. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Mich., whose support, statistically, came in at zero.

In short, Huntsman's very existence seems only modestly more probable than that of Sasquatch, and his odds of winning the nomination are roughly equivalent to the chances of Al Gore and Dick Cheney co-hosting a Tupperware party in Red Bank.

But his remoteness from anything approaching political reality notwithstanding, Huntsman's hair-trigger impulse to kick shins when he gets within six miles of a conservative idea has made him quite the media sweetheart.

How else to explain the fact that not until Hurricane Irene was threatening to make underwater attractions of the Statue of Liberty and NBC Studio did "Meet the Press" decide to postpone an interview of Huntsman? Nobody's heard of the guy and NBC thinks he merits that kind of prominence?

Eleanor Clift, meanwhile, mustered her most serious face on "The McLaughlin Group" to counsel Republicans that they are in deep fondue if they dare nominate anybody besides Huntsman or the Incredible Shrinking RINO himself, Francois Mitterrand "Mittens" Romney.

And CBS News, a picture of sincerity, says Huntsman "makes the White House nervous."

True - if by "makes the White House nervous," CBS means the president worries he won't get the chance to smack the stuffing out of Huntsman in the general election because Republicans are going to whip Huntsman like a fine meringue in the primaries and actually field a competitive nominee.

Not that anybody is likely to fall again, this soon after the McCaining of 2008, for the unsubstantiated theory that imitating the Democrat is a Republican's path to the best seat on Air Force One.

And yet, the zany Fourth Estate spotlight on Huntsman intensifies. Vogue magazine labeled him "a thinking person's candidate." (One struggles to guess what those persons are thinking.) The writer adds, "[H]is lack of traction thus far doesn't feel exactly like failure." (No, not exactly. Huntsman waved bye-bye to failure weeks ago. He's on a bullet train to Fiascoville now.)

The media themselves have begun to acknowledge the inexplicable stature accorded to Jon "I'm not a footnote, I just play one in real life" Huntsman. Citing his prime-time appearance on CNN with Piers Morgan, U.S. News & World Report noted in a headline, "Jon Huntsman Has 2012 Momentum in Media, If Not in Polls."

That's a good thing, I suppose, because along about the time of the South Carolina primary - if not much sooner - he'll need some momentum for the carbon-free bicycle ride back to Utah.

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