MANCHESTER, N.H. — About 40 percent of voters in Tuesday’s New
Hampshire primary cast their ballots for either Texas Rep. Ron Paul
or former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who finished second and third
behind the “It’s His Turn” Republican presidential candidate,
former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
Adding in Romney’s 39 percent, the top three finishers in
the Granite State got nearly 80 percent of the vote — even though
none of them can credibly claim to represent the mainstream of GOP
conservatism that has developed over the past three decades.
Romney, of course, has been on both sides of every important issue
during his political career, having even denied any fealty to
“Reagan-Bush” during his unsuccessful 1994 Senate race. Ron
Paul’s foreign policy views are not merely at odds with mainstream
Republicanism, but arguably put him to the left of President Obama.
And Huntsman has not only embraced same-sex civil unions and
global-warming theory, but has praised the Democratic president who
appointed him ambassador to China.
Thus in New Hampshire, a state where independents are
eligible to vote in the GOP primary, barely 20 percent of voters
chose either of the conservative candidates — former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich or former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum — who
competed here. Gingrich and Santorum each got less than 10 percent
of the vote, providing the only real suspense of the night with
their see-saw battle for fourth place. Texas Gov. Rick Perry didn’t
even bother to campaign in the Granite State, and got about 1,500
votes. And so the first-in-the-nation primary ends with the fight
for the Republican nomination exactly where it was when the
campaign started, with Romney as the pre-emptive
favorite.
Has it all been a colossal waste of time? How did we get
back where we began? We are now eight months into the 2012
presidential campaign, if we date its beginning to the first
Republican debate last May in Greenville, S.C. Only two of the
candidates who participated in that debate — Paul and Santorum —
will still be in the race as the campaign trail heads back to South
Carolina, which holds its primary a week from Saturday. Of the
other three candidates in that May 5 debate, former Minnesota Gov.
Tim Pawlenty dropped out after a disappointing third-place finish
in the Aug. 13 Iowa GOP Straw Poll, former New Mexico Gov. Gary
Johnson quit last month and announced he would instead seek the
Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination, and Atlanta
businessman Herman Cain quit in early December after being battered
by unproven allegations of sexual misconduct. Perry joined the
field in August and zoomed ahead in the polls, but his lead
collapsed quickly after a series of September debate blunders.
Gingrich’s campaign survived a seemingly crippling start when his
staff walked out en masse and subsequently signed
up with Perry. However, it seemed Gingrich might become the last
man standing among the “not Romney” candidates, when he soared
upward in the polls in November. But he was devastated by attack
ads — from Romney, Paul, and Perry — and finished a weak fourth
in Iowa.
After another fourth-place finish in New Hampshire,
Gingrich appears now to be running a campaign of personal vengeance
against Romney. A Gingrich-allied “super PAC,” bankrolled to the
tune of $5 million by casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, is planning an
attack onslaught against Romney featuring a
documentary about the GOP frontrunner’s tenure at the
investment firm Bain Capital. When Mitt Romney Came to
Town depicts Romney as responsible for shutting down American
companies and leaving laid-off workers to fend for themselves. Rick
Perry picked up on this theme Tuesday in South Carolina when he
described Romney’s firm as “vultures … sitting out there on the
tree limb waiting for the company to get sick, and then they swoop
in, they eat the carcass, they leave with that, and they leave the
skeleton.”
This is scarcely the sort of rhetoric expected of
conservative Republicans, and everyone who watched Romney’s victory
speech here knew who he was referring to when he said,
“President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial. In
the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join
forces with him.” Indeed, those Republicans still intent on
stopping the “inevitable” Romney have good reason to be desperate,
because if the well-funded frontrunner wins South Carolina, the
2012 GOP campaign could be effectively over before it has really
even begun.
What little hope remains of stopping Romney at this point
would appear to rest with South Carolina voters, and even there
the most recent polls show Romney leading. Members of the
national press corps who have been ensconced here in Manchester the
past week seem now nearly unanimously agreed that the Republican
campaign is now all over but the shouting. One network news
analyst, getting into a cab outside the Radisson Hotel near
midnight, paused long enough to ask a nearby reporter, “Who do you
think he’ll pick for his running mate?” And there was no need to
explain who “he” is.
