Romney Wins Michigan

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Mitt Romney won a crucial victory in Tuesday's Michigan Republican presidential primary, defeating John McCain and Mike Huckabee with a message of optimism for the state's ailing economy.

With 95 percent of precincts counted, Romney -- the Oakland County-reared son of a popular Michigan governor -- lead McCain by a margin of 39 percent to 30. Mike Huckabee had 16 percent.

"Tonight is a win for optimist over Washington-style pessimism," Romney told a cheering crowd at a Southfield hotel where he had awaited the results.

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McCain, who defeated Romney just a week before in New Hampshire, was campaigning Tuesday night in South Carolina.

"For a minute there in New Hampshire I thought this campaign might be getting easier," the Arizona senator said. "But you know what? We've gotten pretty good at doing things the hard way too. And I think we've shown them, we don't mind a fight."

The stakes were highest for Romney, a former Massachusetts governor who told Michigan voters that from the White House, he could help rebuild the ailing domestic auto industry. After disappointing losses the last two weeks in Iowa and New Hampshire, analysts said his candidacy would be severely wounded by a loss in a third state where he had invested heavily.

"You've got to give the guy a ton of credit for winning a state he had to pull through," said Washington-based Republican pollster Neil Newhouse.

Sen. Hillary Clinton won a marginalized Democratic primary in which she was the only major contender on the ballot -- fallout from the controversy over Michigan's move to an early primary in defiance of both parties' rules. Clinton was headed to a large and expected victory, though her opponents were certain to point to a relative large "uncommitted" vote, especially among African-American voters. With 94 percent of precincts reporting statewide, she got 55 percent of the vote, compared to 40 percent for "uncommitted."

In the Republican race, Romney, McCain and Huckabee each had captured a win in one of the three states that preceded Michigan -- though Romney's victory came in little-contested Wyoming. And each man campaigned hard here, searching for a win and for momentum that could carry into Saturday's South Carolina primary and Nevada caucuses, and the big-ticket Florida contest Jan. 29.

"We are going to do it today," a confident Romney told supporters in Grand Rapids on Tuesday, a final busy day of campaigning.

McCain, an Arizona senator who upset George W. Bush in a similar contest here eight years ago with the support of Democrats and independents, said at a final Michigan stop that he'd take any votes he could get.

"We're depending on Republicans, Democrats, independents, Libertarians, vegetarians, Trotskyites," he joked.

Huckabee is already campaigning in the next primary state, South Carolina. "We're going to win South Carolina. We put a flag in the ground here Saturday," he said.

He also jabbed at Romney, who has poured at least $20 million of his personal fortune into his bid: "We need to prove that electing a president is not just about how much money a candidate has." Though he now has come in third in New Hampshire and Michigan after winning in Iowa, Huckabee said, "Whatever it takes, we're in it for the long haul."

Of the roughly 2,300 Republican delegates who will choose the party's nominee at its convention in St. Paul, Minn., in September, Michigan was to have 60. Officially, that number has been cut in half by the Republican National Committee as punishment for holding a primary earlier than allowed under party rules. But it is nearly certain that the eventual nominee will seat Michigan's full delegation.

Though the race appeared close, there were trends that pointed to a possible Romney victory: Democrats, who had their own marginalized primary without most of the major players, showed little interest in crossing over to meddle in the GOP primary: Fewer than one in 10 voters in the Republican contests identified themselves as Democrats, according to preliminary exit-poll results. About one in four Republican primary voters said they were independents -- a number lower than in the 2000 Michigan primary, when McCain rode their support to an upset win over Bush.

More than half of GOP primary voters listed the economy as their most important issue, and Romney won those voters by a small margin. Perhaps more significantly, more than half of voters said the most important factor in their decision was the candidates' stands on the issues. By contrast, voters in New Hampshire last week listed leadership qualities as their most important criterion, a factor that helped McCain to victory.

Carmela Langle, a Novi school guidance counselor, said there's no secret to Michigan voters' worries at the moment.

"Right now, the economy is very important. It's difficult to function when my salary is frozen," said Carmela Langley, a Novi guidance counselor. "Foreclosures to me are also one of the biggest issues."

Wavering voters such as Ken LeMarbe were looking for help. His small masonry business in Commerce Township is suffering from the state's economic downtown -- and, he said, from competitors he believes have hired illegal immigrant workers to undercut him on price..

"I'd sure hate to leave the state," LeMarbe said before a McCain rally in Howell. "I've lived here all my life, I hunt here, I fish here. But it's getting tough."

The campaign in Michigan, though basically condensed into a weeklong period after the New Hampshire primary, became what may well have been the most intense candidate blitz in the state's history. Four Republican candidates and one Democrat putting in more than 60 campaign appearances from Traverse City to the auto show floor in Detroit. At no time in modern political history has Michigan played such an important role in either party's nomination.

And that role largely centered on the state's ailing economy: a 7.4 percent unemployment rate, thousands of lost manufacturing jobs, falling home values and rising foreclosures. The candidates and the national media covering the race made Michigan's economy a major part of the national political conversation.

And with voters going to the polls on a day where bad economic news sent the stock market plunging more than 2 percent, the debate here might widen into the national campaign if Michigan's one-state recession spreads to the other 49.

"This is going to act as kind of a catalyst to talk much more about the economy and much less about national security," Republican political consultant John Feehrey said of the intense, week-long focus on Michigan's economic plight.

"And the campaigns that are able to make that switch are going to be more successful."

Romney made visceral, emotional appeals to voters in his home state, where his father, George, was an auto CEO-turned-governor. Romney said the combination of his business experience as a successful consultant and venture capitalist, plus the "cars in his DNA," made him best equipped to help Michigan recover. And he hammed on McCain, a longtime supporter of higher fuel economy standards that the Detroit automakers oppose, as unduly pessimistic about the state's future.

"Those jobs aren't coming back," McCain said upon hitting the ground in Michigan last Wednesday. He called it more of his "straight talk," and most economists agree that Michigan's traditional auto jobs are gone for good. But Romney targeted the statement relentlessly, and it may have had an effect: Almost a third of voters said they made their decision in the last three days, and Romney won those voters by a 4-to-3 margin.

Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and ordained Baptist preacher, had depended on a combination of economic populism and religious conservatism. He aired television ads in the final week of the campaign, appealing to voters who wanted a president like "the guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off."

But exit polls showed him in a relatively distant third. And tellingly, evangelical Christians did not give him the same boost in Michigan as they did in Iowa: Those voters made up about a third of the GOP vote, but Romney and Huckabee got nearly equal support from them.</div>

Detroit News

 

He's a robot with human skin.

 

I don't think he's all that bad, but the thing is we have a real dearth of true leaders who run for president. He clearly is lacking in the leadership quality.

I'm talking about the George Patton types, or folks who make you want to spring to attention when they enter the room. Colin Powell had that for a while, but his luster is faded. Obama has the tools, but isn't expressing well where he wants us to follow him. I don't mean to sound like I'm looking for a military fellow, just a leader.

The rest are basically technocrats who are hard to root for.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Denny Crane @ Jan 16 2008, 12:23 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>I don't think he's all that bad, but the thing is we have a real dearth of true leaders who run for president. He clearly is lacking in the leadership quality.

I'm talking about the George Patton types, or folks who make you want to spring to attention when they enter the room. Colin Powell had that for a while, but his luster is faded. Obama has the tools, but isn't expressing well where he wants us to follow him. I don't mean to sound like I'm looking for a military fellow, just a leader.

The rest are basically technocrats who are hard to root for.</div>

Looking for a Gen. David Petreaus?

 

No, I'm not looking particularly for a general, it's just that generals (I assume) get to that rank by being the epidomy of leadership. Our recent leaders (and for the most part overall) just aren't inspirational like JFK or Reagan were.

A lot of religious leaders have that quality. MLK Jr. could get millions to march on D.C., for example.

 

The thing is, Hillary is the most beatable candidate the Democrats are running. The racial nature of the mudslinging going on in the Democrats' nomination process is nothing compared to what the Republicans will do to her if she's nominated. Kerry as Flip-flopper is mild in comparison.

Think about it. Her history is an open book. Cattle futures will raise their ugly head once again, and that's just the start of it. Remember how her Rose Law Firm billing records couldn't be found and they magically appeared in the West Wing one day? Vince Foster's suicide will surely be dredged up and revisited. The Clinton body count WWW sites will be brought up to date and made big in the blogosphere. Lincoln Bedroom for sale. Impeachment. And on and on.

Heck, I'd easily see the Republicans doing serious damage with ads that just quote Carl Bernstein's book about Hillary where he says she played loose with the truth, or newspaper clippings of former big Clinton donors who gave to Obama this time around saying the same things.

Once the people are reminded of how scandal-ridden the Clinton years were, it'll become a decision if we want to go back to that atmosphere...

McCain had a kind of magic back in 2000, running as an outsider. Not a Washington outsider, but a republican party machine outsider. The machine crushed him. He became the good soldier, which is fine and honorable. But he went from being the guy who wouldn't go to Bob Jones University on principle (which made him more popular) to the guy who now panders to that crowd. I want to like him, but he's lost his spine along the way, sold his soul for the core constituency vote of the party where he was making a new kind of constituency for the party.