In his farewell speech, Jon Huntsman said this race has "degenerated into an onslaught of negative and personal attacks not worthy of the American people and not worthy of this critical time in our nation's history." Never mind that he was one of the most consistently negative campaigners against Mitt Romney (immediately after the news of his withdrawal from the race broke, his campaign took down all the anti-Romney videos and sites they've posted in the last few months) and that much of his politics runs counter to the 2012, more-conservative version of Mitt Romney. Now, Huntsman is Mr. Republican Unity.

Actually, make that Mr. Dumbass. Huntsman backed out of the race at the exact same time that The State, one of the biggest papers in South Carolina, published a hearty endorsement of him and his politics:

Mr. Huntsman is a true conservative, with a record and platform of bold economic reform straight out of the free-market bible, but he’s a realist, whose goal is likewise to get things done. Under his leadership, Utah led the nation in job creation, and the Pew Center on the States ranked it the best-managed state in the nation.

Any other candidate would have been able to turn that into momentum. But then the Huntsman campaign has never known how to capture momentum. Huntsman's run began in a whirl of positive press; Esquire practically swore him in as president in a glowing profile in the summer of 2011. In all of our live-Slogs of debates, Slog readers have heaped praise on Huntsman as the candidate who makes the most sense out of all of them. But his quick embrace of Romney, and his shameful attempts to change recent history, show that he really was what his critics claimed he was all along: Mitt Romney, Jr. I guess when daddy's cash ran out, Jon Huntsman was just as eager as anyone to jump on the winning bandwagon. He might just have a bright future in Republican politics, after all.