2016 Feb 10^th

The winners go on and the losers go home! The problem here is that some of the losers do not yet think of themselves as losers. On the Republican side the second bananas staying around after New Hampshire are Kasich, Bush, Cruz and Rubio. Kasich was second after Trump and opened a slight gap between himself and the next three candidates. It seems Kasich’s retail campaigning helped him stay in the race. Rubio, who disgraced himself early in the debate by repeating a favorite phrase over and over was not all that severely damaged by his gaff. Perhaps his boyish charm led voters to forgive him.

Governor Christie, who savaged poor Rubio in the debate, did not profit from his viciousness. He is on his way back to New Jersey to “re-evaluate his situation,” re-evaluate is political speak for drop out. I doubt that the New Jersey people will be any more welcoming than the New Hampshire people were. Christie’s approval rating in New Jersey hovers around 30 percent; in short, they don’t like him much either. He can’t shed his “prosecutor” persona and that persona works fine when he’s on the attack but he can’t seem to turn it off and it is quite unattractive.

Then we have Carly Fiorina who is also dropping out. Ms. Fiorina tried to hang her hat on bashing Hillary Clinton and was always so angry about Hillary that she seemed in danger of a stroke. Constant anger in a candidate is not attractive to voters either and Fiorina is discovering that. This is Fiorina’s second consecutive election failure; the last one was her contest with Senator Boxer for a California Senate seat which Ms. Fiorina lost badly when Boxer pointed out that she had tripled her own salary, bought a splendid yacht while laying off some thirty thousand Hewlett Packard workers. Needless to say Boxer won and Fiorina lost. Then Fiorina let some of her staff for that contest go for several years without being paid; when one of her current staff was asked about that he said that because she lost her staff should not expect to be paid. I wonder what he thinks today.

Finally there is Dr. Ben Carson, the pediatric neurosurgeon. We haven’t heard from Dr. Carson but if he persists in his quest for the nomination he will have to climb out of a very deep hole. He got just 2.3 percent of the New Hampshire vote; he didn’t even stay around for a post-election “victory” party with his staff. He left for South Carolina instead. He has said nothing yet about withdrawing. He isn’t accustomed to losing so this might take a while to soak in…or maybe his book sales as a candidate make it worth continuing.