In asking this question, The Atlantic seemed to miss the obvious answer.

Jon Hunstman isn’t trying to win the 2012 Republican primary.

Okay, I mean, he obviously filed to run for president as a Republican in this upcoming election, but it should be pretty obvious that, for months now, he’s actually been executing a different plan than one intended to win the upcoming primaries.

Sure, when he jumped in, he was going for it. He thought that there might be a space for him as someone with more constancy than Romney (not a high bar) and more sanity than Bachmann (also not a high bar).

But he’s not, at least not so far as I know, an idiot.

It’s been quite clear for sometime that he was just not getting traction and that there wasn’t enough oxygen left in the room for him to develop the necessary traction.

And around the time it became clear that he wasn’t going to win the primary, he began to make a series of public, rational, centrist statements acknowledging things like global climate change and the need not to engage in constant, endless wars. He might even have once said that an American without health insurance should not be allowed to die on the hospital curb (which is apparently a controversial stance).

He is betting that in either 2016 or 2020 the electorate will have sufficiently rejected right wing extremism that a moderate Republican in the mode of a Reagan (the real Reagan – not the Tea Party caricature of him), if not a Rockefeller, would be in fashion again within the GOP.

And he probably has a point. Even if a Republican wins in 2012 (which is looking less likely than it did a couple of months ago), the turn to the far right will have to end in the next few cycles – whether from natural evolution (something that, I believe, Huntsman has expressed a belief in) or from a reaction to a painful repudiation at the polls.