More Granite State observations

Mitt Romney appeared Monday afternoon at an event co-sponsored by 2010 congressional candidate Jennifer Horn and Defend Your Health Care’s Betsy McCaughey in Hudson, just east of Nashua. This was the fourth such meeting held with a Republican presidential candidate this year, and Horn said it drew a few more people than the others; the seating for 250 was filled, with some standing room behind. Romney drew the contrast he has been making lately between Barack Obama’s entitlement-based vision of society and his merit-based vision and, clearly attentive to tea partiers’ fondness for the Founding Fathers, provided a rousing invocation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with special emphasis on the Tenth Amendment. He fairly deftly handles questions on infrastructure (he raised spending on bridge repairs in Massachusetts), AmeriCorps (he touts the work of the Boston-based City Works group) and term limits (he’s for term limits for Congress, but not sure what they should be). Asked if he supports the alleged terrorist group MEK, he says he hasn’t heard of it. Asked about loss on freedoms in the war on terror (Ron Paul types often ask questions at other candidates’ events), he talks of the need to spend more on defense and to add 100,000 active duty personnel. The most interesting part comes when he’s asked what has changed his perspective, and he talks of his experience as a Mormon missionary in France living quite modestly on the equivalent of today’s $500 to $600 a month and then segues into a salute to those who served in the military, asking a veteran about his service. I found this rather moving and thought Romney far less awkward than he is often accused of being—rather the opposite, in fact.

 

In the press availability afterward, the first question predictably is on his proposed $10,000 bet with Rick Perry; Romney’s self-deprecating reply is that his wife said he was no good at gambling. Asked to comment on a Romney staffer’s description of Newt Gingrich as a Foghorn Leghorn (a 1940s caricature of an aging senator), Romney twice says he’s not going to “distance myself” from what his supporters say, and would not agree or disagree with them. This perhaps is intended to give him a little distance from John Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor and Bush 41 White House chief of staff, who has been criticizing Gingrich most vigorously for opposing the 1990 tax increase which Bush reluctantly agreed to; Sununu says Gingrich agreed privately to support it and then publicly opposed it, while Gingrich says he never agreed to support it. In any case, does Romney want to sign on retrospective to the 1990 tax increase which broke Bush’s 1988 “read my lips—no new taxes” promise? I guess saying he thinks he can avoid the question by saying that he neither agrees nor disagrees.

While Mitt Romney tries to show a range of emotions, from occasional playful kidding to heartfelt patriotism, Jon Huntsman seems to sound one emotional note—or so I gather from having watched him on television and in the second half of an event with an audience of 75 in a high school in Swanzey, just south of Keene, in the southwest corner of the state. He attracted a crowd of 75 people, who sat serious and perhaps even transfixed. “I don’t do political bromides,” Huntsman said, twice, though that sounds like a political bromide to me. But he also had a lot of interesting things to say on the substance of issues—the need for different kinds of education for different kids, for example, the need for a marketplace solution for health insurance (he has a more consistently market-oriented and conservative position on this than either Romney or Gingrich). He showed occasional signs of humor—saying he would make a Grateful Dead-like tour of the country—but his consistent tone is serious, perhaps even censorious, disdainful of Washington positions and particularly disdainful of Mitt Romney. In a press availability, he is asked about Romney’s advocacy of term limits for members of Congress and implies that Romney is copying him by saying that “he sends people to my meetings.”

Huntsman is banking all on New Hampshire and, his New Hampshire campaign manager Michael Levoff (a veteran of Michael Bloomberg’s political operation) says, has assembled a group of field representatives who live in the area s they work. The Huntsman camp says his support in New Hampshire has edged into double digits (it’s 9% in the latest realclearpolitics.com average) and that he’s getting 50 to 60 people at many appearances and as many as 200 in Milford (southwest of Manchester) the other day. My sense is that Huntsman is making some headway and winning some support, but that he is still significantly behind not only Romney and Gingrich but also Ron Paul. For a ticket out of New Hampshire to any place else he surely needs at least a double digit percentage and third place finish here, and he doesn’t seem to be there yet.