On Saturday Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman made four different stops throughout the Tampa Bay area (you can read our report about his Hillsborough county visit here). It was an important visit, because he's banking on Florida being a major focus of his campaign. Of course, the last Republican presidential candidate to do so – Rudy Giuliani – as we all recall didn't fare so well with that strategy.
Unlike Giuliani, Huntsman isn't focusing exclusively on the Sunshine State to catapult him in the GOP primaries – he's also active in the early voting states of New Hampshire and South Carolina (but not Iowa). But he is doing something that no candidate based outside of Florida has seemingly ever done in a presidential run – base his campaign staff here, specifically in Orlando.
When asked by a Utah television reporter in Brandon on Saturday why Orlando, Huntsman said he needed to have a base on the east coast – and Orlando was ideal because it was the hometown of his wife, Mary Kaye Huntsman.
A Newsweek article in January quoting Huntsman as saying he might have one last run in him for office sent Washington political reporters into a frenzy about him possibly running for office this year, which had been considered off the table since he was at the time serving in China as President Obama's Ambassador there.
But Mary Kaye Huntsman tells CL that article was not her husband's official declaration that he would run in 2012.
This article appears in Jul 7-13, 2011.
