New Hampshire: The Fat Lady is Warming Up

Tonight, New Hampshire voters said enough. With months of televised debates and one caucus, voters in the Granite State said they are ready for the primary season to end, the real campaign to begin and they want Mitt Romney to be their candidate. The former governor of Massachusetts did what he needed to, he topped the field and garnered around 37% of the vote, beating Ron Paul the Congressman from somewhere west of Mars who place second with a little less than a quarter of the vote, and Jon Huntsman in third, twenty points behind the leader.

The voting splits are only part of the story. Despite what you may be reading in the Mainstream Media exit polls reflect that almost two thirds of Republicans were satisfied with the choice of candidates. The number one reason people selected their candidate was electability. Almost sixty percent of those who chose electability as their priority voted for Romney. Romney also performed best with voters who were dissatisfied and down-right angry with President Obama.

My sources on the ground on primary day tell me there was a major sense of anger amongst the GOP voters but directed toward the former speaker of the house, Newt Gingrich. During the last days of the campaign Gingrich, who claims his policies are to the right of Romney, started to attack the front-runner from the left. The supposedly conservative candidate attacked free-enterprise, criticizing the Romney tenure at Bain Capital, doing a set-up job for the expected Barack Obama class-warfare campaign against success.

If one listens closely, each time a Republican candidate attacks Mitt Romney as being a “corporate raider,” you hear the Obama campaign filming another class-warfare commercial, this one starring Newt Gingrich’s stump speeches over the past few days. Should Obama win a second term many will look to Newt Gingrich’s childish scorched earth-type rhetoric as providing much of the ammo.