PRINCETON, N.J., June 21 (UPI) -- Jon Huntsman officially declared for the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday, vowing in New Jersey's Liberty State Park not to trash President Obama.
Huntsman pledged to "make hard decisions that are necessary to avert (economic) disaster" and keep the U.S. position as a world power, USA Today reported.
Huntsman said it was "totally unacceptable and totally un-American" that for "the first time in our history, we are about to pass down to the next generation a country that is less powerful, less compassionate, less competitive and less confident than the one we got," the newspaper reported.
Until recently U.S. ambassador to China, Huntsman played up his history as a two-term governor of Utah, which balanced its budget, "cut taxes and flattened rates" and maintained a AAA bond rating.
The announcement came in the same park where President Ronald Reagan began his 1980 presidential run.
As for Obama, "He and I have a difference of opinion on how to help the country we both love," Huntsman said, "but the question each of us wants the voters to answer is who will be the better president; not who's the better American."
In a television interview Sunday, Obama strategist David Axelrod said Huntsman was "effusive" in private conversation about the president's handling of healthcare and other issues.
The Washington Post said Democrats, who see Huntsman as a credible Obama challenger, have seized on his moderate positions on a number of key issues in hopes of thwarting his candidacy, saying that he has borrowed from Romney's playbook in shifting his stance.
Huntsman, a Mormon, is the eighth major Republican candidate for president, but Gallup and other surveys have him polling in the low single digits.
Meanwhile, nearly one in four U.S. voters would not vote for a Mormon for president, a poll indicates.
Twenty-two percent of respondents would not support their party's nominee for president if that nominee was a Mormon, a Gallup poll indicated.
Among Democrats the number was 27 percent. Among Republicans and independents, it was 18 percent and 19 percent, respectively, Gallup said.
Gallup found no significant differences on the issue by age, sex, region of the country or religious preference. People with no college were almost three times as likely to consider Mormonism a deal-breaker than college graduates, Gallup said.
The percentage opposed to a Mormon president has remained largely unchanged since 1967, in contrast to other ethnic, religious and gender prejudices, Gallup said.
The Gallup phone poll of 1,020 adults, conducted June 9-12, has a margin of sampling error of 4 percentage points.