Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman may be trailing in the polls, but he has become the first of the candidates to put up a parody of former tobacco lobbyist Herman Cain’s already-notorious “smoking man” ad. 
 
 Huntman’s ad features his three daughters in horn-rimmed glasses and false mustaches 
 
 “Tomorrow is Friday, one day closer to the weekend,” one deadpans. 
 
 “We strongly believe that our dad has the experience and proven track record to revive America’s economy and create jobs,” the second intones, adding, “Even if we didn’t believe that, we’d still have to be here.” 
 
 “We are shamelessly promoting out dad like no other family ever has,” the third continues. 
 
 In conclusion, at the point where Cain’s aide takes a drag on a cigarette, all three women blow soap bubbles in unison. 
 
 This video is from Jon2012Girls, posted to YouTube October 28, 2011. ||||| In early November, the Jon2012girls were in New York City getting their hair and makeup done for a karaoke-themed photo shoot at a Chinese restaurant on the Lower East Side. Mary Anne, Abby, and Liddy Huntsman are the twentysomething daughters of presidential candidate Jon Huntsman Jr., which means that the sisters—who've become celebrities over the past few months for tweeting snarky updates from the campaign trail at @Jon2012girls—are sort of unofficially running for first daughters. Which makes this technically a campaign stop, even though there are no voters here and we're in a banquet room that smells like old rice. 
 
 As a stylist feathered Mary Anne's hair with a curling iron, Liddy cued up "Hold On" by Wilson Phillips on her iPhone. Lately they've been playing this song to get psyched up before watching their dad debate. Despite all the free media attention his daughters have garnered on his behalf, as of this writing Huntsman remains a margin-of-error candidate. So decide for yourself if their rallying cry of Hold on for one more day is touching or painfully ironic. Still—when they break into perfect three-part harmony, they totally crush it. 
 
 
 
 Would-be first daughters (from left): 
 
 Liddy, Mary Anne, and Abby Huntsman. 
 
 The Huntsman daughters' three-headed social-media presence is a mischievous, seemingly unfiltered corrective to the stage-managed sneering of the campaign. A few months ago, the Herman Cain campaign posted a bizarre ad in which Mark Block, Cain's mustachioed chief of staff, enumerates his boss's virtues in tough-guy close-up. At the end, he takes a defiant, Denis Leary–ish puff on a cigarette. Even in the context of a Republican race already shaping up as the Battle of Who Can Come Off Like a Bigger Assclown Before Losing the Nomination to Mitt Romney, this was weird. Liddy, the youngest Jon2012girl, whose dream is to work for a show like Saturday Night Live someday, couldn't believe it. 
 
 "I was stunned that this was a legit commercial," she says. Plus, she was home from college and bored. So she and her sisters shot a Funny or Die–style parody of the ad that doubled as a Huntsman spot. They wore fake mustaches; instead of smoking, they blew bubbles. It went viral, and for at least the length of a news cycle, they were more famous than Jon Huntsman himself. Even Mark Block was impressed. When Mary Anne ran into him before a debate in South Carolina, she told him how much she loved his ad. "I loved your ad," he responded. 
 
 Today the touch-screen menus on the karaoke machine are user-unfriendly, and most of the songs are in Chinese. A determined Liddy pokes at one until it coughs up Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl"—the girls sing shhhh when Gwen says shit—and gradually, despite the presence of a photographer, sisterly goofiness ensues. This is definitely not the first time they've sung LeAnn Rimes's "Can't Fight the Moonlight." 
 
 Afterward they talk (shrewdly yet idealistically) about using new technology to reach young voters disillusioned by Obama's failure to deliver all that hope and change he promised the Facebook generation, and how off-the-cuff sass is the only way to speak to an audience that gets its news from Jon Stewart and Twitter. They explain, politely, that no, they're not angling for gigs on Fox ("I'm not blonde," Abby points out sagely), nor are they trying to be the Kardashians of politics. Abby, who used to be in PR and works hardest to keep her sisters on-message, explains that their parents raised them to give back. Every night, she says, "they'd ask us what we'd done that day to make someone's life a little better, to make someone smile or whatever. I know that sounds cheesy—but that's the philosophy we were raised with." Campaigning for Dad is their way of doing that. 
 
 Before the girls arrived, Huntsman's campaign spokesman called to warn me that Liddy has yet to fully grasp what "on the record" means, although he needn't have bothered. When I mention the Kardashians, it's Liddy who volunteers the information that Mary Anne once went on a date with Kim's now estranged husband, Kris Humphries, when he was on the Utah Jazz. 
 
 "Liddy!" Mary Anne says, mortified. 
 
 But it's true. They saw Elf; Humphries bought a bucket of popcorn the size of a garbage can. Mary Anne never heard another thing about him until he turned up on E!, dating a reality-TV queen. 
 
 "You're gonna get me in trouble," Anne says. 
 
 Liddy takes a sip of water. "I'm just trying to make someone smile." ||||| Grant Cornett for TIME Jon Huntsman 
 
 Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman has just proved he can keep 1,100 graduating college kids awake for 17 minutes  and even led them in a popular local cheer about kicking ass. But Obama's lean, understated former ambassador to China is really here to prove he can mount a credible campaign against the man he was working for a week prior. In a brightly lit cinder-block room inside the sports arena where the University of South Carolina has held its commencement, the former Utah governor jokes that the stark setting of our interview  his first since returning to the U.S.  suggests he might be in for some "enhanced interrogation." 
 
 But if that's what I'm up to, then torture really doesn't work, because in several sittings and a couple of hours together over a week's time, I don't even come close to getting him to spill such puny secrets as whether he thinks we should be in Afghanistan or Libya ("There will be more to say about that"), in what ways he disagrees with Obama ("I don't want to get into specifics") or, for that matter, where he parts company with his fellow Republicans, including his distant cousin, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney ("It wouldn't be fair to offer an opinion without doing due diligence"). And as for whether or not Huntsman still belongs to the Church of Latter-day Saints, I know less than I did before I asked him. ("I'm a very spiritual person," as opposed to a religious one, he says, "and proud of my Mormon roots." Roots? That makes it sound as if you're not a member anymore. Are you? "That's tough to define," he says. "There are varying degrees. I come from a long line of saloon keepers and proselytizers, and I draw from both sides.") (See "Twelve for '12: A Dozen Republicans Who Could Be the Next President.") 
 
 So careful that he's disinclined to weigh in on any matter on which he hasn't been fully briefed or made up his mind, Huntsman is nonetheless plenty open about wanting to compete for Obama's job. Already he's in primary-season mode, moderating his previously moderate views by praising the Tea Party as "a very legitimate manifestation of people's anger and frustration in where we are today" and junking his support for the regional cap-and-trade carbon-emissions pact he and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger once championed. "It hasn't worked," he says now, "and our economy's in a different place than five years ago." Until it recovers, he adds, "this isn't the moment" to keep trying. 
 
 While some Republican hopefuls have failed or are still trying to coax their loved ones onto the campaign bus, Huntsman's wife and their seven children are more than ready for a yearlong road trip that could begin as soon as June. "I would be extremely excited" if he ran, his daughter Liddy, 23, says. "He'd be the ultimate fresh face." ("Thanks, chief," he tells her in his usual soothing sotto voce style.) 
 
 Certainly, his party is in the market for one of those; competition was so modest at the first GOP presidential debate of the season that the sole top-tier contender who showed, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, was begging for a rival who could help him keep his skills up. As Huntsman's would-be campaign manager John Weaver tells me, "This is the weakest Republican field since Wendell Willkie won the nomination on the sixth ballot in 1940." (Watch TIME's video "The GOP: Optimism and Obstacles.") 
 
 But is the understated 51-year-old Jon Meade Huntsman Jr. really the answer to the Republican Party's personnel problem? He is, after all, a pro-civil-union Mormon who has just finished nearly two years of service for Obama in the land many Americans consider the new evil empire. He is pro-environment  a little too green for many in his party  and hardly anyone knows who he is. Though Huntsman's path to the nomination is a certified long shot, you have to wonder why so many on both the right and left seem to be freaking out at the prospect of his jumping into the race. 
 
 Democrats who fear that Huntsman would do well against Obama in next year's general election are busy pelting him with rose petals  take that, you wonderful man!  that they openly hope will disqualify him in the eyes of Republican Party regulars. But it's Huntsman's fellow conservatives who are in a swivet over all the attention he's gotten since arriving home from China on April 30. As governor, the antiabortion, pro-gun Huntsman did all the things Tea Party conservatives say they want, slashing taxes and adding jobs. He did that in part by using his sway with Mormon elders to pave the way for a reform of state liquor laws that made it easier to get a drink. (See TIME's graphic "Mark Halperin Weighs In on the Republican Party.") 
 
 Yet on the right, he still somehow stands accused both of writing the President the kind of "love letters" most of us refer to as thank-you notes and of showing disloyalty to his country by "plotting" to run against that same President while in a position to undermine him on the world stage. Both what he says and what he doesn't say in our interviews make clear, though, that he really has not been steeping himself in presidential politics. "I'm not even sure I could name all of them," he says of his GOP rivals. 
 
 Fortunately for him, much of the country can't either.
– First Jon Huntsman's daughters made a splash on Twitter, thanks to their tactical deployment of wit and snark. Now they're taking to YouTube, featuring a parody of the infamous "smoking man" video put out earlier in the week by Herman Cain's campaign manager, Mark Block, reports Raw Story. All the women sport big mustaches, like Block, and intone their lines with much seriousness, also like Block. But where Block said, "Tomorrow is one day closer to the White House," Liddy Huntsman deadpans, "Tomorrow is Friday, one day closer to the weekend." And instead of Block's line, "If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be here," family ties apparently nix such freedom: “Even if we didn’t believe that, we’d still have to be here,” says Abby Huntsman. And for the big finish? No, they don't puff a cigarette like Block did. But they do blow soap bubbles (very moodily, of course). For some choice snarking from the Huntsman daughters, check this out.