Shut out of the last Iowa debate because of low poll numbers, earnest, honest, ethical, reasonable, intelligent and boring candidate Jon Huntsman gave his assessment of the event to ABC’s Christiane Amanpour, saying that the main issue facing the country was a trust deficit:

“The most important issue of all was not even touched upon and that is the deficit of trust we have in the United States, in fact it may have played right into the trust deficit. That is, nobody trusts Congress anymore. We need term limits in Congress, we need to close the revolving door that allows members of Congress to move right on into the lobbying profession. No one has trust anymore towards the executive branch, no one trusts Wall Street with the banks that are too big to fail. So I would argue that the issues that are most salient in our political dialogue today were not even touched upon last night…”

Huntsman is right. It was especially astounding that this issue wasn’t addressed in the debate (and that those crack moderators Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos  didn’t mention it) after more than a month of Occupy Everywhere protests that sorta-kinda dealt with the trust issue (oh,  what a little focus could have wrought!)  and the recent “60 Minutes”  expose on insider trading by members of Congress. Also preceding the debate was this trust-buster: in July of 2008, Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson held a meeting with select Wall Street fund managers and gave them advance notice of government action that they could use to make significant profits: Continue reading →