Romney win provokes panic

Mitt Romney cemented his status as the Republican presidential front-runner yesterday with a win in the New Hampshire primary that left rivals fighting for a chance to derail his march to the nomination as the race moves south.


Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who won the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses by eight votes, ran 16 percentage points ahead of his nearest competitor in New Hampshire, the nation’s first primary.


He had 39 percent of the vote, with 95 percent of the precincts counted in the Associated Press tally. U.S. Representative Ron Paul of Texas finished second with 23 percent, followed by former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. with 17 percent.


“Tonight we celebrate, tomorrow we go back to work,” Romney told supporters in Manchester last night in a speech that debuted new lines of attack against President Barack Obama.


Romney told his audience the president he hopes to oppose in November “has run out of ideas” and is “running out of excuses.”


Referring to the next primary on Jan. 21, Romney added: “Tonight, we’re asking the good people of South Carolina to join the citizens of New Hampshire and make 2012 the year he runs out of time.


The conservatives, sensing the imminence of their defeat, have resorted to the best, most damaging line of attack on Romney: that he was unethical and greedy in his work as a private equity dude at Bain Capital.
The most damaging charge is that Romney and his crew found dying companies and bled them dry -- running up their debt and firing their workers -- to make profits for themselves. It is not helpful either that it is exactly the business in which Michael Douglas' Gordon Geckko was engaged in Oliver Stone's cinematic indictment of the Reagan era, "Wall Street."
Romney points to successes like Staples and Sports Authority where Bain provided the resources to expand and revitalize businesses and casts the failures as instances when their best efforts just weren't enough. But the charge is that in at least a few instances, Bain was a corporate scrap dealer, junking existing firms and jobs and cashing in the parts.
Gingrich is going very hard at Romney over this claim. Perry, stuck at 5 percent in the polls, is going even harder, invoking the term for the kind of carcass picking of which Romney is accused: vulture capitalism. Santorum has deemed the line of inquiry as legitimate but been understandably wary of joining in the kamikaze mission to stop Romney.
Exit polls in New Hampshire didn't show much sign that the attack worked here, but the charges haven't had time to really sink in. In the 10 days before South Carolina, thanks in part to massive spending by a pro-Gingrich Super PAC funded by a casino magnate, the topic will become preeminent.
This is a desperation play, but it works because it is a topic on which Republicans can rely on establishment media outlets to amplify. It's hard to get the New York Times and NBC to ask about Romney's slippery stance on social issues or his other conservative apostasies, but when the Not Romneys echo talking points from Occupy Wall Street and the Democratic National Committee, the press corps takes notice.
This is bad for Romney is that it legitimizes the inevitable line of attack from the Obama Democrats if Romney can endure through January. "Even your fellow Republicans questioned ..." It is good in another sense, in that it will tend to make the charges seem stale by the fall.
It seems to be all bad for the Not Romneys, though. Having failed to resolve the underlying question of which one of them should be the primary rival to Romney, their intended quarry is about to slip away with the nomination.