RUTHFULLY YOURS

This is something that happened a couple of days ago, but I didn’t want to write about it for reasons of privacy you will understand.

Once in a while — well, at least this once for me — when you are traveling around the country covering presidential campaigns, you have an experience that makes the big-time grandeur of presidential politics oddly and touchingly personal.

When, relatively at the last moment, the folks at PJ Media asked me to continue on from Iowa to New Hampshire, having been in the Granite State for previous primaries, I knew Manchester would be the center of the action. I want online and, not surprisingly, the entire city was booked. Looking for someplace relatively close, I stumbled on a Holiday Inn Express in a place called Merrimack, not far from Manchester and known for its outlet mall. The hotel had a 4.7 rating on Trip Advisor, so I quickly reserved a room.

The day I arrived, I sensed something was up when I bumped into Senator Tim Scott in the elevator. I knew he was backing Marco Rubio. Was Marco actually staying in this hotel? I knew the Florida senator slightly. We had been introduced in the Senate last summer and I had interviewed him for PJ Media at Joni Ernst’s Roast & Ride in Iowa some months ago. I also sent him and Senator Cruz a series of foreign policy questions for PJM that they both answered.

I was further partial to Rubio, as some readers have noted, because I admired those foreign policy views and thought he was well positioned to beat Hillary, Bernie or whomever (Jerry Brown?) the Democrats would put up. I wasn’t as disturbed as some by his role in the amnesty question, though I don’t think those who enter the country illegally should ever be allowed to vote.

Sure enough, I saw Rubio’s campaign bus parked behind some snowy trees at the back of the hotel parking lot, but didn’t think that much of it as I went about my business, checking out the candidates at their campaign stops and then joining the media mash-up at the debate.

There, of course, I watched Chris Christie butcher a befuddled Rubio with his accusations of scripted answers that have been repeated, we could say ad nauseum, in the media. In an instant, I realized that Marco’s momentum from his surprise finish in Iowa, that many were saying would propel him to being the competitor to Trump, had been derailed by the New Jersey governor.

To be honest, I was depressed by it, but still went the next day to Rubio’s Super Bowl party, which was very well attended. (They had to change to a larger venue.) Marco gave an upbeat speech — maybe he wasn’t so wounded — and told the crowd to enjoy themselves, he wasn’t staying to watch the game.

As I was saying at the dawn of this day:

1) Trump;
2) Kasich;
3) Rubio;
4) Bush;
5) Cruz.

Number One and Two were correct, and at this hour Numbers Three, Four and Five are all jostling together at 11 per cent, but with Cruz third and Rubio fifth. On the Democrat side I noted the midnight vote tallies from Dixville Notch, Hart’s Location and Millsfield:

Sanders 17
Clinton 9

And I suggested that that spread might “hold throughout the day”. It pretty much did: Bernie 60 per cent, Hillary 38 per cent. And in the northern and western counties of New Hampshire, Mrs Clinton got seriously Berned. Coos County: Sanders 63 per cent, Clinton 35. Grafton: Sanders 65, Clinton 34. Sullivan: Sanders 68, Clinton 30. Carroll: 63, Clinton 36. It took older, moneyed women in the prosperous south-east corner to push Hillary up to 39 per cent. That’s really her only constituency: liberal women over 65 making 200 grand a year.

On the Republican side, Trump won yuge: 35 per cent in a nine-man race, and more than twice as many votes as the second-placed Kasich. On the latter, I wrote three weeks ago:

On the “moderate” side of the GOP, the thinking since debate season began is that Rubio is the alternative to Bush, and Christie is the alternative to Rubio. But it could be that Kasich is the alternative to all three of them.

And so it proved. Good for Kasich. But a nightmare for the GOP’s Donor-Industrial Complex: Trump has the populist lane, Cruz the conservative, and both are reviled by the so-called “establishment”. All New Hampshire had to do was sort out the so-called “moderate” lane by anointing Rubio, and, in a three-way race, he’d eliminate the Trump-Cruz problem. That was the theory.