Politics

FreedomWorks: Jon Huntsman not a ‘serious candidate’

Amanda Carey Contributor
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FreedomWorks – the country’s most influential Tea Party group – doesn’t think much of potential presidential candidate Jon Huntsman.

In an interview with The Daily Caller, President and CEO Matt Kibbe said he doesn’t view the former Ambassador to China and Utah Governor as a “serious candidate.”

“To be honest with you…we haven’t really taken a look at him [Huntsman] because I don’t consider him a serious candidate,” said Kibbe. “If he starts to emerge as somebody-  I mean, I’ve been told by people that he’s not terribly good on our issues.”

When TheDC pointed out that the White House, even, has indicated they view Huntsman as a serious threat, Kibbe responded by saying that “may mean the opposite.”

“He [Huntsman] had some pretty glorifying things to say about the stimulus,” Kibbe continued. “And apparently…there’s a lot of rumors that’s he’s signed some really glowing letter about Obama as soon as he was an ambassador,” he added jokingly.

Though FreedomWorks has not endorsed any candidate in the 2012 Republican presidential primary yet, the group has said that not only will they will work to stop Mitt Romney from getting the nomination, but Tea Partiers will stay home if he does.

Huntsman, on the other hand, is reportedly only a week and a half away from making his candidacy official. In an interview with Bloomberg Television over the weekend, Huntsman said that President Obama is “absolutely” beatable.

“Absolutely, with today’s economic backdrop an the difficulty that we’re finding in getting any traction at all around growth or in taming our high unemployment,” said Huntsman. “We’ve got everything that any country would hope for in order to hit it out of the ballpark. We just don’t have a plan, we don’t have a vision, we don’t have the right leadership to get us there.”