In a party that has tacked way to the right, Huntsman is the sort of guy moderate Republicans should like.
"He has gotten a reputation for being too nice a guy, too moderate," said Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
"What they hear is that here's this good liberal guy doing moderate things for the business community, but you don't hear about the details, the big subsidies to the developers, the issues with gentrification, the local and minority contractors who didn't get work".
I mean, hell, that game's difficult enough for a sighted guy of moderate skill like me to beat.
Now it seems as though those guys are moderates staring in open-mouthed disbelief at an army of shock jocks, Christian fundamentalists, and oil company stooges.
The idea that he's a moderate guy just isn't correct.
Doesn't he seem such a calm moderate guy these days?" The afternoon we meet, the news is full of Donald Trump's announcement about closing American borders to Muslims.
In the final weeks of a close race, his task was a different one: convincing undecided and middle-of-the road voters, who seem, this cycle, to be disproportionately women, that he is a likeable, moderate guy with solutions to the problems they face.
Taking a page from the playbook of George H. W. Bush (who, nice guy and relative moderate though he was, based the non-Willie Horton half of his successful 1988 campaign on the fantasy that his opponent despised the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance to it), Romney led a Virginia crowd in reciting the Pledge.
"He said to me, 'You're a moderate guy.
