CONCORD, New Hampshire — If today’s primary is a poker game,
Mitt Romney is sitting on the tall stack and folding every hand.
His extremely risk-averse strategy — he holds well-choreographed
rallies but rarely takes questions, either from voters or from the
press — is starting to annoy some Granite Staters.
At a Rick Santorum event in Nashua yesterday, a questioner
praised Santorum for being genuine and open to taking questions,
and said she was annoyed that Romney wouldn’t. This wasn’t the sort
of socially conservative voter who would be a natural Santorum
constituent — she went on to self-identify as a marijuana user and
ask about pot legalization. The polls bolster the sense one gets on
the ground; like the poker player sacrificing all the blinds and/or
antes (depending on what game we’re playing), Romney’s lead has
been slowly ticking away.
It probably won’t matter; the game ends today, and Romney
will almost certainly still win. If the
polls are right, Ron Paul is holding steady in second place;
the real fight is for third, where Santorum, Jon Huntsman, and Newt
Gingrich could all conceivably land.
Huntsman’s late boom underscores the upside potential he
squandered with an ill-conceived strategy from the start; rather
than emphasize his fairly conservative record, he instead courted
the elite media in a play for independents. This is the strategy
that Huntsman’s top adviser, John Weaver, pursued in John McCain’s
2000 campaign; McCain did win New Hampshire, but he quickly hit a
dead end. McCain’s 2008 campaign only succeeded after firing
Weaver, who in between the two McCain campaigns worked briefly for
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, seemingly out of
spite.
If not for Ron Paul, who no one would confuse with a
moderate despite his appeal to non-Republicans, Huntsman might be
near the front of the pack. He makes an pitch to war-weary voters
that there’s clearly an appetite for — hence Paul’s strength —
while eschewing Paul’s blanket hostility to America’s role as a
global military power. Huntsman emphasizes that “we do have
something to show for our efforts” in Afghanistan. “We’ve got the
Taliban run out of power; al Qaeda has been dismantled, they’re in
sanctuaries, Osama bin Laden is no longer around,” Huntsman says in
his stump speech, which I caught at a townhall in Keene on Sunday.
“We’ve had free elections; we’ve strengthened civil society. We’ve
helped the police; we’ve helped the military. We have done what we
can do as people — I want those troops to come home.”
This has obvious appeal to a significant slice of the
electorate, and if Huntsman makes it into third today it will be in
part because he’s broken through near the end of the campaign by
coupling this message with an image as a competent conservative.
That third place is the best he can hope for is testament to the
failure of his early strategy of what Tim Carney has
correctly identified as liberal identity-politics signaling,
marked by his well-known declaration on Twitter: “To be clear. I
believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call
me crazy.”
Newt Gingrich, by contrast, whose record is in many ways
substantively to the left of Huntsman’s, is styling himself as the
red-meat candidate. At a town hall event yesterday in Manchester,
he accused President Obama of “Saul Alinsky radicalism” and called
him “the most radical president in history” within the first few
minutes of his speech. He later hit Mitt Romney as a “Massachusetts
moderate” who can’t draw a contrast with Obama; in the press
availability after the town hall, a reporter asked why a
Massachusetts moderate can’t draw a contrast with the most radical
president in American history. Gingrich answered that healthcare
would be Romney’s Achilles’ heel on the contrast-drawing front,
which is true, but the exchange laid bare how over-the-top Newt’s
rhetoric can be. One gets the feeling that this erstwhile friend of
Nancy
Pelosi’s and
Al Sharpton’s doth protest too much.
Gingrich has been sinking in the polls, though he’s still
close to Huntsman and Santorum; his late
endorsement from Todd Palin (and earlier
endorsement from the Union Leader) may give him a
cushion. But Huntsman and especially Santorum look stronger on the
stump; of the three, Gingrich seems least likely to win the fight
for third.
That, at least, is how it looks this morning. New
Hampshire has surprised us before; we’ll see tonight if it does so
again.
