Posted by
Steve on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 8:02:44 AM
Yesterday was the New Hampshire primary. Mitt Romney won the primary, as expected, with 39% of the vote. Ron Paul was second with 23% and Jon Huntsman was 3rd with 16%. Santorum and Gingrich essentially tied with 9%. Those results are pretty much as expected. Polling had Romney somewhere between 16 and 20 points ahead just prior to the primary. The election turned out to be a 16 point win.
The big surprise was that Ron Paul defeated Jon Huntsman for second place. Huntsman skipped Iowa and put all his eggs into New Hampshire. He needed to finish second in the voting in order to gain any traction going ahead. He ended up a pretty poor third, considering how much time and effort went into the campaign.
Ron Paul ended up a few points ahead of where people expected him to be. He was supposed to come in 3rd a few points behind Huntsman. Pulling out second place, decisively, gives him some momentum going into the rest of the primary and caucus states. It probably is not enough to win the nomination, but I am not convinced he truly wants to be President. His victory speech was not the kind of speech you give if you have visions of winning the nomination. The speech was the type given by someone who knows he will not win, but wants to make a difference in the debate going forward. I did get to hear most of Ron Paul’s speech live. I turned on the TV just in time to get most of Ron Paul’s speech. I always find myself agreeing with almost everything he says. It is just his ideas of foreign policy that cause me to shy away from Ron Paul.
Mitt Romney now has two notches in his belt. He needs to secure two more notches to make the nomination inevitable. Even my wife admitted last night that Romney will be the nominee. She has resisted that statement since day one. Not that she is anti-Romney. She just is not into politics and wanted the race to count into Arizona.
Romney is leading in the polls in South Carolina and Florida. If those polls are accurate, then Romney should have the inevitability factor in his favor by early February. The big question of the two is South Carolina. That is the more conservative state and one where Newt Gingrich has the biggest influence. Romney’s lead in Florida is almost as large as it was in New Hampshire (12%).
What is disturbing about the Republican nomination process right now is that Gingrich and Perry are attacking Romney using anti-capitalism as their theme. Republicans are the freedom party. The result of freedom is capitalism. Capitalism has winners and losers. That is just how it works. To hear Gingrich and Perry, you would think that capitalism is supposed to have guaranteed winners. Anyone who has ever participated in capitalism knows that is not the case. Companies go belly up all the time. Freedom allows people to fail. Failure is bad in the short term, but good in the long term. You learn from your mistakes. When you fail, you learn. Then you start over and come back stronger than you were before.
Socialism is where people get guaranteed outcomes. Gingrich and Perry are implying that capitalism should choose winners and losers. That is soft socialism that Gingrich and Perry are preaching. That is why I no longer consider Gingrich or Perry viable candidates for President and really question whether they are conservatives at all. Gingrich talks like a conservative and lives like a liberal. Perry governs like a conservative most of the time, with occasional detours into socialism. Their complaints against Romney play directly into the hands of the Democrats in the fall. In some ways it is good to get these issues out in the open now. But having Republicans bringing them up is self-defeating.