Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman are taking the gloves off. It makes sense: both campaigns are salivating over the big pot of registered independents eligible to vote in New Hampshire’s GOP primary. Both candidates score at the top of the Republican field with self-described independents and Huntsman’s more retrained foreign policy positions come the closest of any other candidate in the pack to Ron Paul’s famously anti-interventionist stances. Both Ron Paul and Huntsman are in the hunt for the wild card voters that could upend the Granite State results.
Last night, somebody with access to Ron Paul’s official campaign Twitter account fired off a taunting tweet aimed at Huntsman, ribbing him for skipping over the Iowa caucuses and focusing on New Hampshire’s primary, a place he believes will prove more fertile ground for his message:
@JonHuntsman we found your one Iowa voter, he’s in Linn precinct 5 you might want to call him and say thanks.
Huntsman issued post-caucus statements with kind words for candidates who were pulling out of the race, or who he thought was ready to wrap up a run:
“Michele Bachmann brought an energetic and passionate voice to this race,” and
“Mary Kaye and I have a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for our friends Rick and Anita Perry. As he returns to Texas, where he implemented the kind of pro-growth policies that our country desperately needs and President Obama failed to deliver, we wish Rick and his family all the best.”
…but Ron Paul was the only candidate he took aim at via press release.
Paul’s blase dismissal of the Twitter incident seems may have gotten under his skin, and it was reminiscent of Paul’s casual pooh-poohing of arched eyebrows over his now-infamous 1990’s newsletters.
The release starts by asserting that “The Ron Paul blame game continues.” And continues with a reminder mention of “his racist and conspiratorial newsletters, racist and conspiratorial book” and tie them to the Paul team’s mid-caucus “childish tweet,” hoping to plant this seed of doubt in voters minds: “How can voters trust Ron Paul, when he can’t say with certitude what he has tweeted or written?”
Huntsman’s spokesman Tim Miller wraps up the release with another plug for the campaign’s recent Ron Paul “Twilight Zone”-themed video and ends with this zinger: in Ron Paul’s world, “everything is a conspiracy and nothing is his fault.”
This will get Paul’s rabid legions worked-up online, no doubt, but will Ron Paul himself or his campaign fire back?
