Bad news for Jon Huntsman came Monday night in a large, baseball cap-wearing package.
On CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight, liberal documentary maker Michael Moore offered a big, jowly, and probably unwelcome endorsement of the Republican presidential hopeful, dismissing the rest of the primary field.
“There’s only one that has sanity operating inside of him and that’s Jon Huntsman. When they asked ‘who here believes in science?’ He’s like, the only one to raise his hand! … Here he was, a Mormon and the governor of Utah, and he got a civil union law passed that’s not passed in many states that are not Utah.”
Huntsman’s campaign has had trouble gaining traction, and his low single-digit poll numbers threaten to shut him out of an October CNN debate. Since September 1 he has attracted the required 2 percent showing in only two national polls. He will need 2 percent support in at least one more poll to be included.
The former Utah governor has struggled to attract conservative support because of his moderate positions and his employment in the Obama administration as ambassador to China. In New Hampshire, Huntsman’s base consists almost entirely of independents and Democrats.
Moore, however, explains Republicans’ wariness of Huntsman differently: He just thinks they’re stupid.
“Because he’s smart, and he actually might win. You see, if the Republican Party, and if the Tea Party was smart, they would run somebody who would not only get the Republican vote, but a good chunk of the independents and maybe even some of the Democrats, but they’re not,” Moore said. “They are on, as I said the other day on some other show, on the ‘Tea-tanic.'”