Mitt Romney Wins New Hampshire

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney won a decisive victory in the New Hampshire primary tonight. The numbers as of press time show Romney with about 36% of the vote, about 11% more than his closest rival, Ron Paul. While that is a large margin, and CNN was able to call the primary just after 8 pm eastern time for the former governor when the polls were officially closed, it was not necessarily a decisive one. The Huffington Post splashed as their headline tonight, “5 Years Campaigning, Less Than 40%?” Romney has ostensibly never quit his 2008 presidential bid in New Hampshire, keeping offices open, continuing to build support over the last 4 years, much like what Congressman Paul had done down in Iowa (yet it still couldn’t get him a win). Romney did win, but he was only able to garner roughly 36% of the primary voters. With a lasting campaign as he had had, one might have thought New Hampshire would be a runaway victory for Governor Romney.

In all likelihood, Romney will win the nomination. There really is nobody in the field who can match his campaign when it comes to spending and donations. Through his own resources and the capital of the Pro-Romney Super PACS, he can fend off any surge by the other candidates in the race. Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, they all rose and fell without Romney needing to do much. They had no chance when it came to Iowa, or New Hampshire. They beat themselves. Newt Gingrich, however, was a different story. With less than a month to go before the Iowa caucuses, Gingrich saw a huge shift in support from likely voters. And with the holidays coming up, and the focus shifting off Iowa for a hot-minute, Gingrich looked poised to roll into the final week with a commanding lead. Sensing a shift in momentum, Romney (and his Super PACS) stepped in. They blanketed the airwaves with attack ads on the former House Speaker calling into question his integrity, his record, his marital strife. And it worked. Gingrich’s popularity plummeted and Romney went “all-in” in Iowa hoping to shut down this roulette wheel of Republican flavors-of-the-month. It didn’t quite work. Former Sen. Rick Santorum played well with Iowa voters with his social conservative issues and nearly pulled off an upset. Without a decisive victory, Romney would still have a large field of contenders to bat off in New Hampshire.

It’s a week later, and I don’t see that much has changed. Sure Romney won by more than 10% (with a field of five), but it’s not a knockout punch. Rick Perry, after tonight, should really drop out. But he was never focused on New Hampshire and has instead been looking to South Carolina’s primary on Jan. 21. But his showing was so bad tonight, and his campaign has been running on life-support for weeks, that he should just give up while still ahead. Of course, I probably could say the same thing about Jon Huntsman, but he never even bothered with Iowa. His focus was New Hampshire and it worked – to an extent. Huntsman will likely finish a strong 3^rd in New Hampshire, but with no base whatsoever in South Carolina to speak of it’s difficult to say how he can press on from here. Huntsman really did need a 1^st or 2^nd place tonight to get the momentum he needed in the coming weeks. With only about 15-18% of the vote in New Hampshire, and a significant distance to catch Ron Paul, this does not bode well for his campaign in the coming weeks. But then this all comes back around to Romney and how poor his numbers were for the evening.

Without breaking the 40% margin, Romney has to be wondering what is missing from his campaign to draw in new voters. There must be some consternation on his part that the anti-Romney popularity has not yet finished weaving its way through the field of contenders. About 30% of voters this past weekend were still undecided going to the voting booth and Romney's final tally were fairly consistent with his polling numbers, meaning he still has not done what's needed to sway the undecided to his camp. If given a few more days, or another week, might Huntsman turned more support his way? We can't say for sure now. South Carolina might still have something to say for Jon Huntsman. It may have something to say for all the other candidates as well. Rick Santorum's social issues might play better in SC. Newt Gingrich is from neighboring Georgia. Ron Paul's libertarian base seems to be holding steady between 20-25% of republican voters. If New Hampshire is indicative of South Carolina in its population of undecided voters, we might not be any closer to solidifying a republican nominee for the White House in 11 more days. And the longer this strings along, the worse it will be for Romney.

Gingrich Putting the Children to Work

With the Republican Presidential nomination race maintaining its highly contested aura, the candidates are searching for ways each can pull ahead. Generally such a highly contested race might spur some candidates to veer more towards the middle, to a more moderate stance in their party to avoid becoming the outlier, the crazy one, and draw more supporters. If we look back at the 2008 Presidential election, there were many independents on the fence about voting for an untested Barack Obama, but when it came down to it, they couldn’t bring themselves to lay down their vote for the gaffe-prone, “rogue,” Sarah Palin, John McCain’s Vice Presidential pick. After the landslide margin of victory for the Democrats in that election, you’d think the Republican Party might have turned down the far Right rhetoric. But it only seemed to get worse after Obama took office. And now here we are one year out from the 2012 election and it seems the crazier the Republican nominee, the better chance they have of winning the nomination.

That’s where Newt Gingrich comes in. Once considered completely out of the race, suddenly the former Speaker of the House finds himself in the lead with a slight edge over former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Romney has had his share of problems, mostly his John Kerry-like indecisiveness and “flip-flopping” on key issues. (I use the term ‘flip-flopping’ here loosely. Romney, I feel if elected, would actually move far more the Left of his current positions on certain issues. I believe he’s aware that the GOP has shifted drastically Right since Obama’s election and to simply court the vote, Romney is veering far Right until the nomination.) Gingrich, on the other hand, has simply maintained. He has not had the major flubs that Michelle Bachmann and Gov. Rick Perry have had. Also, despite Gingrich’s marital problems, no extra-marital affairs or sexual harassment allegations have sprung up, like nose-diving Herman Cain. What Gingrich has going for him thus far seems to be only that he is the GOP’s self-professed “ideas man.” What exactly has Gingrich come up with lately? Well, this week he once again attacked child labor laws defending a remark he made in mid-November for how ‘truly stupid’ they are. Frankly, if these are the types of ideas a Presidential nominee is going to come up with, I fear the Right is far more out of touch with the American public, and the American economy than most realize.

How exactly putting children to work will help the economy, and more specifically the unemployment rate, is something the prospective nominee does not purport to theorize. But, nonetheless, Gingrich is maintaining his stance on this issue. He believes that ‘poor’ children do not know how to work, that their work ethic is nonexistent because if they are poor, then surely their parents must not work. Gingrich glances over the fact that 15% of the country, 46 million people, are in poverty. The official unemployment rate is just below 9%. That means that 6% of the population works, but is still below the poverty line. That’s not lack of motivation, that’s lack of livable wages in the private sector. But say that Gingrich does somehow manage to rollback child labor laws, and his idea of putting school children to work with janitors in the evenings is implemented. How exactly does this help unemployment? Children are not officially counted in the unemployment rate. So, that would not dent the unemployed. But, if suddenly schools are allowed to hire children for less wages, thus more hands, they could feasibly layoff adults working in the school, which would actually worsen unemployment.

And what exactly does this do for a child? True, I’m sure they’d get valuable experience learning how to clean toilets and clean up kindergartener’s puke, if they aspired to be janitors when they grow up. Children should not be made to work in school. Parents should be raising their children. (Is this big government from Newt Gingrich?) Children should be concentrating on bettering their education, not what cleaning product works best on permanent marker scribbled on school lockers. A better education for the youth of our generation is the only means to a better future. India and China, the two fastest growing economies in the world, have invested billions into their education systems and they are leading the way in graduating math and science students, producing future innovators and entrepreneurs. It’s true that an after-school work program might keep a lot of kids off the streets and it will better prepare them for the future by teaching them needed skills, but it should be a voluntary, unpaid program. It should be like an internship program, or provide extra-credit for students struggling with their grades. Or perhaps it could be used as a reduction in school taxes for those parents whose children join the program. Lower taxes? Every Republican can get onboard with that one.

And speaking of China: until recently the country had very lax child labor laws. Comparatively to the US, they still do. Maybe Mr. Gingrich doesn’t quite remember sweat shops? Maybe Mr. Gingrich doesn’t quite remember our own sordid history with child labor in the fields and factories of the early 1900’s? For someone who’s written so many books, especially on history, I find that hard to believe. Maybe someone needs to remind Mr. Gingrich of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911? The point is this country has already seen it’s more than fair share of needless accidents involving the deaths of workers, especially children who were put into unsafe working conditions. We enacted laws to better safety standards of factory conditions so that workers are not risking their lives to make below poverty rate wages. The funny thing that happened along the way though is that as American labor laws became stricter, the factory owners and “job creators” just took their industries overseas to China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, to name a few. Sure enough, however, the same thing that happened here is happening overseas. There have been countless reports of death and injury in Chinese factories where the labor laws were extremely lax. But after some very public, egregious stories of operose workers being hurt, especially poor children from China’s vast countryside coming to the booming cities for work, the country has had little choice but to enact stronger labor laws to protect its people from unsafe American business practices. Why then, in a bit of hyperbole, does Mr. Gingrich wish the United States to rollback our labor laws and become more aligned with Communist China? Isn’t Obama supposed to be the socialist Kenyan, Newt?

Finally, I think the biggest problem I have with this whole idea of Gingrich’s is that he specifically points out that “poor” children are the ones in need of a solid employed role model in order to garner some kind of proper work ethic. Why is it just poor children who need this? What kind of work ethic do rich kids have that poor children do not? Poor children do not see how their parents boss the maid around the house in order for the maid to pick up after the messy child. Do rich children by some under-reported phenomenon, some kind of osmosis of ambition, absorb the ingenuity, the entrepreneurial spirit that their parents supposedly have? What about the children of Bernie Madoff? What kind of work ethic do they have if their father’s wealth came from crime? And what of the executives on Wall Street who crashed the economy with fraudulent mortgage foreclosures, mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, etc.? Sure these people made a lot of money, and they stole a lot of money from the country and the middle class. Is this the type of “ambition” that Mr. Gingrich feels we should be instilling in all our children?

Oh Perry, Perry

Well, Rick Perry proved once again he can't handle the big stage. Perry has made multiple gaffes over the many, many, many Republican presidential debates, yet he still manages a front-runner status. In the debates, he has trouble maintaining focus, especially as the debates wind down. He's often been inarticulate when trying to put forth his policy agenda, and in criticizing his opponents viewpoints and policies as well. And then there was that awful, possibly inebriated, campaign speech he gave in New Hampshire in late October. It's been so bad the Perry camp has said that they will limit the number of presidential debates the Texas Governor will attend. That makes sense considering his abysmal track record thus far. Maybe they should have let the Governor skip Wednesday night's debate in Michigan.

I didn't watch the debate (reason #488 why I sometimes wish I had a TV), but from what I know, Perry was being mostly ignored throughout the night -- the media's usual way of telling a candidate they're taking them less seriously. Even with Perry being close to center (Herman Cain is the current front-runner, and was centered), the moderators were not allowing Perry much in the way of getting his answers out there. Maybe they were trying to limit the Governor's chances of a misstep? But Perry would not be denied. He jumped into the discussion when an opportunity arose for him to trumpet his reduce-the-government mentality. If he gets into office, he would cut three government agencies: Commerce, Education, and "um, uh, oops." He stumped himself on the third. It was cringe-worthy. As has been want for the candidates to do after these missteps, they attempt to laugh it off, or blame others. "I'm glad I had my boots on," Perry quipped to a round of reporters backstage, "because I really stepped in it tonight." Governor Perry might want to look into getting himself a full body suit. I think he's in way over his head.