The primaries are (finally) underway, and the Sunday talk shows were chock full of interviews, analysis, and inter-campaign squabbles. Mitt Romney showed up on Fox News Sunday, making a last-minute pitch to the voters of New Hampshire as to why he should be nominee instead of John McCain:
“He’s just been there 27 years, and hasn’t been able to get the job done. He’s somebody who wants to change Washington; he talks about changing Washington. But he’s been there for so long, he’s got so many lobbyists at each elbow, he’s worked so long, in many cases, he’s a maverick against his own party, he has brought some bills in place like McCain-Feingold, which hurt our party and I think hurt the first amendment. He fought for immigration law which I think was a terrible course, which said that all the illegal aliens that had come here illegally would be able to stay in this country forever, and I think that was a mistake.”
McCain didn’t take it lying down. He popped up on Face the Nation and Meet the Press, and continued to turn what many had thought his greatest liability–his support for the war and the surge–into his biggest asset.
“But recently, in the last few years, I made the greatest change I’ve ever been responsible for and was part of it, and that is the change of strategy in Iraq. … No one else said the Rumsfeld strategy’s going to fail and we’ve got to adopt a new strategy that–led by General Petraeus. That has turned this conflict around. We’ve got a long way to go. Al Qaeda’s on the run, but they’re not defeated. But I believe that’s the biggest change you can make, is to save young Americans’ lives.
From there he went straight into another one of his favorite themes, his long fight against waste and mismanagement at the Pentagon:
And I’ve been involved in–you know, if you think I’m an insider, ask Jack Abramoff, ask the lobbyists for Boeing and the Air Force guys and the people that are in jail now because we saved the taxpayers $2 billion on a bogus tanker deal. In fact, you might even ask former Secretary Rumsfeld if I’m–if I’m not an agent for change.
New Hampshire has long been forecast as a Romney-McCain showdown, but don’t forget about Mike Huckabee, even if Huckabee might want to forget about his appearance on This Week. For the second time in a row, George Stephanopoulos took the Arkansan to the woodshed on topics as varied as the surge, his lack of support for the president, and other issues. Here’s the video, watch the whole thing to get a sense of how brutal the interview was.
George Will was also pretty harsh on Huckabee, dismissing his Iowa victory as something of a fluke.
“On the Republican side, I think you saw what football coaches call schedule luck. That is, Mr. Huckabee, among nonevangelicals, finished fourth with only fourteen percent of the vote. So the question is can his success in Iowa be replicated in a demographically very different states.”
Over at Meet the Press, Republican strategist Mike Murphy probed Hillary Clinton’s mindset after declaring that she’s dead meat.
“The best part of these debates is every once in a while you’re lucky enough to see the veneer get pulled back a little. And fact is, they can’t stand each other. And she’s thinking, ‘How’s this guy killing me? I’ve done all this work, I’ve been this big superstar.’ He knows that she has the big grind coming in the last attempt to try to stop him, so there was a little moment of truth broke out in politics. The fact is she did pretty well last night. But it’s not enough. She needs a big game changing thing here, and just a decent debate performance won’t do it.”
