Ron Paul surprises party establishment by winning Idaho GOP straw poll in Garden City

Despite a speech from U.S. Sen. Jim Risch backing Mitt Romney, Rep. Ron Paul won Friday’s pay-to-play vote. Paul’s surrogate was Washington state Rep. Matt Shea of Spokane Valley. 

How strong a win? The former Libertarian got 43 percent (173 votes) to the former Massachusetts governor’s 34 percent (135). Trailing them were Newt Gingrich with 12 percent (47 votes), Rick Santorum at 10 percent (40) and Jon Huntsman with 1 percent (4). A total of 399 people from across Idaho participated. Rick Perry's campaign asked not to be included on the straw poll ballot. 

What’s it mean? It cost $30 to participate, and party officials cautioned against making too much of the result. The poll was a party fundraiser held at the Riverside Hotel in Garden City. 

Whoops of joy: Paulies were jubilant. “It feels so good,” said Chris MacCloud of Meridian. “Just a lot of hard work, time and energy.” 

New plan for GOP: Idaho Republicans are using a caucus for the first time this year. They also moved up the delegate-selection date from a May primary to the March 6 caucus on Super Tuesday — which features GOP contests in 10 states — in hopes of having a role in picking the nominee. 

Party officials hope for 15,000 to caucus in Ada and Canyon counties alone.

Attack Ad

Ron Paul's campaign is out with this new ad in South Carolina, which hits Rick Santorum on his "record of betrayal." 

"One serial hypocrite exposed," the ad says, showing clips of Newt Gingrich. "Now another has emerged: Rick Santorum, a corporate lobbyist and Washington politician. A record of betrayal."

This is the first time Paul has hit Santorum on TV so far, and looks a great deal like the anti-Gingrich ads the Paul camp ran in Iowa. Those ads helped bring Gingrich's numbers down before the caucuses, and brutal ads from a campaign that has money to spend could have a similar effect on Santorum. 

The Paul campaign is spending $250,000 on the ad buy, a source tells us, and the ad will run in South Carolina starting Monday. 

Read more about: Ron Paul, South Carolina, Rick Santorum

Mitt Romney's weekend from hell

The 2012 front-runner played the pincushion role before, in the lead-up to the 2008 GOP primaries. But this time around, Romney has largely avoided being perforated by rivals. That’s likely to change on Saturday and Sunday due to a mix of personal animus and strategic imperatives. 

“In 2008, he found himself in the middle of a circular firing squad … and it really put him on an uncomfortable defensive posture throughout the whole debate,” recalled Rich Killion, a New Hampshire-based strategist who is neutral in the Jan. 10 primary. “Truly, this [weekend], he could be seeing two or three candidates come at him.” 

“Gov. Romney has been this nominal front-runner from the get-go yet he’s not been anybody’s big target in the debates,” said Chip Saltsman, Mike Huckabee’s campaign manager in the 2008 presidential race. “We’re gonna see that change this weekend, and now these guys are making the decision.” 

One veteran GOP strategist put it even more bluntly: “He will be a political pinata, no question about it. The question is, how does he handle it?” 

The chances of a Romney pile-on are fairly high, especially with a field that’s been whittled to six candidates, down from eight just a few weeks ago. 

There are two debates within 16 hours of one another — an ABC News-sponsored event on Saturday night, followed by an NBC News-sponsored forum the next morning. The two face-offs are consuming gobs of time for all the campaigns, and essentially freezing campaigning over much of the weekend in what is an already-condensed run-up to the Jan. 10 primary. 

Newt Gingrich is the safest bet to go after Romney — the only question is whether it’s a strafing run or a full shock-and-awe bombing. The former House speaker, who has repeatedly denounced Romney for the barrage of negative ads that helped sink his fortunes in Iowa, has made clear he is going to draw sharp contrasts, emphasis on “sharp.” 

But Gingrich isn’t the only one taking the stage with issues with Romney. Jon Huntsman, who has staked his fortunes on New Hampshire without any notable rise in the polls, also has no love lost for Romney. Rick Perry, as he demonstrated at the Dec. 10 debate in Iowa, has a unique ability in the field to get under Romney’s skin. 

Then there’s Rick Santorum, who isn’t known to harbor any ill will toward Romney but has consistently gone after the front-runner at the debates for months — the problem was that he got very little time from the moderators to make that case. That’s certain to change this weekend, given his squeaker of a loss to Romney in the Iowa caucuses.

 The debates were the forums Gingrich used to rehab his moribund campaign in the fall, and the timing of the weekend debates works well for him — it gives him a platform, at a very opportune time, to climb back into the race. Outgunned in finances, Gingrich is visibly furious with Romney over the bruising campaign that was waged against him in Iowa, and is looking forward to a chance to even the score. But it will mean abandoning the cheerful warrior posture he’s adopted at most of the past debates, in which he’s excoriated President Barack Obama and the media to in-house crowd applause. 

Santorum has also been an able debater — and, like Gingrich, likes to mix it up. It’s not hard to envision him getting aggressive with Romney in the debates. 

Huntsman has generally steered clear of real attacks on Romney in the debates, although they had a memorable exchange about Afghanistan that was seen as benefiting the former Utah governor during a foreign policy-focused debate. And he’s now running out of options to stop Romney, against whom he’s positioned himself as the clearest alternative. 

“Newt’s already told the world what he’s going to do Saturday night. Huntsman spent an entire campaign [making] muted, subtle contrasts to Mitt on the trail. This is his last shot,” Killion said. 

Saltsman said that some of the anti-Romney sentiment isn’t personal, just the practical impact of his standing. 

“Nobody likes the guy in front of them,” Saltsman said. “You can be nice to him, but nobody likes the guy out front. [Huckabee’s campaign] certainly four years ago [was] always very friendly and always had a good relationship with John McCain, but I can tell you, after he beat us in South Carolina, I didn’t feel so friendly.” 

Attacks this late in the game may not matter much. The debates played a significant role in the lead-up to the caucuses since they drove the narrative, but now that Romney has won a contest and heads into Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary as the front-runner by a wide margin, there’s a limited amount his opponents can do to drag him down. 

“Except for the very rare silver bullet, attacks on opponents need to start before voters and the media have begun to harden their sense of who the candidate is,” said one veteran GOP strategist. “This late in the election cycle, it will be very difficult to introduce attacks and make them stick, particularly on Romney, whose vulnerabilities are so well known.”

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Debate night undercard: Good Newt vs. Bad Newt

Newt Gingrich faces, to use one of his favorite terms, a transformative question in the next 48 hours: Can he claw his way back into this race without letting Bad Newt completely out of the box? 

Listening to him on the campaign trail, he seems authentically torn. In some appearances, he sounds like a man who knows he did more in this year’s debates to repair his image than anyone else onstage. He did it by sounding smart, flashing humor and training all of his harshness on President Barack Obama and the media. This is the reason he had his moment in the front-runner sun.

In others, he sounds like a man who just can’t help himself. With that sun now set, Bad Newt — the one with the acid tongue and nasty streak — is emerging. It started in Iowa, where he couldn’t leave it where most politicians do, and simply accused Mitt Romney of dishonesty or petty politics in denying his involvement in attack ads his friends were running against Gingrich. Gingrich had to put some Gingrich on the point, and called Romney “a liar.”

Then Friday morning, Gingrich, in discussing how Romney might fare in debates against Obama, couldn’t stop at just saying the former House speaker would be better, or Romney would be at a strong disadvantage. 

“As people look at his record and they imagine him debating Obama, Obama’s going to laugh at him,” Gingrich said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “Obama’s going to say, ‘I developed Obamacare based on Romneycare. I even brought your staff into the White House in order to develop it.’ ” 

It’s great stuff for the media — reporters lap it up. But it runs the real risk of leaving Gingrich looking like the old Gingrich when the dust settles on the campaign. 

Hyperbole is his oxygen, and the man takes a lot of very deep breaths. The hyperbole is a hoot for Republicans when it’s directed at Obama or, just as good, at the media in debates in defense of fellow Republicans. In retrospect, his defense of Romney and others against the moderators was among the most important factors in his unexpected rise.

But it can be cringe-inducing when it’s aimed at those fellow Republicans instead.

With two debates 10 hours apart this weekend, Good Newt versus Bad Newt will be one of the most compelling subplots. It’s clear he hasn’t totally decided which approach to take yet, and even if he does aim to tone it down, it’s not clear he has the discipline to do so.

After signaling for days that he planned to abandon his self-imposed “relentlessly positive” stance, Gingrich suddenly steered toward sunshine Friday, saying he planned to mostly ignore his rivals. His plan is to “be positive, be happy, talk directly to the American people and mostly ignore my competitors,” he told reporters. “What I’ve done for every single debate.

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