Polls show Barack Obama gaining in several battleground states. Photo: AP In the last contested GOP primary, in 2000, underdog McCain camped out in New Hampshire and soared to a stunning 19 percentage point win over establishment favorite George W. Bush.
In 1996, conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan won the primary over Bob Dole with 27 percent of the vote. Four years earlier, Buchanan took 37 percent, but he lost both the New Hampshire primary and the nomination to the incumbent president, George H.W. Bush.
This time, New Hampshire is fertile ground for several candidates, and the multi-person field has fractured the GOP primary electorate. In a state traditionally home to more economic conservatives than social conservatives, everyone is pitching a message of low taxes and restrained spending.
"It's no different than past cycles," said Fergus Cullen, the state GOP chairman. "There are few states where all the candidates are coming to campaign and are fully resourced. Today, we have five or six candidates that are playing hard here."
They haven't begun to run negative TV or radio ads. But hard-hitting commercials are all but certain given the wide-open race in an early voting state that historically has tolerated negative campaigning more so than others.
Romney, the former governor of neighboring Massachusetts, has a slight edge in most polls. He could be considered a part-time resident of the state considering his lakeside vacation home and his weekly campaigning here. The multimillionaire venture capitalist has emphasized his management experience in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. He's spent about $4 million on TV and radio ads here since going on the air early this year.
Giulaini, the former New York mayor leading in national polls, is playing to win after months of focusing elsewhere. He has made eight recent visits and has flooded mailboxes with literature while spending some $300,000 on radio ads. He's increasing his state staff and courting the Seacoast region that's home to moderates and independents. A fellow Northeasterner, he's known for putting New York back on solid financial ground and for his resolve following the Sept. 11 attacks.
McCain, the Arizona senator, remains a favorite among a segment of hard-core supporters from 2000. But his bid back then was fueled in part by independents, and their support for him this time is not guaranteed. Still, McCain, a longtime deficit hawk who rails against runaway spending, is looking to New Hampshire for a comeback after summer stumbles. He's running TV ads emphasizing his military service as surveys show an uptick in support.
Among the others, Thompson, the actor and ex-senator from Tennessee, promised to be in New Hampshire "early and often" but has visited the state only three times in two months. He trails his top rivals in polls and organization. Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, has a network of grass-roots support but lacks money. Paul could be a force; he opposes the Iraq war, and his libertarian bent resonates here. He's running TV and radio ads and just raised $4.3 million in one day.
New Hampshire has held the first-in-the-nation primary since 1920, and Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who has sole discretion over setting the date, is fiercely defending that history this year. Jan. 8 has emerged as the most likely day, but Gardner refuses to rule out a mid-December primary.
Campaigns are anxiously awaiting his decision, which is expected soon, and also are trying to gauge the voting behavior of influential independent voters, dubbed "undeclareds" in New Hampshire.
Surveys show roughly 4 out of 10 of these voters say they plan to vote in the Democratic primary, and about the same number say they aren't sure which ballot they will pick up on primary day. Only 19 percent are planning to vote in the Republican primary, according to a recent poll by Saint Anselm College's Institute of Politics.
Also, many Republicans say they are undecided or willing to change their minds.
A stay-at-home mother of four boys in nearby Bedford, Shannon McGinley typifies the indecisiveness. One day this week, she zipped from a breakfast-time Thompson appearance to a midmorning Giuliani speech — but said she was leaning toward Huckabee.
"I'm still shopping," said McGinley, 37. "You have to be both bright and a communicator. Sometimes that doesn't always happen in politics."
At the Bedford Village Inn as Thompson prepared to speak, Ray Powles of Goffstown called himself "still hovering" and said he was partial to Romney, Thompson and Giuliani.
"I'd like to see a candidate that addresses some of the issues, that's going to help try to strengthen the country, shore it up and not set us back," said the 37-year-old Republican who works at a cable company.
Waiting to hear from Giuliani in Manchester, Noel Rainville, a 65-year-old retiree from Bedford, said she's taking her time deciding who to support after voting for Bush in the 2000 primary and ending up disappointed.
"I never did realize we would be in this situation," she said of the Iraq war. This time, Rainville said, she is leaning toward Giuliani and McCain. "They have served well in the positions that they have been in. To me, they're very honest. And I'm not sure the others are."
The War Party can't win the war in Iraq, so they're taking it out on the GOP
by Justin Raimondo - Oct 22, 2007
The ongoing hara-kiri of the GOP proceeds apace, with the latest being a concerted effort by the party's neoconservative wing to oust sitting Republican members of Congress who oppose the war. The latest examples: Walter B. Jones of North Carolina and Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland. Rep. Jones attracted national attention when, at the height of the pre-invasion war hysteria, he led an effort (with now-jailed Rep. Bob Ney) to rename the French fries on the menu in the House cafeteria "Freedom Fries" – and then attracted more serious attention when he turned against the war he had championed, and began to denounce the president's war policies in no uncertain terms.
Jones is quite a character, an old Southern gentleman who emanates sincerity and class: he has personally written to thousands of military families who have lost loved ones in this futile and apparently never-ending war. What's more, he has taken an enormous political risk in reversing course, not because it's now the popular thing to do – it wasn't when he began speaking out – but because he's a man of principle who puts his conscience and his constituency before partisan considerations. What I like about him is that his denunciations of the war are invariably fiery, and shot through with a white-hot anger directed at those who lied us into war:
"At a local barbecue restaurant last week, he delivered a passionate speech defending his position – and slamming the administration's foreign policy. He approvingly read from Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold's 2006 Time editorial attacking the Bush administration for using '9/11's tragedy to hijack our security policy.'
"He accused the 'neocons' – he repeated the phrase twice – of manipulating intelligence to sell the Iraq war to the public. He said he was more concerned with terrorists coming from South America than from Iraq."' Many people get their news from Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity,' Jones said after the speech, referring to the popular conservative radio talk show hosts. 'I get my news in classified briefings with military experts and CIA experts. I have to make my decision based on what the experts say.'"
His primary opponent is one Joe McLaughlin, a financial planner, retired military man, and Onslow county commissioner who tends to ignore (and neglect) his constituents and has been accused of using his office to promote himself (no doubt a first for a politician!). McLaughlin stupidly accuses Jones of being a "leftist" – a charge that falls flat when confronted with the congressman's lifetime ACU rating of over 90 percent – and is making Jones' co-sponsorship of a congressional resolution condemning Rush Limbaugh for his "phony soldier" comment the main issue of the campaign. In McLaughlin's world, it's okay to diss a soldier who disagrees with him and Rush on the war, but it's not okay to criticize the pill-popping talk-radio icon who has never been anywhere near a battlefield. This is why, brays McLaughlin, Jones is a "phony Republican."
On his Web site, McLaughlin proclaims he's a "family values conservative," and yet rumor has it that, uh, maybe not… At any rate, local Republican activist Jim Kouri reports "one member of the NCGOP told this writer that 'not a day goes by without Joe [ McLaughlin] smearing Congressman Jones.'" It's incredible that McLaughlin is trying to portray the staunchly conservative Jones as some sort of left-wing subversive, but the clear implication of his most recent radio ad – which proclaims McLaughlin "supports the troops" – is that Jones does not support the troops. This accusation is especially toxic in a district with one of the heaviest concentrations of military bases in the country.
"His is a message of despair," says McLaughlin, "a message of defeat." Yet who is likely to arouse more despair, especially in the ranks of military families: those who say the five-year war in Iraq must stretch into 10 or more – or those who say it is time for the Iraqis to stand on their own legs and walk the walk?
Walter Jones supported this war in the beginning: he was, indeed, one of its most fervent advocates. It takes character for him to admit he was wrong – and a real sense of responsibility to go as far out on a limb as he's gone in order to make up for what he now recognizes as a grievous mistake.
Instead of appealing to the various signs and symbols of the fake Left-Right divide – Rush, Cindy Sheehan, and Dennis Kucinich (the latter two, McLaughlin unconvincingly avers, are Jones' good pals) – why doesn't McLaughlin engage Jones when it comes to the war issue, on its merits?
I'll tell you why: because McLaughlin doesn't know the first thing about the war, Iraq, or foreign policy in general. He's just a political opportunist circling Jones' seat like a vulture seeks out carrion. Yet Jones is far from being dead meat: for one thing, McLaughlin has yet to raise much campaign cash – although that could change.
Word is out that the Club for Growth – a right-wing neocon outfit rolling in dough – has met with McLaughlin and may be interested in funding his campaign. The Club is also bankrolling the campaign of another Republican primary challenger, state Sen. Andrew Harris, who is going up against antiwar Rep. Gilchrest.
The Club purports to be for "limited government" and "economic freedom," yet their major concern, these days, seems to be going after any and all Republicans who so much as breathe a word of criticism of the neocons' war. Yet what has provoked the biggest orgy of spending since the New Deal – and promises to cost us as much as $2 trillion before it's over? This rotten war.
I've even heard the Club described as "libertarian" – but this use of its resources as a battering ram against the real libertarian Republicans, such as Walter Jones, shows what these guys are really up to, which is to serve as the neocons' water boys. War trumps parsimony in the new GOP's hierarchy of political values, and the ongoing Republican purge is carving this principle in stone.
There have been rumors that Jones – who started out a Democrat, like his father, who once represented the district – might return to the party of his youth, yet nothing has come of that so far. Local Republicans are rallying to his cause, and the veterans whom he has stood by so steadfastly – especially the wounded, who have been the worst victims of government incompetence in this war – have come to his aid, even as party officials have abandoned him. VoteVets is running pro-Jones ads in which retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, former commander of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, lauds Jones for his "moral courage." Says Batiste:
"We are caught in the middle of a brutal civil war in Iraq without a focused national strategy. Congressman Jones is well-informed in challenging those politicians who are breaking our great Army and Marine Corps."
In the fifth year of a long, grinding war, the appeal of McLaughlin's demagoguery is increasingly limited, especially where it concerns his key audience: military personnel and their families. He attacks Jones for appearing with Cindy Sheehan, but remember, Cindy is a military mom, too, and the grieving mothers of North Carolina's 3rd congressional district have a lot more in common with her than McLaughlin might imagine. Recent pollssuggest that the "solid South," once solidly for the war, is now turning against it: a majority now say it was a "mistake," and – along with much of the rest of the country – Southerners now support a decrease in troop levels (56 percent).
Nationally, Republicans are wavering in their support for the war, and that's why Ron Paul, the only antiwar candidate in the Republican presidential stable, is going from dark horse to a somewhat lighter hue. Jones has endorsed Paul's bid, and it is likely that the North Carolina congressman will benefit from the kind of dedicated nationwide support – from veterans as well as libertarians – that has come Dr. No's way.
The effort to oust Jones demonstrates the essentially parasitic – and destructive – character of the neoconservative virus in the GOP. For these guys, it's rule or ruin: they don't care about regaining control of Congress (they gave up on that distant possibility a long time ago) or saving a conservative vote on fiscal and other matters. They care about one issue and one issue only: war and more war, as far as the eye can see. When they've run the GOP into the ground and reduced it to a mostly regional party, they'll abandon the dried-up husk and emigrate back to where they came from – the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party, where they can join Joe Lieberman, Joshua Muravchik, and Hillary Clinton's neoconservative fan club in ginning up a war with Iran.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
I have a long essay over at Taki's Top Drawer: "Ayn Despite the Randians," a commentary on the legacy of Ayn Rand and the 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged, and also a whole lot of blog posts that you really ought to check out.
