I escorted a crew from GuardianFilms to a couple of John McCain campaign events on Saturday, at GuardianFilms’ request. We saw McCain speak at the VFW post in Merrimack and then at a house party in Bedford.
I was a little surprised to see that the event at the VFW post was standing room only. There was a line out the door when we arrived, and people were packed shoulder to shoulder. The campaign estimated about 300 people attended, and that looked right to me and the other journalists I spoke with.
A highly energized McCain came in to applause, started with a series of jokes that put the crowd in a good mood, then gave a feisty speech. If you didn’t know he was 71, you probably would not have guessed it. He’d just come from a similar event in Dover, where he addressed about 350 people.
Afterward, most of the folks I talked to who weren’t already committed to McCain said they now were leaning that way or had decided to vote for him. One said he was probably voting for Romney, but he got his picture taken with McCain anyway.
At the Bedford house party three hours later, McCain showed no signs of wear on his third stop of the day. He gave a truncated version of the same speech to about 60 people, mostly from the neighborhood. He had them laughing and nodding their heads in agreement. When he’d left, I asked a lot of people if he’d won them over. About half said they were going to vote for him or were leaning toward him now, about half said they still had no favorite candidate.
The house party was interesting because the audience, as is typical for house parties, was not the same type of crowd that would show for a town hall meeting. Some had not followed the primary very closely, but they said they were going to vote.
One independent I spoke with said she was down to Romney and McCain and would definitely vote for McCain after hearing him.
After his last stop that day, McCain had spoken to about 1,000 people — while Romney was in Iowa. Romney is still in Iowa, and McCain is hitting hundreds of people every day. That is bound to hurt Romney if he doesn’t win in Iowa, which of course he might. Even if Romney does win Iowa, McCain has had the chance to speak directly to thousands of New Hampshire voters while Romney was out of state. That might make a difference next week.
It was evident that McCain was having a blast at these events. After the VFW post, he stopped at the Dowg Shack next door for two hot dogs, which his campaign insisted on paying for though the restaurant offered them for free. He spoke with a few patrons and joked around with the staff before getting on the bus and heading out.
Campaign staffers I’ve talked to say you can tell when a candidate is “feeling the momentum.” It energizes them. That clearly was happening with McCain. He’s feeling good and having fun. Maybe the voters who see him will pick up on that vibe and feel good about voting for him on Tuesday.
At the end of the house party, the host gave McCain a Tom Brady jersey. A few hours later the Pats won their 16th game of the season.
In response to National Review’s surprising editorial attacking our editorials critical of Mitt Romney — National Review’s choice for President — I offer a few brief comments.
1. The editorial begins, “John McCain’s aides complain that Mitt Romney is running a negative campaign. Those same aides have been attacking Romney themselves, but for the most part they can outsource the negativism to their friends in the press — starting with the Union Leader, a prominent conservative newspaper in New Hampshire that has endorsed him.”
The jab that “they can outsource their negativism to their friends in the press” implies strongly that our opinion of Mitt Romney is not our own, but is simply McCain talking points rewritten. Nothing is further from the truth. Not a single editorial we have written in favor of John McCain or in opposition to Mitt Romney was based on anything other than our own impressions of both men. The McCain campaign has not fed us editorials, nor have we fashioned any of our editorials out of raw material supplied by the campaign. All of them were our own opinions.
2. National Review wrote, “The Union Leader has blasted Romney for changing his mind on immigration. It accused him of lying, too, for saying that McCain wanted to let illegal immigrants earn Social Security benefits while working here illegally. But Romney was right. McCain has voted to let illegal immigrants who meet certain conditions become citizens and then receive benefits for their prior illegal work. Few Senate Republicans joined him.”
But that’s not what Romney claimed. Romney’s ad says of McCain: “He even voted to allow illegals to collect Social Security.” National Review thinks we shouldn’t use the word “lie” to describe that falsehood, so we’ll just say it’s untrue, as it is. As National Review, The New York Times, Factcheck.org and our editorial noted, Sen. McCain supports letting immigrants who came here illegally collect the Social Security benefits they paid into the system, but only after becoming legal residents. So he does not support allowing “illegals to collect Social Security,” as Romney claimed.
3. The editorial suggests that we are guilty of a double standard because McCain has changed positions on some of the same issues Romney has, and we don’t point that out. But we never wrote that candidates cannot change their positions. Our issue with Romney is that he appears to have undergone a wholesale political conversion on virtually all issues, save the death penalty and a few others. Not only that, he has made misleading statements about his own personal history. National Review ignores our criticism of Romney for having falsely claimed to have been a hunter “pretty much” all his life and to have marched with Martin Luther King Jr.
If our issue were simply that Romney changed positions on immigration and abortion, National Review might have a point in claiming that we held the candidates to two different standards. But we made it perfectly clear that Romney’s numerous position changes over the years combined with his false claims about his past and his ad mischaracterizing Sen. McCain’s position on Social Security for immigrants indicate that he is fundamentally less trustworthy than Sen. McCain. That is the issue — for us and, it seems, millions of other conservatives. That is what we wrote. It would have been nice if National Review had paid more careful attention.
On Sunday evening I saw what appeared to be a few dozen Ron Paul supporters thronging the front entrance to the Mall of New Hampshire in Manchester. The chanting horde had a HUGE Ron Paul sign along with numerous smaller ones, and one was even waving an American flag from atop a snow mound in a way that reminded me of that Sunday Bloody Sunday video. They braved the rain until it rain got really heavy, which was probably smart since it could’ve turned those big snow mountains into big snow avalanches. Not sure if they won or lost votes with that rally, but they made an impressive showing. Especially compared with the Duncan Hunter rally near the same spot the day before.
If you saw two people waving Duncan Hunter signs at the mall on Saturday and thought one of them looked an awful lot like Hunter, well, give yourself a Christmas cookie for knowing what Duncan Hunter looks like. Hunter spent about five hours, from 3:15 to 8 on Saturday, waving at passing cars at the mall. All told, the campaign got a total of six people to show up — including Hunter himself. There were “no more than three people at a time,” his state director Bob Bevill told me.
Hunter was supposed to spend “the holidays” in New Hampshire, but had to fly back to San Diego for a funeral on Sunday, Bevill said. Hunter intends to return on Saturday and stay in New Hampshire until the primary, with the possible exception of a short trip to Wyoming.
I’m no former campaign operative or anything, but it seems to me that if you had a candidate in town all day on Saturday, you might find something better to do with five hours of his time than stand on a median at the mall and wave at cars. Especially if 99 percent of the people passing by wouldn’t be able to tell your candidate from Santa Claus and would assume that it’s just some poor campaign volunteer out there in the cold.
OK, here’s a game for the Christmas dinner table. Try to come up with a policy position Mitt Romney hasn’t flip-flopped on.
I suggest this after seeing that Romney has even flip-flopped on the one issue where I thought Romney was strongest — taxes.
Romney has been whacking John McCain for not originally supporting the Bush tax cuts. But it turns out that Romney didn’t support the Bush tax cuts the first time around, either.
Romney has accused McCain of failing “Reagan 101.” Interesting soundbite coming from a guy who used to talk as if “Reagan” were a dirty word.
Romney’s challenge has been to convince conservatives that he is a real Reagan Republican, and the only Reagan Republican in the race. I think Republicans in Iowa and New Hampshire were open to that possibility all year long. But they’ve given Romney a fair hearing and are deciding after a year of listening to him that he’s not a Reagan Republican after all.
Comment from John in Golden, Colo.: Romney is going to be another Clinton parsing the meaning of “is”. Enough of these fake choices of candidates, please.
The House Republican Alliance will try to get Judge Patricia Coffey impeached if she does not resign.
“This action is necessary to preserve the reputation of absolute integrity of our judiciary in the eyes of the public. A judge must be held to the highest standards. Unfortunately, Judge Coffey’s admitted actions are not of the highest standards and could damage the judiciary’s reputation,” Alliance co-chairman Rep. Andy Renzullo, R-Hudson, said in a statement today.
Gov. Lynch has demanded Coffey resign, so he presumably would be on board for impeachment if she does not.
I had given Mitt Romney the benefit of the doubt on his claim to have seen his dad march with Martin Luther King Jr. No one questions that George Romney supported the civil rights movement and did participate in a civil rights march in Detroit a few days after one led by Dr. King. I’d assumed that when Romney said his dad marched with Dr. King he meant that his father joined a civil rights march, not that his father literally marched beside King. That would be true, and I think an understandable phrasing. But that’s not the explanation Romney offered.
He actually said “if you look at the literature, look at the dictionary, the term ’saw’ includes being aware of in the sense I’ve described. It’s a figure of speech, and very familiar, and it’s very common. And I saw my dad march with Martin Luther King. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort.”
I think the reaction from those paying attention will likely be along the lines of: “Um, whatever, man.”
I still think even that awkward explanation could have been salvaged were it not for The Boston Globe’s reporting that in 1978 Romney told the globe that not only did his father march with Dr. King, but that Mitt did too:
“My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit,” he said.
Not true. “Mitt Romney did not march with Martin Luther King.” Why says? Romney’s spokesman.
Of course, the obvious explanation Romney could have offered is that he didn’t mean Martin Luther King Jr. at all.
“I saw my father march with Martin Luther King,” Romney said in the speech. Obviously, he meant MLK’s dad. And by “march” he meant spend some time together in the month of March.
Tucker Carlson has a sweet little column on traveling in Nevada with Ron Paul in The New Republic. You really should read it not only because it’s funny but because it gives a glimpse into the accidental juggernaut that is the Ron Paul campaign. My favorite line: “I wasn’t planning on showing up at Paul’s press conference with a bordello owner and two hookers, but unexpected things happen on the road.”
Mike Huckabee has his “floating cross,” which has generated a ton of buzz. John McCain’s cross in the sand trumps it.
McCain sent this mailer to New Hampshire households this week:
“As a POW, my captors would tie my arms behind my back and then loop the rope around my neck and ankles so that my head was pulled down between my knees. I was often left like that throughout the night.
“One night a guard came into my cell. He put his finger to his lips signaling for me to be quiet, and then loosened my ropes to relieve my pain. The next morning, when his shift ended, the guard returned and retightened the ropes, never saying a word to me.
“A month or so later, on Christmas Day, I was standing in the dirt courtyard when I saw that same guard approach me. He walked up and stood silently next to me, not looking or smiling at me. After a few moments had passed, he rather nonchalantly used his sandaled foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We stood wordlessly looking at the cross, remembering the true light of Christmas, even in the darkness of a Vietnamese prison camp. After a minute or two, he rubbed it out and walked away.
“That guard was my Good Samaritan. I will never forget that man and I will never forget that moment. And I will never forget that, no matter where you are, no matter how difficult the circumstances, there will always be someone who will pick you up and carry you.
“May you and your family have a blessed Christmas and Happy Holidays,
“John McCain”
It’s the best piece of direct mail I’ve ever seen. And to top it, today the campaign released this television ad version of the mailer.
After watching that ad, you can’t help but feel that your troubles are awfully small.
That’s what the latest ARG poll says: Romney 26, McCain 26, Giuliani 16, Huckabee 11, everyone else single digits.
That puts McCain over 20 percent in four consecutive NH polls, and over 25 percent in the last two. Giuliani hovers in the mid-teens in the last four polls, troughing at 13 and peaking at 18.
Contrary to some Internet buzz, there is no state Attorney General’s office report on the Romney push-poll yet. The investigation is ongoing and incomplete.
Asked if there was any report yet, Deputy Attorney General Bud Fitch told me a few minutes ago, “That is absolutely not true. We have had some success in getting partway down the trail that leads to the source of those calls. But we are not all the way down that trail. Today and yesterday and every day we have been working to get us to . . . that determination of who ultimately was responsible for it.”
Although the law that governs push polls does not cover calls made exclusively for the presidential primary, the Romney push poll might still be covered, Fitch said.
“At this point the people who got the calls understood them to be not about who they are voting for in the primary, but who they are voting for for President,” he told me.
That would make them general election calls, which are covered by the law.
“We started off with the proposition that people were calling folks and asking them who they would vote for for President,” he said.
Emphasizing that the investigation has in no way led them to this conclusion, Fitch gave an example of how the calls could be primary-related but still fall under the law banning push polls in a general election.
“We could find that this was done by a member of an opposite party doing research . . . to find out what messages worked in the general election,” he said.
The investigation might turn up something different, but for now the presumption is that the calls are subject to the law.
The latest Rasmussen poll has John McCain at 27 percent in New Hampshire to Mitt Romney’s 31 percent.
McCain’s favorability rating is tied with Romney at 78 percent, a 25-point gain for McCain since the summer, according to Rasmussen polls.
Fifty-nine percent of Romney supporters say they are “certain” to vote for him, vs. 61 percent of McCain supporters. That’s a 15 point rise for McCain vs. the last Rasmussen poll, which was in late November and had Romney up by 19.
Rasmussen seems to credit a string of McCain endorsements, beginning with ours.
In the Real Clear Politics average, McCain is now in a solid second place behind Romney and 5 points ahead of Giuliani.
I suspect Giuliani’s numbers will keep dipping and McCain’s will keep rising. I’m not convinced McCain is solidly within four points of Romney — yet — but the trend is clearly going that way. The Romney and Giuliani camps are going to have a nervous Christmas.
Ron Elving, NPR’s supervising senior Washington editor, has a column today about John McCain’s reviving campaign. In it, he notes our endorsement and calls us “the torchbearer for ‘Live Free or Die’ politics in New Hampshire for generations.” Nice. So far, so good. Then he writes, “Never known for favoring anti-establishment types, the Union Leader still endorsed the Arizonan in a salute to his character and perseverance.”
Huh?
It is a strange analysis indeed that would include Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Pete DuPont, Bill Bradley and Joe Lieberman (some of our recent past presidential primary endorsements) as establishment candidates.
And by the way, we haven’t been the “Manchester Union Leader” in decades.
