Presidential Campaign Moves To New Hampshire
WASHINGTON,DC (WUSA) --- While arguable saner Americans plot winter time away from home on sunny beaches, political Washingtonians this week are escaping the cold of Iowa for the colder temperatures of New Hampshire, leaving caucuses behind and immersing themselves with less than a night's sleep into the first big political primary of presidential election year.
Iowa's landslide winner Mitt Romney (he won by an astonishing eight votes in Tuesday's caucuses), began the New Hampshire campaign with an endorsement from the 2008 GOP winner there, Senator John McCain, who traveled with Romney to several Wednesday events.
Romney is well-funded, has a solid ground operation in the state, owns property there, and was a neighboring governor when he had the top spot in Massachusetts. He is well-known, and polls show him with a double-digit lead over his closest competitor there, Texas Representative Ron Paul.
Former Senator Rick Santorum came close to beating Romney in Iowa on Tuesday, and told New Hampshire supporters Wednesday to dismiss critics who say he has little chance there.
"They forget that this is my 31st trip into New Hampshire, that we've done well over 100 of these town hall meetings, and that we have been traveling all over this state for well over a year," he said at a Wednesday night rally.
Fourth place Iowa finisher,. former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, had an interesting perspective for New Hampshire voters who attended a Gingrich discussion on Wednesday evening. He talked about the Iowa campaign.
"Wow! Here's this very intense period leading up to the caucus and the caucus is over. Bye-bye, and you go to the next place to get immersed and you do this over and over.
"But I think it creates indelible memories in good candidates, and I think Clinton had this characteristic. In good candidates they're not just going from staged event to staged event to staged event. In good candidates they're getting a kind of immersion that gives them a permanent flavor of who they're representing, and its amazingly diverse."
"You begin to get this flavor of a country that is so much richer in its human components and, I think for the good candidates, when they get to the Oval Office, that gives them a reservoir that they draw on that reminds them who they represent," Gingrich said.