HOLLIS, N.H. — J.D.’s Tavern at the Radisson Inn in Manchester
was crowded Saturday night with the elite of America’s political
media. Famous faces from TV news mingled with less-famous but
nevertheless influential writers from major publications. Waiters
brought food and beverages — and still more beverages — as
midnight passed in the hours after yet another nationally televised
Republican presidential debate. One of the more famous bylines
among the journalistic throng delivered a harshly negative verdict
on the proceedings that had just aired on ABC.
“They were weak,” said the writer. “They didn’t bring
it.”
By “they,” he meant the various challengers to former
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. The pre-game forecast for Saturday
night’s debate was that the non-Romney conservatives would rush to
attack the man who is the overwhelming favorite to win Tuesday’s
primary here in New Hampshire. But the promised assault on Romney
— in a debate that had been hyped up like a professional wrestling
match — never materialized, much to the disappointment of the
journalist in J.D.’s Tavern.
“Look, I’m a reporter,” he said. “You know I’d love this
thing to go all the way to the convention, but… C’mon.”
His point was that the other candidates, by missing
opportunities to take the fight to Romney, had helped the
well-funded frontrunner move perceptibly closer to becoming the
inevitable GOP nominee. And it was hard to dispute his conclusion,
despite my own hope — one shared by most other conservatives —
that somehow this year the Republican Party can avoid its
predictable habit of nominating the “It’s His Turn” candidate. It
has been alleged, by
Sarah Palin among others, that the “mainstream media” are more
or less conspiring to hand the Republican nomination to Romney.
However, there are many in the press corps who would very much love
to cover a long and bitterly contested GOP battle that goes all the
way to the August convention in Tampa. Such a Republican donnybrook
becomes far less likely if, as polls now indicate, Romney scores a
decisive victory here in the Granite State. Thus it was that some
reporters had hoped that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich or
former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum would turn Saturday night’s
debate into a sustained beatdown of Romney, but they did not.
Romney escaped that debate with nary a scratch. While his
conservative rivals committed no major gaffes, neither did any of
them hit Romney with the kind of shattering blow that would
undermine his status as the favorite to win New Hampshire. And if
Romney adds a strong New Hampshire victory to his razor-thin
win
last week in Iowa, he will enhance what
Amy Walter of ABC has called his “mantle” of
inevitability.
The fight that didn’t happen Saturday night, however,
finally broke out Sunday morning in a Meet the Press
debate whose moderator, David Gregory, has seldom been accused of
objectivity. Goaded by the liberal host, Gingrich and Santorum
eagerly took their shots at the leader. Gingrich called Romney
“a relatively timid Massachusetts moderate … who I
think will have a very hard time in a debate with President Obama.”
Next came Santorum who said that, in Romney’s failed 1994 Senate
bid against Democrat Edward M. Kennedy, Romney “wouldn’t stand for
conservative principles. He ran from Ronald Reagan. And he said he
was going to be to the left of Ted Kennedy on gay rights, on
abortion, a whole host of other issues.” Evidently mindful of his
own need to appeal to conservatives who seek a feisty champion to
go up against Obama, Santorum continued: “We want someone, when the
time gets tough — and it will in this election — we want someone
who’s going to stand up and fight for the conservative principles,
not bail out and not run, and not run to the left of Ted
Kennedy.”
As combative as Romney’s rivals were Sunday morning, some
said it was too little, too late, coming just two days before
Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation primary here. Veteran political
analyst
Michael Barone suggested that Romney locked up the nomination
Saturday night, and American Spectator alumnus
Philip Klein lamented: “Had this all happened in
September, we may be looking at a race where Perry had just won
Iowa and was well ahead in South Carolina, while Huntsman was
nipping at Romney in New Hampshire. But this isn’t September.”
Klein noted Santorum’s late emergence as “the leading conservative
alternative to Romney,” but observed that what Republicans are
“left with is a situation in which Romney is so far ahead in his
quest for the GOP nomination, that barring a major catastrophe,
he’s unlikely to lose.” Both Barone and Klein, like most other
journalists covering the campaign in New Hampshire, discount the
possibility of Santorum’s post-Iowa momentum making a dent here.
The crowds showing up to see Santorum in New Hampshire — including
at
two events Saturday here in Hollis — are large and
enthusiastic, however, and the possibility of an unexpected surge
for Santorum is one of the uncertain factors in the final hours of
the Granite State campaign.
Polls indicate two certainties in Tuesday’s result: Romney
will win, whatever his margin of victory, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry
will finish a distant sixth, following on the humiliating
fifth-place finish in Iowa that nearly caused the former
frontrunner to quit the race. Perry hasn’t actively campaigned here
recently, and has now apparently invested all his hopes in the Jan.
21 South Carolina primary. Polls show Texas Rep. Ron Paul a solid
second place in New Hampshire, where his libertarian message meshes
well with the state’s “Live Free Or Die” motto. Tuesday may prove
the high point of Paul’s campaign, while it will likely be the last
hurrah for former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. The Obama
administration’s erstwhile ambassador to Beijing provided a comic
moment Saturday night when he criticized Romney’s anti-China
rhetoric in Mandarin Chinese. The improbable GOP candidate whom I
long ago dubbed “Governor
Asterisk” has been unable to break above the low teens in New
Hampshire polls, despite extensive advertising and near-constant
campaigning here. No one expects Huntsman to finish better than
third Tuesday, and if he can’t win here, he has no real hope of
winning elsewhere.
These relative certainties leave little dramatic tension
to be resolved by Tuesday’s vote. Observers will watch closely to
see which of Romney’s two leading conservative challengers,
Gingrich or Santorum, finishes higher in New Hampshire. Most polls
show them bunched together with Huntsman in the fight for third
place and, if Huntsman’s candidacy will have no other impact on the
2012 race, by finishing third or fourth, he could relegate Gingrich
and/or Santorum to an embarrassing spot in the back of the pack in
the Granite State.
The other closely watched factor will be Romney’s final
percentage here in the state that has been his must-win “firewall”
from the beginning of the yearlong campaign. Romney’s share in the
influential
Real Clear Politics average of New Hampshire polls has
increased from a low of 33.3 percent on Dec. 17 to 40.2 percent as
of Sunday evening. Yet the most recent Suffolk
University tracking poll seemed to indicate a slight decline in
Romney’s support, down to 35 percent. Should Romney finish in the
mid-30s Tuesday, he would be perceived as still vulnerable going
into the crucial South Carolina primary ten days later. But if
Romney gets much more than 40 percent in New Hampshire, the sense
of his inevitability could overwhelm what remains of conservative
resistance to the “It’s His Turn” candidate.
