Nothing but trench warfare

A funny thing happened on the way to South Carolina. Nobody dropped out after New Hampshire.

Mitt Romney is not amused. Barack Obama is delighted, content at a minimum. Presidential primaries were created to apportion delegates to nominating conventions but a companion function has been to winnow the field, eliminate the also-rans from the serious (usually to mean, the better financed) candidates. Together, New Hampshire, as always the first primary, which follows Iowa, always the first caucus, have almost always either shoved the least equipped contenders into the ditch or rewarded their efforts so poorly that they were marked as nuisances, eccentrics, expensive impediments to the two or three contestants with the best chance of consolidating their party’s factions. Indeed, the calculus of both party’s field is rarely if ever significantly altered after the two early states take their swing. If you don’t make it into the top two, three at most, you aren’t going to be the nominee.

Thus a third place finish in New Hampshire four years ago could hardly have deterred former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas from continuing on to South Carolina. After all, he had won a stunning victory in Iowa. By early March, however, his wins or near misses in Dixie and the Midwest nonetheless left him captive to the delegate selection math, and he left the race. With a near-40 percent win in New Hampshire, plenty of money, a lead in South Carolina and social conservatives, already splintered, more concerned this season with the economy than abortion and gay marriage, Romney the Inevitable looks — inevitable.

The question is how much carnage will occur in the next dozen days? How bloodied will Romney be when the nomination becomes his? How tattered his claim to “real” conservatism? Recall a moment, months ago, in one of the first of the seemingly endless debates among the Republican presidential candidates. A moderator, CNN’s John King, noted the huge gap between residents with health insurance in Massachusetts, where Romney had engineered a medical coverage mandate, and the Texas of Gov. Rick Perry, as ferocious as any of his rivals in condemning “Obamacare,” with huge numbers of uninsured, many of them children. A divergence there, plainly; who, the reporter asked former Speaker Newt Gingrich, had “the better end of the argument?”

“Well, I’m frankly not interested in your effort to get Republicans fighting each other,” Gingrich snapped. “[Y]ou would like to puff this up into some giant thing.”

The crowd roared its approval.

A few second later, Gingrich lashed out again: “I, for one, and I hope that all of my friends up here are going to repudiate every effort of the news media to get Republicans to fight each other, to protect Barack Obama.”

The crowd roared again. Damn liberal media! Newt, he really told ‘em! In our trade it’s called working the refs, complaining about “biased” questions —politicians, of course, never give biased “answers” — or journalistic “grandstanding” using “gotcha” questions. (Let’s be honest, there is such a thing as grandstanding and gotcha, but it usually backfires). Nobody in the current field is better at working the refs than Newt. Or, was.

The evening was a prelude to the knife fight that the GOP campaign has become since Iowa, with Gingrich in particular being slashed and slashing back. Speak not ill of a fellow Republican? That was 30 years ago. With South Carolina make-or-break for his rivals, Romney can expect nothing but trench warfare. He acknowledged as much in claiming victory in New Hampshire, plainly referring to the fratricidal rhetoric (his supporters did their share) of the previous days. “In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with [Mr. Obama],” Romney said. “This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation.”

Arkansas? Six electoral votes await the eventual GOP nominee, Romney or, by some stroke of chance, one of his rivals. The same in most, maybe all, of the South. The larger nation is up for grabs.

• • •

Steve Barnes is host of Arkansas Week on AETN.