It was no accident that Jon Huntsman chose the Statue of Liberty as the backdrop to announce his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Sure, the scene had echoes of Ronald Reagan, who used the same spot to launch his 1980 White House run. But it was also far from the cornfields of Iowa. The former two-term Utah governor plans to keep his distance from those cornfields in his quest to go from a largely unknown politician to his party's pick to take on President Barack Obama in 2012.
Huntsman, 51, barely registers in presidential preference polls. That could be, in part, because he just returned from a two-year stint as the US ambassador to China in the Obama administration. But rather than using the living rooms of Iowa as a launching pad to introduce himself to the nation, Huntsman, the scion of a wealthy Mormon family, has said he will skip the Hawkeye State's first-in-the-nation presidential nominating contest.
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