Gates And Davis And South Carolina

Jon Huntsman Opens 2012 Campaign, Plans To Call US Decline 'Totally Un ...

By MICHAEL FALCONE ( @michaelpfalcone ) and AMY WALTER ( @amyewalter )

Although he is hovering somewhere near the bottom of most recent national polls, former U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman has an outsize campaign kick-off planned today. He's hoping that the venue that brought Ronald Reagan electoral success in 1980 will do the same for him in 2012.

Huntsman will officially unveil his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty later this morning, declaring that while he respects the president who appointed him to the post in Beijing, the two have “a difference of opinion on how to help the country we both love.”

“The question each of us wants the voters to answer is who will be the better President,” Huntsman will say, “not who’s the better American.” (He notes, “I don't think you need to run down anyone's reputation to run for President.”)

Huntsman will speak from Liberty State Park in New Jersey before launching a multi-state announcement tour that will take him to a town-hall meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire today followed by stops in Florida, South Carolina, Utah, California, Texas and elsewhere around the country.

“For the first time in our history, we are about to pass down to the next generation a country that is less powerful, less compassionate, less competitive and less confident than the one we got,” Huntsman plans to say. “This is totally unacceptable and totally un-American.”

It’s clear that Huntsman's decision to run has been met with particular ire from within the Obama White House and the president's re-election headquarters in Chicago. Strategist David Axelrod attempted to paint Huntsman into a pro-Obama corner in an interview over the weekend, saying that Huntsman “was encouraging on health care” and “encouraging on the whole range of issues” while he served in the administration. (A Huntsman spokesman called Axelrod’s contention “absurd.”)

The Obama team seems to take Huntsman more seriously than many Republicans do. GOP strategists we talk to see him as a potential factor, but it’s hard to find any who currently see him as potential nominee. Could that change? Of course, but Huntsman has a lot of work to do to prove that he can play at the top of the Republican field instead of at the bottom.

BOTTOM LINE: Huntsman’s campaign is trying to set the candidate apart with an aggressive Internet and social media strategy, which has included a series of motocross web videos conceived by ad whiz Fred Davis, and they’ve also been seeking to tout Huntsman’s conservative credentials whenever possible. Unconventional campaigning is interesting in theory but is rarely successful in reality. Primary voters are more interested in how candidates match up with their own values.

Butch Davis, UNC, And A Japanese Plywood Metaphor - From Our ...

In the crazed heat of Japan's economic boom in the 1980s, the plywood sheets lining the walls of construction sites were made not just of any wood, but from tropical hardwoods torn straight from the forests of Indonesia. This has something to do with North Carolina and Butch Davis, we promise. 

The wood that would have gone for huge dollars on the market for use as anything else was instead cut, pressed, and formed into the cheap sheets used to block out windows. After it was used, it went into the garbage with the Fendi bags, unused chunks of $500 a pound fatty tuna, and whatever other expensive goods the Japanese had decided to throw away that day.

Butch Davis had to have the best at North Carolina, and like the Japanese and their thirst for only the finest wood to use for anything, he didn't particularly care how it got there. The illegal logging in this case was done by one John Blake, a recruiter with a terrible reputation before he ever got to North Carolina, and a recruiter who did nothing but get recruits North Carolina was not supposed to be able to sign.

Well, that's not entirely accurate. Blake did more than that. He never really stopped recruiting, not even after the recruits arrived on campus, pushing certain athletes at UNC towards agent Gary Wichard and taking cash from Wichard in return for the lobbying. The cell wall separating college athletics from the professional world didn't have a hole punched in it, but rather had a lovingly constructed swinging gate installed by Blake and Sons Carpentry of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. For added spice throw in some academic fraud, and some money flying around to cover parking tickets that no one really wants to track down, and you have a failure to monitor case that could have easily slipped over into "lack of institutional control" territory.

Even if you somehow accept that Butch Davis did not know he'd hired a recruiter with a horrendous reputation, and that he truly knew nothing about Blake's blatant violations of the rules--and improbable as this may seem, that is exactly what the NCAA might do--then you have to move to the next logical conclusion from a survey of the Butch Davis era at UNC. Given fine wood taken from mysterious sources, Butch Davis got out his table saw and made...plywood. Sheet after sheet of steady, boring, and utterly mediocre plywood. The net sum of all this effort and ruthless recruiting? Three straight years at eight wins, a win total often padded by matchups with D-1AA cupcakes, and a 2010 season crippled by the suspension of a slew of players due to the agent contact that got us here talking about all this plywood in the first place.

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