Visual source: Newseum
Ron Fournier/National Journal:
Call it a victory Mitt-igated. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney easily won New Hampshire's primary Tuesday night, stepping to the brink of the GOP nomination with a historic sweep of the first two presidential contests. But this past week exposed his existential vulnerability: Romney is easily cast as a cold-hearted phony.
Eugene Robinson:
If the pattern continues, Romney can’t lose — no matter how hard he tries. With his record at the private equity firm Bain Capital already under intense scrutiny, Romney’s declaration that “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me” could only have arisen from some kind of political death wish. Yes, he was talking about firing insurance companies, not individual workers. But how could any sentence containing the phrases “I like” and “fire people” escape his lips?
This will surely be a major line of attack against him if he wins the nomination. Thanks partly to Gingrich, the “vulture” variety of capitalism that Bain practiced — often involving cost-cutting, downsizing and layoffs — is now an issue for President Obama to exploit.
Richard Viguerie:
Conservative Circular Firing Squad Continues in New Hampshire
After strolling through the lead-up to the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses without one negative ad being run against him, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney finally got some heat in New Hampshire for his moderate-to-liberal record.
The problem is, as much or more conservative fire is still being directed from one conservative candidate to another as it is at Romney himself.
Charlie Cook:
It’s hardly coincidental that each of the last five Republican nominees — going back to Ronald Reagan in 1980 — won the South Carolina primary and either the New Hampshire primary or the Iowa caucuses. That statistic can be attributed to momentum or signify that presidential contenders deprived of early victories simply wither and die on the vine. Wins beget money and losses shrink fundraising.
Romney is the only contender with anything remotely resembling the kind of campaign that usually wins nominations, and his odds of clinching the nod are extremely high — pretty close to a sure thing.
WaPo:
Mitt Romney may face lasting damage from New Hampshire primary
The Mitt Romney who campaigned across New Hampshire the past few days entered the workforce “at the bottom,” feared getting “a pink slip,” doesn’t own four houses (although he thinks “that’s a good idea”) and “never imagined” he would run for office because, as he put it, “I was just a high school kid like everybody else with skinny legs.”
There’s nothing wholly false about the ways Romney has been describing himself. But the descriptions don’t ring true, either.
Clive Crook:
Mitt Romney likes to contrast the U.S. economic system with Europe’s welfare state. You can have a merit society, he says, or an entitlement society, but not both -- and an entitlement society is where the U.S. is heading if Barack Obama and the Democrats get their way.
It’s a favorite Republican theme, and you can see why. For one thing, there’s some truth to it. Contrasting the American model of capitalism with the European alternative isn’t absurd. The gap is narrower than it used to be, but they’re still different.
Also, Obama and the Democrats do want to move the U.S. in a European direction. Best of all, from the Republican point of view, they are generally embarrassed to admit it. American voters still see their country as a model for the rest of the world, not the other way round. Nobody will ever be elected president of the U.S. on a pledge to make the country more like France.
Democrats therefore find themselves having to deny the obvious. Obama wants to make the country more like Europe? Ridiculous. A straw man.
But it isn’t ridiculous. What’s ridiculous is the idea that Republicans take for granted and squirming Democrats tacitly endorse -- that making the U.S. more like Europe would be a disaster.
Sigh. Confusing policy and politics is a recipe for disaster. Keep straight in your mind which is which or you'll lose.
Greg Sargent:
Romney was twice given a chance to nod in the direction of saying that concerns about these problems have at least some legitimacy to them, that they are about something more than mere envy or class warfare, and that they are deserving of a public debate. And this is the answer he gave.
At a time when polls show rising public anxiety about these problems and what they mean for the country’s future — and at a time when Dems are preparing to run a campaign focused on economic unfairness and lack of Wall Street accountability while painting Romney as the candidate of the one percent — this seems like a pretty revealing and important moment.
Matt Miller:
Romney’s dishonesty here is breathtaking. I used to think Republicans had taken chutzpah to unsurpassable new heights when they refused on principle to lift the debt ceiling last summer – despite having passed the Paul Ryan budget, which added more than $5 trillion in debt over the next decade.
But Romney may have topped that. He’s saying that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act — which offers people precisely the choice among competing private insurers that Romney’s own health-care reform did in Massachusetts — is instead some cartoon version of socialized medicine.
It’s a blatant falsehood. The Big Republican Lie.
Just for fun:
Daily Kos 1/09/12:
So, if we assume Romney wins by some amount in NH, we move on to less friendly territory in South Carolina (where Romney is doing well, and where Rick Perry's Alamo may be located) and then Florida, which broke Rudy Giuliani four years ago and which can potentially end this in Romney's favor for all practical purposes if he runs the table between now and then.
The Hill 1/10/12:
Perry: South Carolina is not ‘our Alamo’