Jon Huntsman wants you to know he rides a dirt bike. On real dirt! He’s Salt of the Earth. Grease of the Garage. Dragster on the Dunes. Huntsman’s runnin’ and gunnin’ for president. But underneath the Steve McQueen costumery, this made-for-cable-TV Moderate Speed Racer is a creaky old John McCain on Wheels.

The former Utah Republican governor and Obama ambassador to China is the answer to an election-year problem that doesn’t exist. The quadrennial “problem,” in the minds of Beltway GOP strategists and liberal media chin-pullers, is that the Republican Party isn’t moderate, civil, self-critical or inclusive enough.

Huntsman is the latest no-labels flavor of the month. Just like the failed 2008 GOP contender whose consultants are now fueling the Huntsman bid, McCain 2.0 is a big-spending accommodationist more in tune with the Democratic elite than with conservatives. In the shadow of the Statue of Liberty on Tuesday, Huntsman assailed the economic crisis overseen by Obama as “totally unacceptable” and “totally un-American.” Yet Huntsman retains nothing but “respect” for his former boss in the White House.

This is all you need to know about the manufacturing of the Huntsman candidacy: Swooning reporters far outnumbered supporters at the kickoff in Liberty Park and a follow-up rally in New Hampshire. CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer gushed: “Here’s what I especially liked about Jon Huntsman’s presidential announcement in front of the Statue of Liberty. He called for some civility in the race for the White House. Unlike several of the other Republican candidates, he did not open with a blistering assault on President Obama.”

Yeah. Who do all those uncivil Republicans running against Obama think they are — opposing the opposition with oppositional rhetoric? Heaven forfend.

Former McCain mastermind John Weaver, now a key Huntsman strategist, said this week the campaign will be “mellow.” More like “marshmallow.” Instead of trashing enemies by name, they’ll keep it vague and mushy. Huntsman has been buoyed by months of glowing coverage from left-leaning, dead-tree media, whose reporters have lapped up his trashing of the GOP as “devoid of ideas” and “a very narrow party of angry people.” See? No names. No nasty. Embrace the civility!

While politely paying lip service to principles of tea party fiscal restraint, Huntsman hopes no one remembers how 2,000 Utah tea party activists booed him in April 2009 so corrosively it could have stripped the paint off a fleet of Harleys.

Utah conservatives raised their voices at the seminal tea party rally against Huntsman for championing $1.6 billion in Obama stimulus funds (Huntsman wanted even more money than that) — and against GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch and then-GOP Sen. Bob Bennett for backing the Bush-Obama TARP bailout.

While state governments across the country are rejecting or repealing onerous cap-and-trade environmental regulations, Huntsman is a climate-change Republican.

While state governments rein in middle-class entitlement spending and Washington turns to means-testing, Huntsman turned the SCHIP government-funded health plan for low-income children into a universal health insurance mandate. McCain 1.0 was for SCHIP before he was against it.

McCain’s Straight Talk Express ran out of gas when his former media paramours inevitably turned against him — and his gambit to out-big government the Democrats blew up in his two faces. So it will be with McHuntsman and his campaign wheels to nowhere.

Michelle Malkin is the author of “Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies” (Regnery 2010). Her email address is malkinblog@gmail.com.