POLITICO launched Arena in 2008 with the hopes of creating a vibrant forum where Washington’s sharpest minds could debate and dissect the issues of the day. And Arena became just that. Over the past four years, Arena has hosted thousands of constructive, serious, provocative and civil debates on issues facing Washington and the nation. 
 
 
 
 But the spirit of innovation that led to the creation of Arena now drives us to think about new ways in which POLITICO can present outside opinion with maximum impact. And as we plan our next steps in the opinion space, we’ve decided to draw the curtains on Arena. 
 
 
 
 We’re grateful to everyone who participated in Arena over the years – as contributors, as moderators, as producers and as readers. Thanks for making Arena a success, and we look forward to continuing the conversation in the pages of POLITICO soon. ||||| Jon Huntsman will quit the Republican presidential race today and endorse Mitt Romney. One of his aides told Fox News, “Governor Huntsman was encouraged [by his third place in] New Hampshire, but does not want to stand in the way of the best candidate to beat Barack Obama.” It’s a turnaround in human relationships that could only happen in the fickle world of politics. A little over a week ago, Huntsman was accusing Romney of putting party before country and dividing America. Now he’s giving him his unequivocal support. 
 
 Jon Huntsman’s campaign faced three problems. First, it started too late. Huntsman thought he could sit out the deeply religious Iowa caucus and concentrate his resources on New Hampshire instead. Big mistake. It cost him a lot of media attention and made him miss a couple of debates. The Iowa results dominated the news cycle, meaning that even candidates who had crashed and burned got more coverage than Huntsman. “We had strong numbers in New Hampshire,” one campaign insider told me, “But after Iowa we were always playing catch up.” The media only started talking about the candidate a couple of days before the Granite State voted. Hypotheticals are no use to anyone, but it’s fair to speculate that with more time and attention Huntsman could have pulled away moderates from Romney concerned about the Massachusetts moderate’s fair weather ways. Yes, Mitt places well against Obama in polls at the moment, but all the dirt thrown at him this primary season is bound to slow his progress. A part of me suspects that Americans will never vote for a man who straps his dog to the roof of his car. 
 
 Second, Huntsman never quite shook off the weirdo factor. He can be a tad Vulcan – all deadpan phrasing and alien eyebrow twitches. His first ad was nonsensical: Jon on a motorbike speeding through the desert. Then he regaled us with his knowledge of Mandarin, breaking into it every five seconds. If voters find Romney’s French off putting, how were they going to react to Huntsman’s channelling of those commie devils? It didn’t help that he sometimes sounded like he was running purely to promote business with the Middle Kingdom (see his rousing defence of Chinese trade policy), or that his foreign policy sounded sub-Ron Paul. Then there were the jokes – the execrable, painful jokes. Jon Huntsman made Gordon Brown sound like Oscar Wilde. 
 
 Huntsman’s third problem was the most significant for US politics watchers: he had no constituency. He ran as a moderate. On the one hand he was fiscally conservative, on the other he had some nice things to say about evolution and homosexuality. I heard (but have no confirmation) that on the stump he sometimes took an “I’m against it but it’s your call” approach to abortion. Huntsman wanted the votes of aspirant suburbanites – people with college degrees who worry about the state of the economy but not about the sex lives of their transgendered friends. If the demographic sounds familiar, then it’s because it’s very similar to the coalition David Cameron strung together in the UK. 
 
 Huntsman’s staff included several British Tory aides who desperately wanted to see the compassionate conservative revolution replicated in the USA. They not unreasonably thought that Cameron’s brand of liberal conservatism would have a trans-Atlantic appeal, that Right-wing Republicans desperate to beat Obama would put aside their religious chauvinism and elect a trendy moderate. It had worked in Utah, where Huntsman extended gay rights while also cutting taxes. It would seem that there is some part of a foreign field that is forever Notting Hill. 
 
 But it didn’t work nationally. The reality is that the GOP and the British Tories are very different. In America, principle trumps electoral calculation for the most part – and American conservative principles are imbued with a gutsy, aggressive cultural conservatism that Huntsman was unable to tap. There were simply not enough liberal Republicans to give the candidate anymore than 16.8 percent of the vote. Those folks who share his socially moderate instincts have either drifted to the Democrats or sit out the party as registered independents. Perhaps Huntsman could have attracted more of these people to participate in New Hampshire if he had gained more media attention early on. But even then, it’s hard to imagine his patrician style getting more support than Ron Paul – a man who understands that it takes populist energy to generate heat. 
 
 There is a Jon Huntsman in almost every Republican presidential primary. In 1980, it was John B Anderson. In 1996 it was Lamar Alexander. In 2000 it was John McCain. Every cycle, this moderate vote shrinks and their tally gets a little smaller. Despite all the cultural changes that have taken place around it, the Republican Party is arguably even more socially conservative than it was twenty years ago. America will never give us another David Cameron. Some on the Right might say that one is more than enough. ||||| 
 
 His hair’s looked better. (JASON REED/REUTERS) 
 
 “Huntsman’s dropping out!” 
 
 It’s like misheard bad news. “What? Who? Oh, Huntsman. I thought you said something else.” 
 
 I was going to do a highlight reel of Memorable Huntsman Moments, but I couldn’t remember any. 
 
 Even if I could have, they would have resembled a highlight reel of Favorite Waters or Most Exciting Taupes. 
 
 The only people really depressed about Jon Huntsman’s exit from the race are people who wouldn’t in their wildest dreams have voted for him — or any Republican candidate, for that matter. 
 
 It was a stillborn campaign hooked up to life support by the media. It did the campaign no good, and it cost everyone money and time. 
 
 Everything he did that made the press fawn — that cheeky tweet about believing in global warming, to name one — just ticked off the people whose votes he actually needed. His attitude toward the primaries was that of a lion tamer charming the stands and ignoring the lion. 
 
 And it showed. In South Carolina, Huntsman was polling behind Stephen Colbert. 
 
 Even in Utah, Huntsman’s home state, Mitt Romney was raising more funds than Huntsman was. 
 
 Anyone who’s sad that Jon Huntsman is out of the race would be equally sad about the news that, say, “Downton Abbey’s” second season was subpar, or that they might not release a special collectors’ edition of “The West Wing” with commentary from Aaron Sorkin. “Aw,” they’d say, and go back to leafing through menswear catalogs. “Nuts.” 
 
 Jon Huntsman’s out? Nobody cares about that, not even the people who’d said they were voting for Jon Huntsman. It’s like being told that the Num Lock key is leaving the race. You feel like you should be disappointed, but you can’t think of anything that it was adding. 
 
 Each of the Huntsman voters had a different reason for supporting him. One liked his hair. Three more were confused and thought this was the Democratic primary. Another one just thought he looked the “most Mad Men” of the Republican field. The last turned out to be Jon Huntsman in disguise. 
 
 With Huntsman gone, his support behind Romney, these voters can return to what they did before Huntsman came into their lives — shopping for antiques, watching “The Help,” “relating” to their kids, playing the violin badly, buying Word of the Day calendars, reading Annie Proulx stories, forwarding YouTube links to their nephews, trying to figure out how Windows Me works, watching 2006 Best Picture winner “Crash” again, buying pocket squares, reading “The Help,” raising funds for PBS, really intending to watch “Breaking Bad” but not getting around to it yet, taking Centrum Silver and saying, “Well, that’s a good point.” 
 
 Jon Huntsman’s campaign does go to show that if you put a lot of effort into making your hair look nice, people will take you more seriously than perhaps they ought. You can show up at Republican debates and they’ll even let you participate — although I’m not sure why you’d want to. It’s like crashing an annual awards dinner for advances in geriatric care, where Newt Gingrich is sure to be the keynote speaker. 
 
 Whenever someone leaves the race, questions mount: What will happen to the voters who supported him? Huntsman is endorsing Romney. Will the voter follow his lead? 
 
 The Huntsman voter was easy to track down. There was only one left, a nice, middle-aged woman who spent most of the year in Maine painting watercolors of sunsets. 
 
 “I miss him already,” she said. “He was really going to turn this country around, with his clear, common-sense 9-9-9 plan.” 
 
 “No,” I said. “Jon Huntsman.” 
 
 “What? Who? Oh, Huntsman. I thought you said something else.” ||||| “I hope it’s good enough for you,” Jon Huntsman said at the Huckabee Forum 2, a serial public interrogation of the Republican candidates, in South Carolina on Saturday night. An undecided voter had just asked him how he could possibly call himself pro-life when he would still allow women who had been raped or whose lives were at risk to have access to abortions. Huntsman talked about how glad he was that a Chinese woman had abandoned the baby girl who would become his adoptive daughter Gracie at a vegetable market, and about how the parameters he set on the abortion question were the ones he’d always followed. He hoped, again, that his answer would suffice. But that and a hundred other things would never be enough. On Sunday night, about twenty-four hours after the forum, word came that Huntsman was dropping out of the race. There will be an announcement on Monday morning, probably at 11 A.M. He’ll endorse Mitt Romney, “whom he accused a week ago of putting party ahead of country,” as the Times put it. 
 
 Why did Huntsman leave? The better question is: Why did he stay as long as he did? All elections have their oddities, but this one has been a carnival in which all of the clowns turn out to be carrying knives, and ready to use them. (See The Players, Hendrik Hertzberg’s guide to candidates, for more details.) Sanity and relative moderation were meant to be Huntsman’s appealing qualities, but, whatever genuine support they generated, they seemed to drag him down in this race. (Nor did Huntsman, in the seven months since declaring his candidacy, consistently adhere to those principles.) His exit will be of limited use to those who are torn between Gingrich and Santorum.
– Jon Huntsman is dropping out of the presidential race today—but does anyone care? "The only people really depressed about Jon Huntsman’s exit from the race are people who wouldn’t in their wildest dreams have voted for him—or any Republican candidate, for that matter," writes Alexandra Petri in the Washington Post, who places the impact of his announcement at close to zero: "It’s like being told that the Num Lock key is leaving the race. You feel like you should be disappointed, but you can’t think of anything that it was adding." But there is one big takeaway from his bid: "If you put a lot of effort into making your hair look nice, people will take you more seriously than perhaps they ought." Her highly amusing column is worth a read. More reactions: "Huntsman's failure proves that there's no constituency for liberal Republicanism," declares the Telegraph. Huntsman was fiscally conservative, but he also "had some nice things to say about evolution and homosexuality," writes Tim Stanley. But those "aspirant suburbanites" whose votes Huntsman was courting? They're either Democrats or independents who won't be voting in the GOP primary, while the Republican party itself "is arguably even more socially conservative than it was 20 years ago." "Sanity and relative moderation were meant to be Huntsman’s appealing qualities, but, whatever genuine support they generated, they seemed to drag him down in this race," writes Amy Davidson in the New Yorker. "His exit will be of limited use to those who are torn between Gingrich and Santorum." Politico's Arena features an extensive discussion of what went wrong. Grover Norquist says Huntsman's strategy could have worked had he gotten started earlier, an impression shared by many. (One former Obama administration official quips: "What went wrong? He ran for the GOP nomination in 2012 instead of 1988.") A few guess that Huntsman is now angling for the secretary of state appointment in Romney's administration, or that this whole thing was just a trial for a real run in 2016. Click for more on why Huntsman decided to drop out.