Jon Huntsman, rejected by GOP masses, seeks a boost from his elite base

NEW YORK — At 5:35 p.m. Thursday, a black Chevy Tahoe rolled past men in raincoats walking dogs in sweaters in Manhattan’s exclusive Sutton Place. Before a dead-end sign overlooking the East River, the SUV turned into a gated entrance marked “Private” and delivered its passenger to a uniformed doorman.

After a brutal week in the Republican wilderness, Jon Huntsman Jr. had come back to his base.

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“In order to finance the effort, you’ve got to perform,” said Huntsman, pausing to answer a few questions before heading upstairs to shake hands and accept checks at a high-dollar fundraiser here. Wearing a dark suit and red tie that allowed him to fit right in with the bankers swinging their umbrellas on the way home from work, Huntsman put a positive spin on his bleak political condition. “If you didn’t get some sort of head of steam out of New Hampshire, nobody is going to attend these things and want to support you.”

Huntsman, truth be told, hemorrhaged steam in New Hampshire and has had little to no luck rallying support in other primary states. But he can still turn to rarefied Republican pockets where his relatively moderate brand of conservatism and internationalist bona fides resonate, as well as to former Democratic donors such as Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a glamorous and die-hard Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter whose antagonism toward Barack Obama has led her across the partisan aisle.

Huntsman’s “dear friend,” as he called her, hosted the fundraiser in her 18th-floor apartment. Guests included a former Andy Warhol muse, Wall Street moguls and the global-warming activist great-grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. Among the members of the event’s host committee were past supporters of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), former New York governor Eliot Spitzer (D), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and the progressive activist group MoveOn.org. (“Hillary partisan gathers Gillibrand supporters for a Huntsman fund-raiser,” read a headline on the Web site Capital New York.) Many of the event’s organizers testified to Huntsman’s integrity and superior qualifications. But when it came to his electoral prospects, they tended to speak in past, future and conditional terms.

“He ran out of time,” said de Roths­child. “I think one more week in New Hampshire, with the limited funds that we had, we would have been a strong second.”

Dan Arbess, a partner at the global financial services firm Perella Weinberg, said the flavor-of-the-month fluctuations in the Republican race gave Huntsman some hope. “Does this mean that he is going to win the nomination? Probably not,” said Arbess, a host committee member and self-described centrist who supported Obama in 2008. “But Jon Huntsman has elevated the quality of this whole process — that will benefit our democracy but also governor Huntsman’s most assuredly promising future.”

Nancy Lieberman, a partner at the New York-based law firm Skadden Arps who met Huntsman decades ago when she began handling mergers and acquisitions for his father’s company, said that, from her perch on the campaign’s finance committee, she had hoped Mitt Romney wouldn’t compete in Iowa. “Had Romney just stuck with his game plan and not competed in Iowa, the dynamic would have been very, very different,” she said. “It would have been Huntsman versus Romney in New Hampshire.”