Jon Huntsman’s new groove is going on the attack. The one-time Mr. Nice Guy has been sticking it to Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney over health care, the debt ceiling, and that mysterious $1 million donation in the hopes of tearing down the Romney colossus.
On Friday, Team Huntsman floated a new line of attack: Romney may be too close to the Chinese for comfort.
From an interview with Huntsman’s foreign policy director Randy Schriver by Foreign Policy‘s Josh Rogin:
He said that the business done by Bain Capital, which Romney co-founded, with the Chinese needs to be disclosed in a transparent manner.
“Part of it is, when you’re doing business with state-owned enterprises, you are also doing business with the government. You are involved in ventures that, even on the margins, are potentially supporting elites and government officials. You need to take account for that,” Schriver said.
Schriver told the website that Romney “should explain his past business dealings and relationships with Chinese state-owned companies and the Chinese government,” as Rogin put it. For good measure, Schriver said “Romney is essentially weak on foreign policy and China is a complex issue to handle.”
Team Romney didn’t respond to Schriver’s comments — either to Foreign Policy or TPM — but Rogin notes that Romney has dealt with this before, back in 2008. The response at the time was this: Romney left Bain in 1999 and has had no say in any decisions made by the company since then.
The issue of China is one of those weird ones in the Republican electorate. On the one hand, Republicans favor free trade. That helps to offshore American jobs and industry to places like China (your Ron Paul contingent of the GOP is generally not on board with this view.) But at the same time, many Republicans are eager to turn China into a neo-Soviet enemy requiring a reboot of the Cold War. So ties to China are not a great thing for a Republican (nor a Democrat, really.)
Romney’s past at Bain has also been a classic line of attack against him. The firm specialized in retooling companies, in many cases leading to layoffs. Critics say that takes some of the shine off the business credentials Romney loves to tout.
