2012 Candidate for President of the United States
(Also Ran)
Jon Meade Huntsman, Jr. (born March 26, 1960) is an American politician and diplomat. He served as the Governor
of Utah from 2005 until his resignation in August 2009 to become US Ambassador to China.
Huntsman was born in Palo Alto, California to billionaire businessman and philanthropist Jon Huntsman of
Huntsman Corporation. The younger Huntsman dropped out of high school to be in a rock band, but attended the
University of Utah, where he became, like his father, a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity. Hunstman then
received a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania after transferring to that school. He spent time
in Taiwan as a Mormon missionary, and speaks both Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese fluently.
Huntsman was elected Governor of Utah in 2004, and was re-elected in 2008 with over three-quarters of the vote. The
mere possibility of Huntsman running for the Presidency in 2012 had received extensive media coverage as of January
2011, when he declined, in an interview that was part of a multi-page Newsweek profile, to rule out a 2012
run against his boss.
Huntsman declared his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States in June 2011. After focusing his campaign
on New Hampshire and still coming up with a disappointing finish in that State's primary, he dropped out of the
Presidential race in January 2012 and endorsed rival Mitt Romney.
Sources: BBC News, Newsweek, wikipedia.org
