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"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - John 8:32
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Author:  Nicholas Stix
Bio: Nicholas Stix
Date:  January 9, 2008
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Topic category:  Other/General

New Hampshire: The Fox Factor, Ron Paul, and the Coming “Blacklash”

And the winner of the New Hampshire primary is … Big Media!

And the winner of the New Hampshire primary is … Big Media!

Well, whaddya expect? As the sayings go, “The media make their own history, but not on their own terms,” and “Journalists write the first draft of historians’ lies.”

Alright, alright, I confess. The “sayings” are mine. Moving right along (where’s that imaginary golf club?) …

Sen. John “If they want a fence, I’ll build them a goddamn fence” McCain (Media-AZ) has won the New Hampshire GOP primary over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, 37-32 percent.

This is amazing, when you consider that: 1. McCain is the media’s own Frankenstein monster, created in 2000, and that the media brought his campaign back from the dead months ago, and kept it alive; 2. McCain is fundamentally hostile to the interests of Republican voters. He has waged a long, lonely battle on behalf of media control of elections (aka “campaign finance reform”), and on behalf of the abolition of America through open borders and amnesty for illegal immigrants (aka “comprehensive immigration reform”); and 3. New Hampshire voters are supposedly very hostile towards amnesty and open borders.

One must note, however, that New Hampshire runs semi-open primaries, in which independent voters may vote either in the GOP or Democratic primary. And New Hampshire has a lot of independent voters, many of whom surely voted for McCain, as they did in 2000. But most states run closed primaries, and if John McCain were so beloved by GOP voters outside of New Hampshire, he would already have won the party’s nomination in 2000.

The biggest loser in New Hampshire was Mitt Romney, who plowed millions of dollars of his own money into a massive ad campaign, gave a dominant performance – in my opinion, and that of the focus group interviewed by pollster Frank Luntz – in the Fox News GOP debate on Saturday, and emphasized not giving an amnesty to illegal immigrants. Although Romney presently leads the pack with 24 GOP delegates, to Huckabee’s 18 and McCain’s 10 (Paul has six), Romney has overspent using his own money, because of that is not getting federal matching funds, which will hurt him down the road (Romney is wealthy, but he’s no Mike Bloomberg.), and is heading into states (South Carolina, Florida) where McCain and Huckabee will be very strong. Thus, if Romney cannot win the January 15 primary in Michigan, where his late father George served as a liberal Republican governor, he is done as a contender (though not as a possible VP nominee). But if Romney takes Michigan, he’ll be back as a contender, and campaigning with a vengeance in all 22 Super Tuesday states holding primaries on February 5.

Another huge loser was Rudy Giuliani. Fox did everything it could to help him. The network invited him to its Saturday GOP debate, and Hannity & Colmes host Sean Hannity had him on his talk show immediately after the debate, while the same network did everything it could to destroy the candidacy of libertarian Texas Cong. Ron Paul, whom it refused to invite to the debate.

(I understand that media companies exist as much to exercise illegitimate political power as they do to make billions of dollars, but according to tradition, they are supposed to at least feign impartiality. Bad form, Fox.)

With 96 percent of precincts counted, Giuliani barely beat Paul, nine to eight percent, a difference of a mere 2,223 votes out of 228,531 GOP votes so far counted. A few months ago, Giuliani had practically been coronated as the Republican standard-bearer. And yet in Iowa, where he did not vigorously campaign (because he knew he was going to get thrashed), he only finished in sixth place in the caucuses, with four percent of the vote. But after campaigning full time in New Hampshire, with nothing to show for it, his campaign is now on life support.

But don’t count him out. This Republican whipped Al Sharpton and the New York media. And any man who can marry his own cousin (his first marriage), and later look a reporter who asked about that choice in the eye and say, “I didn’t know that,” is clearly a liar of presidential proportions.

Mike Huckabee was badly hurt by New Hampshire voters who were hostile to the Evangelical religiosity that Republican Iowa caucusers found so endearing. But with a third place showing (11 percent) in New Hampshire, his win in Iowa, and Southern states, where his Evangelical Christian base is dominant, coming up, Huckabee’s candidacy is very much alive.

Depending on how you look at it, Ron Paul was a big loser or a big winner. He was a big loser, because outside perhaps his home state of Texas (March 4), where he runs as favorite son, New Hampshire may have been his last chance to break into the top three vote-getters. But he was a big winner, in coming in merely one point behind Giuliani, despite Fox’ closing him out of the Saturday debate, and in exposing Fox News’ machinations and causing the state GOP to publicly denounce Fox, and withdraw from its partnership with the network on the eve of the debate. If Paul continues his campaign, he will be running as much against Fox News as he will be against the other Republican candidates. The other networks should love that, and accordingly reward him with free publicity.

On the Democratic side, where Sen. Hillary Clinton (Left of Stalin-NY) beat Sen. Barack Obama (Racial Identity-IL), 39-37 percent – with former North Carolina senator John Edwards getting 17 percent – look for there to be a huge blacklash.

Most whites would probably agree with the white, 40-something, New Hampshire Obama volunteer, who was interviewed with his wife, who had also volunteered for the biracial Illinois senator, before the race had been decided: “It’s very close, if he loses. If he wins, he’s got the nomination.”

Blacks are going to have a different attitude. The last polls before the primary all had Obama winning by at least 9 percent, and in some cases by more than 10 percent. Pollsters’ margin for error is plus or minus three percent. Thus, any result up to a six-point voters’ swing can be attributed to the margin of error; a swing of nine points or more cannot. When you take blacks’ conspiracist obsessions, and add Clinton’s documented dirty tricks of using proxies to claim that Obama is or was a Moslem, and abused and/or sold hard drugs, you have an ugly situation.

Blacks are going to say that Hillary Clinton stole the primary through electoral fraud.

Not that such beliefs are going to have any effect whatsoever on the black primary vote elsewhere. Although black interviewees in the South have been careful to tell reporters that they were “undecided” as between Obama and Clinton, they were lying. They were always going to vote for the “black” candidate, just as they always do.

However, for once blacks’ knee-jerk conspiracy theories will be plausible. In the 2004 election, exit pollsters engaged in mischief, in trying to swing the election to Democrat John Kerry. A nine-point swing can only be explained via either rank incompetence by pollsters or polling or electoral skullduggery. And in Hillary Clinton, we know who we are dealing with.

Black rage could play a huge role down the road. If blacks decide to boycott the national election, the Republican nominee could stumble and stagger and back his way into victory, in spite of the Party’s national collapse under George Bush since 2004.

But with the very real possibility of a four-way race in 2008, this promises to be the most volatile election since 1968. And in a country that has been demographically fractured by legal and illegal immigration, such elections are going to increasingly be the rule.

How much of a role immigration continues to play will depend to a large degree on how long Ron Paul holds out, and whether he eventually decides to run a third-party campaign. Forget about the Democrats, who have been fleeing the immigration issue (Hillary Clinton got New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer to drop his plan to issue driver’s licenses to illegals, so she wouldn’t have to take a stand on the issue), but in the near term, if Mitt Romney loses in Michigan and then drops out, while Ron Paul remains in the race, Paul could benefit from some of Romney’s anti-amnesty vote. Otherwise, the subject of immigration will consist of a cast of Republican flip-floppers propagating positions they don’t believe in, and criticizing each other for expediency.

Nicholas Stix
Nicholas Stix, Uncensored

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Biography - Nicholas Stix

Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.


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