Hewitt Blog

The former GOP nominee talks Mitt Romney and New Hampshire, as well as, Newt's attacks, Chris Christie and Marco Rubio in an interview from today's show:

HH: An hour until polls close in New Hampshire, and very few people in the country know more about the Granite State primary than United States Senator, John McCain, who won it not once, but twice. Senator McCain, welcome back to the Hugh Hewitt Show. It’s great to have you. 

JM: Thanks for having me on, Hugh, and very interesting times.

HH: Tell me how you think the state has changed from 2008, and even from 2000, when you won the New Hampshire primary.

JM: I think in 2008, there was a very strong wave for President Obama. As you know, he carried the state. It’s traditionally a Republican state. That’s my failure. And so that’s what it was. But I also think that what we’re seeing in New Hampshire as well is an increase in the independent voter, and an increase in the impact of the independent voter. And as you know, that helps, I think, the Romney campaign somewhat. 

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The former PA senator refuses to pander to the Cleveland Browns' vote while talking about child tax credit and Marco Rubio among other things:

HH: And whether you’re in Florence, South Carolina, or Greenville, South Carolina, or in between, give a listen, or in Florida beyond that, because we’re starting with one of the people who want your vote next week, and that is United States Senator Rick Santorum. Former Senator Santorum, welcome back, congratulations on your great showing in Iowa. 

RS: Well, thanks a lot, Hugh. Appreciate the opportunity to be back on your show. And we’re feeling good. We’ve been working the polls here, and, well, actually, I’m in Bedford right now. I just left Merrimack, and been getting some good response for people. So we’ll see how things turn out today.

HH: Now over at www.ricksantorum.com, you’re now making available to contributors of $100 bucks the beautiful sweater vest. I’m wondering, do they come in Cleveland Browns orange and brown?

RS: Boy, I think that would certainly be against my founding principles of our country.

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From the in-box:

Dear Friend,

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In support of our military, we would love it if you and your readers could go to YouTube.com/ActOfValorSalutes to create your own THANK YOU Video for our troops -- some of these videos will be chosen to be used in the advertising campaign for the movie! How cool is that?

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The last poll gives Romney a 19 point edge in New Hampshire which I think is far too large for the Granite State contrarians and expect something much closer to 10 points, which will still be enough to send Romney south with the momentum of a double-digit win.  I think yesterday's attempt to manipulate the "firing" line helped him with whomever heard the full context, and that the attacks on Bain hurt the former Speaker and Governor Perry, while Rick Santorum's refusal to join in that line of criticism on Hannity last night makes it much easier for the former Pennsylvania senator to emerge as the "not Romney" in South Carolina. 

It is astonishing that the Club for Growth has to remind GOP presidential candidates that they are supposed to be in favor of free markets and to know how capitalism works.  But here we are, and Romney and Santorum will be the stronger for two of their adversaries having attacked our economic system and the other our commitment to a strong national defense and world leadership. The Washington Post's Michael Gerson writes a salute to Romney's discipline that ends this way:

His competitors have attempted to portray Romney’s ideological inconsistency over time as a character failure. It hasn’t worked, mainly because Romney is a man of exemplary character — deeply loyal to his faith, his family and his country. But he clearly places political ideology in a different category of fidelity. Like Dwight Eisenhower, Romney is a man of vague ideology and deep values. In political matters, he is empirical and pragmatic. He studies problems, assesses risks, calculates likely outcomes. Those expecting Romney to be a philosophic leader will be disappointed. He is a management consultant, and a good one.

Has the moment of the management consultant arrived in American politics? In our desperate drought of public competence, Romney has a strong case to make.

"Vague ideology and deep values," plus a comparison to Ike --not a bad posture for a general election, though Rick Santorum's "specific though idiosyncratic ideology and deep values" has a chance to trump Romney.  The others at this point don't seem to me to have a path forward, but we will see.  

Six hours of broadcasting today, beginning at 6 PM EST.  If you are away from the radio, you can listen to all the usual suspects --Barnes and Barone, Benson and Steyn, Tapscott, Geraghty, K-Lo, Costa, MK Ham and many more via any of my many affiliates such as 1260 WRC in DC, 990 WNTP in Philly, 1420 WHK in Cleveland, 710 KNUS in Denver 1280 the Patriot in the Twin Cities, KKNT 960 The Patriot in Phoenix, or 870 KRLA in LA. 

I am not sure if the internet feed carries the local ads, but if they do, one of my affiliates in South Carolina or Florida, say WJMX 970 in Florence or 660/92.9 in Greenville might be very interesting for who is up and pitching the conservative talk audience a week before the next vote.  The same might be true for Tampa Bay's 860 WGUL or Orlando's 660 WORL.  If the campaigns or the SuperPacs are truly targeting their messages to conservatives, the talkers will be wall-to-wall throughout both states.

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Writing at NationalReview.com in defense of capitalism, profits and growing the economy.

The concluding graphs:

Go ahead, have your “bloodbath” in South Carolina. Make Romney the little guy in the top hat and tails, from the Monopoly game. Have your Santorum, your Perry, your Newt. They may carry something like four states in the fall, but at least they’ve never sullied their hands with — eek! — business.

Perhaps after the election, while Obama is deepening the country’s poverty, Romney and others like him can find a party friendly to capitalism. We conservative Republicans turn out to be cradle-to-gravers, like everyone else.

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This week's column from Clark Judge:

New Hampshire GOP Debates: How Candidates Are Like iPhones ( Good Thing, Too)
By Clark S. Judge: managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc.; chairman, Pacific Research Institute

You’ve got to hand it to this year’s GOP candidates.  Saturday night for nearly two hours starting at 9:00, they debated. Sunday morning at 9:00, there they were, different town, different channel, doing it all over again.
 
Some have observed that certain candidates – Romney is most often cited – are becoming better as a result of so many face to face events.  Broadly, that’s true.  But to me it is more than this or that candidate has sharpened his game.
 
In well functioning markets, there is something like a continual process of improvement that reaches all the players and works very fast.  For example, first there was the cell phone, a very expensive brick. Soon someone made it smaller, someone else, smaller still, until it became tiny and free.  Blackberry gave us a different kind of communications device, which Steve Jobs merged with cell phones into the iPhone, the first of the smart phones.  Then someone added a camera.  Someone else added an MP3 player.  Anyway, we’ve all seen this process in every market from PCs to automobiles to air travel.

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I check the RealClearPolitics "Latest Election Polls" every morning before anyone can spin them for me.  I don't think Romney can win by 20 points in New Hampshire, but a double-digit victory there will power at least a respectable showing in South Carolina, and the Florida numbers in the Quinnipiac poll are the most revealing about how significant is Romney's advantage even before New Hampshire adds to the momentum.  He's up 12 among likely voters there, and the internals tell a very important story:  Romney's favorability rating is to the plus side 73-14 among GOP likely voters, Santorum's at 59-8, and Gingrich much farther behind at 59-29, a handicap that will grow larger as Newt returns to his very negative persona of Sunday morning's debate.

Florida voters have already requested and received more than 400,000 absentee ballots for the January 31 primary.  Mitt Romney's campaign has been mailing material to those voters, and now Ron Paul has joined it in appealing to this large number of early voters, so the Florida primary has already begun, and it will accelerate on January 21 when "early voting" begins in the Sunshine State.  Saturday night's widely-watched debate helped Romney --a lot.  Sunday morning's less watched debate helped Santorum --some.  But the numbers out of Florida suggest that it would take a huge stumble on Romney's part to lose that contest, and Florida is the key, not just to the nomination, but to November 2012 as well.

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In the post below I note that the Wall Street Journal's reporters have dug into Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain, which is all to the good.  The GOP candidates all need vetting now.

The Journal's editorial board, however, decided to rake Rick Santorum over the coals today, and did so in a particularly revealing fashion:

Most disappointing is the Pennsylvanian's proposal to triple the tax credit for children (from $1,000 today), which is a hobby horse of the Christian right. This is social policy masquerading as economics. Unlike a cut in marginal tax rates, a larger tax credit does little for growth because it doesn't change incentives to save, work or invest. It merely rewards taxpayers who have children over those who don't.

Mr. Santorum is essentially agreeing with liberals who think the tax code should be used to pursue social and political goals. Yet a major goal of tax reform is to make the tax code less of a political free-for-all. The best tax code is one that raises the revenue the government needs with the least amount of economic harm and misallocation of resources.(Emphasis added.)

The Journal's hostility towards the "Christian right" will surprise some but not those who have watched the Journal move over the years towards an enemy of all buts purist friends, the product perhaps of a growing disdain among economic conservatives for the allies it must have among defense hawks and social conservatives if a governing coalition is to be achieved --the coalition that Reagan championed.

Rick Santorum champions families as the central building block of societies, and believes our tax code ought to support such families which are bearing the cost of the essential necessity for renewing and replenishing a society --the raising and education of children inside the home.  The Journal's purists want a tax code that can't be achieved to benefit societies that don't exist.  Rick Santorum wants to get elected to help American families and thereby all Americans.  The senator's got the right idea.

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Newt says Mitt "looted" companies, but the Wall Street Journal provides a comprehensive analysis that rebuts the former Speaker's incendiary charges.

Politico calls it "The Bain Bomb," and I wrote at length five years ago on how Romney's opponents would use Bain against him again and again just as they have done since Ted Kennedy used Bain against Romney in their1994 Senate race.  The Journal article is comprehensive and thus long and it is complicated but its conclusion isn't surprising or original: The investment firm which Romney headed for 15 years until he left to lead the Salt Lake City Olympic Games was very, very successful, but many of its investments didn't produce great returns and some of the companies Bain invested in failed completely or went through bankruptcy.

The former Speaker can call the invest-and-turn-around business "looting" --Obama and Axelrod certainly will-- but it is in fact the free market at its incredibly efficient and powerful best, and attacking investment firms that specialize in turnarounds is attacking a core feature of the free market: capital seeking opportunities to grow and in the process creating jobs and opportunities for others.  From Obama and the Chicago gang an attack on this process is to be expected, but it cannot appeal to many voters in Republican primaries.

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My new Washington Examiner column reviews the decision of the president to slash the defense budget, which didn't come up from the Sawyer/Stephanopoulos/Gregory in three-and-a-half hours of "debate" Saturday and Sunday.

They've got the mythical state ban on contraception covered though.

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