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Republicans Get Nasty In New Hampshire With Even Boots Fair Game

Republicans Get Nasty In New Hampshire With Even Boots Fair Game

By Mark Niquette and Terrence Dopp, Bloomberg News (TNS)

New Hampshire voters watching television this week heard Marco Rubio’s allies call Chris Christie a scandal-plagued liberal. Jeb Bush’s backers told them that John Kasich isn’t presidential timber. Christie told a Rochester town-hall meeting that Bush isn’t prepared to be president and Kasich is nuts to question his conservatism.

“I’m not a heavy bag,” Christie told reporters. “You throw a punch at me, and I’m going to throw one back.”

Even Rubio’s boots came in for it, their stack heels mocked by Bush and Ted Cruz.

Republican presidential candidates who represent the so-called establishment have staked their campaigns on emerging in New Hampshire as the viable alternative to real-estate mogul Donald Trump. They’re in each other’s way as they appeal to the same voter pool with the nation’s first primary a mere five weeks away. Now, they must calibrate how hard they can attack without alienating voters, hurting themselves or helping someone else.

The result has been a rancorous minuet.

During events in Rochester, Manchester and Merrimack, Christie pitched himself as the race’s last adult and a battle-tested leader. He said his criticisms were only a response to rivals who are just beginning to focus on him.

“Why all of the sudden now, five weeks from Election Day, are they all taking about me?” Christie told reporters after his event at American Legion Post 7 in Rochester. “Because I’m connecting with voters.”

New Hampshire is often caricatured as a stronghold of Yankee probity, soberly vetting politicians on behalf of the rest of the U.S. Yet the Granite State has turned muddy, thanks to a spate of angry advertising.

A pro-Rubio super PAC on Tuesday started running two separate television ads attacking the New Jersey governor. One shows Christie alongside the president, calling him “Obama’s favorite Republican.” Another revives the George Washington Bridge revenge traffic-jam scandal in 2013 and brings up New Jersey’s paltry job growth.

Christie in turn criticized Rubio’s attendance in the Senate, where he has missed 13.3 percent of roll-call votes since January 2011, compared with the median 1.7 percent of current lawmakers, according to the GovTrack.us website.

Rubio, who is scheduled to arrive in New Hampshire on Thursday, should “just show up for work once in a while,” Christie said. “He’s only got one job.”

Christie hedged his bet amid the Republican-on-Republican verbal violence. He released an ad Wednesday responding to Rubio by saying, “Do not be fooled: any significant division within the Republican Party leads to the same awful result — Hillary Rodham Clinton in January of 2017 taking the oath of office as president of the United States.”

Bush and Kasich also skirted personal criticism even as their allies sent salvos across the airwaves.

Bush’s super PAC is airing an ad comparing the records of the three governors in the race and declaring Bush superior on job creation and leadership. Yet Bush refrained from mentioning his closest competitors during his first few stops this week, saving his criticism for Trump as someone “preying on people’s angst and their fears.”

Bush will continue distinguishing himself by telling voters why they should entrust him with the presidency, said Rich Killion, his New Hampshire state director.

“If the others want to get inside food fights, so be it,” Killion said.

Nonetheless, Bush couldn’t resist a jibe Tuesday when he was asked about swapping his cowboy boots for more snow-friendly shoes.

“They’re not high heeled,” Bush said, according to NBC News reporter Kasie Hunt. It was an apparent shot at the stylish footwear that Rubio has sported on the trail. Cruz’s campaign also mocked what it called Rubio’s “booties.”

The great heel debate of 2016 reflects the increasing stakes of a New Hampshire victory. A RealClearPolitics average of recent polls in New Hampshire has Trump leading at 27 percent, followed by Rubio, 13.8 percent; Cruz, 11.5 percent; Christie, 11.3 percent; Kasich, 10 percent; and Bush, 8.3 percent.

“It’s very difficult, as you can imagine, to attack multiple candidates at the same time,” said John Weaver, Kasich’s chief strategist, as he sat across from the governor on the campaign’s bus before a stop in Manchester.

Some voters would prefer they didn’t try. Dwight Haynes, 79, an independent, undecided voter at a Rand Paul rally in Concord, goes out of his way not to watch negative advertisements.

“I try my darnedest to avoid them,” he said. “I think they’re demonic. I wish there were no attacks.”

Sitting at the back of Kasich’s Manchester town-hall, Tom Rath, New Hampshire’s former attorney general, said negative attacks will have limited effect on voters.

“It’s hard to tell them something they don’t know,” Rath said in an interview. “Unless they found some extraordinary piece of information that invalidates them, I think people understand at the end of an election these things sort of happen.”

Waiting for Christie in Rochester on Tuesday, 66-year-old retiree Dave Curry said the timing of the new attacks is just about right.

“These are three very effective executive officers, and trying to point out their opponents’ strengths and weaknesses is actually doing voters a favor because with such a large field, no one really has time to do the candidate research,” Curry said.

In an interview on his campaign bus Tuesday, amid five straight days of campaigning in New Hampshire, Kasich said he won’t shy from defending himself.

“If I do well here, I’m going to be the nominee,” Kasich said. “If I don’t do well here and get buried somehow, it’ll be over.”

(Sahil Kapur contributed to this article.)

©2016 Bloomberg News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie speaks at a campaign town hall meeting in Merrimack, New Hampshire, January 3, 2016. REUTERS/Katherine Taylor

 

Running For President No Matter What

Running For President No Matter What

New Jersey just received its ninth credit rating downgrade since Chris Christie became governor. How many would it take for him to sit out the presidential race? Ten? One hundred? Is there any point at which a record to run on becomes a record to run away from? For some candidates, the answer to that appears to be a solid no. Even when failure can’t be spun as anything but failure.

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, for instance, lost his bid for a third term in 2006 by a spectacular 17.4 points. That’s not a strong argument for electability, but it didn’t shake his confidence. He not only ran for president in 2012, he won Iowa and 10 other states during the Republican primary season. And now he’s running again.

Several Republicans with equally awkward backstories are brazening it out this year despite the dubious value of promising to do for America what they did for their state or company. They, of course, don’t see it that way — a disconnect that led to a tense exchange recently when Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, met the Washington press. In particular, one skeptical Carl Leubsdorf of the Dallas Morning News.

“You have a mixed record, to be charitable about it. A very controversial record,” Leubsdorf told Fiorina at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast. “What is it that you have that would enable you to perform this very difficult job?”

“In business, the numbers and the facts are clear,” Fiorina began, but Leubsdorf interrupted: “The facts aren’t clear. They kicked you out. But you said you laid the basis for future success. So that’s a mixed record.”

A CNN investigation of Fiorina’s HP tenure concluded that she was “a deeply polarizing figure” who displayed questionable management skills as she presided over “layoffs, leadership transitions, and a controversial merger with Compaq” that created an “ugly feud” with the Hewlett and Packard families. She turned up on several lists of worst tech CEOs.

Fiorina nevertheless jumped onto the national political stage. In 2008, she was an economic spokeswoman for Republican presidential nominee John McCain. In 2010, she was the GOP Senate nominee against popular California incumbent Barbara Boxer. And now she plans to announce a presidential bid on May 4.

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is another Republican with a controversial record — so much so that some fellow Republicans have attacked him publicly for budget shortfalls, spending cuts, financial gimmickry, and allowing his fiscal policy to be dictated by a national anti-tax lobbying group, Americans for Tax Reform. Two recent polls put Jindal’s job approval rating in the high 20s, but he continues to prepare for a national race and recently announced he had “snagged” the endorsement of Duck Dynasty star Willie Robertson.

And then there are outliers like Ben Carson, retired pediatric neurosurgeon, and Donald Trump, unretired and unrepentant attention-monger, who don’t even have the political experience of a Fiorina.

Christie is in a category by himself. Once a key national player, he now awaits indictments related to Bridgegate, the paralyzing multiday 2013 traffic debacle apparently orchestrated by his close aides as political revenge against a Democratic mayor. Christie himself is not expected to face charges. But his explanation for what happened — that he was too trusting and too willing to delegate responsibility — does not inspire confidence in his management abilities.

His state is in a “weak financial position,” according to Moody’s, and Christie himself scored a career low 38 percent approval rating in a new Quinnipiac University Poll. Nationally, the appeal of his rude, in-your-face political style has faded as voters try to envision it transplanted to the White House. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, meanwhile, are usurping the affections of the GOP establishment set.

So far Christie isn’t folding. Instead he is trying to pick up the straight-talk torch from John McCain with four detailed policy speeches this spring on entitlements, defense, taxes, and energy. “These are the truths you all know in your gut,” he said in the first one as he suggested hikes in the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare and reduced benefits for affluent retirees. History suggests this is not a recipe for political popularity.

What about the Democrats? I can hear you thinking it. So far there’s an official field of one, and while she has striking vulnerabilities, she also has much experience and many selling points. The other Democrats making noises about running are political veterans with defensible records, as are most of the dozen-plus Republicans in the 2016 race or seriously considering it.

The operating principle for the rest seems to be, “why not?” By this time next year, that question will be answered.

Follow Jill Lawrence on Twitter @JillDLawrence. To find out more about Jill Lawrence and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo: Kim Davies via Facebook