Hunstman wants Willard's $10,000

ABC excluded Jon Huntsman from last night's Iowa debate because he isn't polling 5% in the state or nationally. Instead, he was in New Hampshire-- throwing stones:

"They're engaging in another evening of theatrics and game show-like discussions. We're here on the ground in New Hampshire talking real issues with real voters. I feel we are exactly where we ought to be, this is what needs to be done. We're doing the New Hampshire primary... I am in this race because I fundamentally feel the American people are getting screwed."

He even said he might not watch the debate on TV-- if Curb Your Enthusiasm was running a good episode.

Tomorrow Huntsman takes on Gingrich for a one-on-one Lincoln-Douglas style forum at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire. He'd like to get a shot at Romney in a similar format but knows there isn't much chance the over-careful, poll-driven, focus group-driven Romney campaign will do anything out of the ordinary... except to start babbling nonsense about lunar colonies ("Places where we disagree? Let's see, we can start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon") and to make a sponaneous $10,000 bet in front of a national auddience. The funny thing is, it's a bet Perry should have called him on and walked away with the ten grand. As you can see in the video above, that's what Huntsman would have done. Perry just used it as a class war weapon with which to pound poor Willard with this morning.

Rick Perry said Sunday he's still not a betting man, but the Texas governor is counting on Mitt Romney losing support among Iowans for offering to wager $10,000 in a dispute over his health care record.

"I was taken a little bit a back," Perry told Fox News Sunday. "Driving out to the station this morning, I'm pretty sure I didn't drive by a house that anyone in Iowa would even think about that a $10,000 bet possible, so a little out of touch of the normal Iowa citizen... The issue of individual mandates is still at the center here, and Mitt can deny this as many times as he wants, but in his first book, hard cover, of No Apologies, he clearly stated that individual mandate should be the model for this country. And then he took that out of the book, in the paperback, and that's the fact, and even a $10,000 bet is not gonna cover that."

..."I want to know if he has $10,000 in his pocket," the spokesman for new Republican front-runner Newt Gingrich, R.C. Hammond, said after the debate.

In a statement, the Democratic National Committee said $10,000 is almost three times more than what an average family spends on groceries in a year and more than a year's worth of mortgage payments for the typical American home purchased today.

..."I didn't grow up poor. And if somebody is looking for someone who's grown up with that background, I'm not the person," Romney said during the debate, noting that his father was poor at one point in his life. He added that his parents "made sure we had jobs when we were growing up. They made sure we didn't spend money foolishly."

As you can see, the front page headline in Iowa's biggest newspaper, the Des Moines Register wasn't favorable for Romney. And inside the paper, it only got worse.

Perry really made his mark when he successfully goaded Mitt Romney into one of the worst moments he’s had in a debate so far. Perry challenged Romney on a passage in his first book, claiming an early edition said the Massachusetts health-care program should be a model for the national plan.

Romney disputed the claim and when Perry persisted, he jokingly offered a $10,000 bet. Perry didn’t take the bet, but he won the point. Romney was casually offering the equivalent of about one-fifth of the average median income for an Iowa family. Romney’s privileged background was driven home later when the candidates were asked whether they’d ever had to cut costs in their own family budget.

“I didn’t grow up poor,” Romney said, and noted that if voters are looking for someone who did, they’ll have to vote for somebody else.

Huntsman Strikes Back

This morning he was on with Christiane Amanpour, whose bookers don't care if he has 5% or even 1%-- just as long as he's part of the one percent. And, of course, born into a family of multimillionaires, he certainly is. Here's some of their banter:

HUNTSMAN: [O]n the debate stage last night, I believe that the most important issue of all confronting the American people wasn't even touched upon, and that is the deficit of trust that we have in the United States. In fact, it may have-- it played right into the trust deficit. That is, nobody trusts Congress anymore. We need term limits in Congress. We need to close the revolving door that allows members of Congress to move right on into the lobbying profession. No one has trust anymore toward the executive branch. No one trusts Wall Street, with banks that are too big to fail. So the-- I would argue that the issues that are most salient in our political dialogue today weren't even touched upon last night.

AMANPOUR: So then how do you explain the phenomenal rise of Newt Gingrich? You say people don't have trust, and yet he does seem to be speaking, at least to Republican voters, in a way that you aren't, for instance.

HUNTSMAN: Well, listen, there have been so many ups and downs in this race, I'm getting whiplashed, quite frankly. We've had six front-runners in the span of about six months. And all I can tell you, having spent a whole lot of time here in New Hampshire-- we have had 116 public events in this state-- is that the voters will begin to coalesce around a candidate about a week to 10 days out. The marketplace is still open. People are shopping. They are listening very, very carefully. And all I can say, Christiane, is the two messages that we're delivering to the people here on the ground, the economic deficit which is the cancer metastasizing in this country and one that is a national security problem, I would say, and the trust deficit are the two biggest issues we face today. And we're getting people showing up to our town hall meetings in numbers I never would have imagined. They're signing up afterwards, they're taking lawn signs home.

I feel very good about their trajectory here in this great state. And this is always the state that upends conventional wisdom. So let's not fall back onto conventional wisdom. That never holds true in the end.

...AMANPOUR: [L]et me ask you about where this campaign is going. I read to you a few comments from people before, including one who called you the sanest one still running. But it appears that you're reversing some of your own eminently sensible positions, for instance on climate change. You in August tweeted that "to be clear, I believe in evolution, and I trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." You have been tweeting about this sort of rightward swing, you've been jabbing at the base. And yet last week, you sort of rolled that bit back on climate change. You sort of said there isn't enough science. I mean, what are you doing?

HUNTSMAN: Well, Christiane, I'm not changing at all. I have said all along that I put my faith and trust in science. When you have 99 out 100 climate scientists, you have members of the National Academy of Sciences who have weighed in on a body of research on the subject matter, I say that's where I put my trust.

Yes, there might be one percent of scientists who still are questioning some of those assumptions, and that debate and discussion will continue. But as for me, let me make it crystal clear. I'm on the side of science in this debate. I don't know a whole lot of people on Capitol Hill who are physicists or climate scientists. I think this is a discussion that needs to be taken out of the political lane and kept in the science lane.

AMANPOUR: One more question, you have said that you will endorse and support whoever's the nominee. If it is Newt Gingrich, will he get your endorsement?

HUNTSMAN: Well, listen, I don't have to worry about that, because we're moving up in this great state of New Hampshire. We're going to be the nominee, and I don't have to worry about anything beyond that.

Yep, when push comes to shove, he's still a lying sack of shit politician... and, if that's not bad enough, a Republican. But, lunar colonies aside, does anyone who didn't inherit millions of dollars want this out-of-touch freak as president?