Huntsman Calls Iowa Caucus Irrelevant, Airs Anti-Paul Ad In New Hampshire

12/29/2011

UPDATE: "Unelectable" is a web ad and the Huntsman has no plans at this time to purchase air time for the ad just yet... maybe after Iowa.

Jon Huntsman is airing a brutal attack ad in New Hampshire targeting the rapidly rising Rep. Ron Paul. The ad, “unelectable,” focuses entirely on the controversy surrounding the “Ron Paul Report,” a survivalist newsletter from the 1980s-1990s.

The ad highlights portions of the newsletter in which the report discusses the “coming race war,” the government’s cover up of AIDS (and how it was presumably created in a government lab at Ft. Detrick) and how African-Americans are a largely criminal people.

Paul has publically disavowed the newsletters and has said repeatedly that he was unaware of the content of the material published in them. He has not yet, however, accounted for the significant profits he drew as president of Ron Paul & Co., the firm that published the letters. In 1993 alone, the company made over $1 million from newsletters subscribers.

Huntsman’s airing of the ad in New Hampshire betrays the significant rise in the polls that Ron Paul is experiencing in the Granite State. The latest CNN/TIME/ORC poll of New Hampshire shows Paul eclipsing Newt Gingrich and seizing a distant second place behind Mitt Romney who is nearing 50 percent of the vote.

Already, in Iowa, Paul is a near frontrunner and has a better than even chance of winning the Iowa caucuses on January 3. Huntsman declined to contest the Iowa caucuses, preferring to focus solely on New Hampshire where he has struggled to crest into double digit support in polls of that state’s Republican electorate.

Huntsman appeared on New Hampshire radio host Paul Westcott’s program on WGIR AM 610 in which he said that Iowa’s caucus is “will be forgotten within a day or two.” Huntsman said that voters in New Hampshire are not even a little bit influenced by the outcome of the Iowa caucuses.

Zeke Miller, a reporter with Business Week, tweets that the “Huntsman anti-Paul ad could do some real damage – if someone aired it in IA.” No candidate or PAC has to date taken a significant swing at Paul on the air in Iowa and, despite candidates talking down Paul on the trail; his polls remain in the high teens and early twenties in the Hawkeye State.