Not the answer NH voters or anyone else needs....

The Manchester Union Leader has been NH's most conservative newspaper and has been a key endorsement for any GOP candidate looking to win NH. While it is a sought after distinction, by no means is it an automatic lock for the endorsed candidate to win NH's primary based off this endorsement.

That brings us to the 2012 primary and the Union Leader's endorsement of Newt Gingrich. Intellectually, Gingrich has the ability to work ideas and review complex problems. He can give thoughtful reviews of key issues and history, but lacks the type of presentation that allows voters to want him as a leader. His style is abrasive and dismissive. He holds a pretty high opinion of his own thoughts and acts condescending to others. He may attract some of the "hard right" of the GOP but he doesn't get the center right or the middle which are both key to winning the White House.

In short, a vote for Newt ( How can anyone think a guy with a name like " Newt " can be President ?) is a vote to keep the feckless idiot that is President in the White House. Gingrich will alienate too many voters and give the left all the ammunition they need to prop up the " Vacationer-in-Chief". The GOP is not strong on leaders this election cycle but I am sure that Newt Gingrich is not the answer, and that is why his rise in the polls has been a delight to President Clinton and other DEMS.

NH will have to think long & hard about the choice they make but if I know my neighbors to the north, they have no more love for Newt than I. He is not the answer we need after suffering for the past three years under the lefty loon that is keeping the seat warm at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Sorry Union Leader, you whiffed on this one.

If the Union Leader thinks Newt Gingrich is the "answer", it must have been a pretty dumb question they were asked.

Union Leader endorses Gingrich
By MAGGIE HABERMAN 11/27/11 Politico.com

The Manchester Union Leader, New Hampshire's most influential paper, picks Newt Gingrich as its candidate of choice in an editorial today (no link yet, but text provided by POLITICO's Ginger Gibson) across the top of the front page.

Key points in the endorsement, made by publisher Joe McQuaid:

America is at a crucial crossroads. It is not going to be enough to merely replace Barack Obama next year.

We are in critical need of the innovative, forward-looking strategy and positive leadership that Gingrich has shown he is capable of providing...

Readers of the Union Leader and Sunday News know that we don’t back candidates based on popularity polls or big-shot backers. We look for conservatives of courage and conviction who are independent- minded, grounded in their core beliefs about this nation and its people, and best equipped for the job.

We don’t have to agree with them on every issue. We would rather back someone with whom we may sometimes disagree than one who tells us what he thinks we want to hear.

Newt Gingrich is by no means the perfect candidate.

But Republican primary voters too often make the mistake of preferring an unattainable ideal to the best candidate who is actually running.

It's the most significant and impactful endorsement in the GOP race so far, and solidifies Gingrich's standing as the alternative to Romney as the race heads into the final pre-Iowa caucuses stretch.

The endorsement, of course, has no bearing on Gingrich in Iowa, and given the competition between the two states, is not likely to be a boost there.

Close observers of the Union Leader had assumed Gingrich as the likely choice when the paper's edit-heads said yesterday there would be an endorsement within the next 24 hours. It was never going to be Jon Huntsman, who despite working the state for months has been the subject of criticism by the editorial page.

Mitt Romney, however, who is ahead in the polls in a state where he has invested years campaign, had worked hard to court Union Leader officials. Reid Epstein took a memorable picture of Romney sitting next to McQuaid at a recent Manchester event, in stark contrast to Herman Cain, who had blown off the paper's editorial board meeting after his campaign couldn't agree with the paper on the length of the interview.

Romney has assiduously courted the paper, and so it remains to be seen whether all that effort amounts to a lessening of the editorial page's boosting of Gingrich (and any negativity about Romney), especially after 2007, when the paper endorsement McCain and was sharply critical of the former neighbor state governor.

The best outcome for Romney would have been an endorsement, but the second-best would be a bit of restraint in the paper's approach to him

The Search for the " Anti-Romney"...Is Rep. Michelle Bachmann the answer the GOP is looking for???

Type in " Anti Obama" into Google and you will get "About 209,000,000 results" - That number almost looks too small based on the people who have issues with the President. No big surprise that people have issues with POTUS

Go to Google and type in the words " Anti Romney " - you will get "About 11,500,000 results" - I wonder why that many hits register about ROMNEY?

Here's the main issues as I see it. He has been trying to get to the Presidency since he first was elected Governor of Massachusetts. He used Masschusetts as a "stepping stone" as he was an absentee Governor for the last two years of his term, spending the majority of that time away from Massachusetts trying to raise cash and national credentials which got him nowhere when he ran for the Presidency in 2008. People saw through his flip-flopping and pandering ways. He would say anything and seemed terribly DESPERATE....He still does as he has this, " C'Mon, it's my turn" attitude about running for the GOP nomination....ugh. The fact that he has more money than anyone else reeks of an attitude that he can buy his way into the Presidency.

Now, we are in 2012, and " Slick MITT " is back at it again. I fail to understand why he didn't get the message last time. The GOP cannot keep running on being the " Old Rich Guys Party". The younger voters were the ones who propelled Obama into office along with the independent voters who swing the key middle.

The GOP will need someone who can energize these key voting blocks, something new that allows them to get people's attention. Pawlenty, Hunstman, Rick Perry, etc. all reek of the same bland politician model that has been the hallmark of the GOP.

So we go back to the central issue, who will be out there for the GOP against Obama ?

The choices have not been stirring up much interest until recently. For reasons that defy political reason, Rep. Michelle Bachman has been gaining some serious traction.

She's the Tea Party's Belladonna and that has ensured that the press painted her as a lightweight until now when polling has shown here breaking out and going neck & neck with Slick Mitt in Iowa. She did well in the NH debate and was the other candidate who got a significant reaction from potential NH voters.

Is she to be taken serious??? She has been a gaffe prone as Romney but when you think about it, the GOP would shake up the electoral game by throwing a female candidate at our first minority President running for re-election.

Politics has a funny way of defying the "knowns" and heading off in unexpected directions. In the search for the Anti-Romney, it may be that Ms. Bachmann is the very thing the GOP needs. She's not Palin either as Ms. Palin has high negatives.

Would Ms. Bachmann make a good President ?? That will be the question that will drive the campaign to nomination or runner-up status for the nomination. All I Know is that right now, SLICK MITT seems like " more of the same" from the GOP. That is a recipe for disaster and a sure lock for re-election of the "Empty Suit" from Chicago....something no one needs.

Bachmann on 'Face the Nation': Two Signs She is Serious
By James Fallows Jun 26 2011 - The Atlantic

The two takeaways from this morning's show (via notes written 12+ hours ago -- have been in transit in the interim):

1) She looks so much better than she used to. Compare her appearance from a famous Hardball spot during the 2008 campaign with her presentation today. (The Hardball episode was famous because it was when she called Obama "very anti-American.")

Is this a retrograde sexist judgment? Overall presentation matters in politics, especially at the TV-based national level. It mattered that JFK looked better than Nixon in 1960, Reagan than Carter in 1980, Obama than McCain in 2008. It mattered that Dukakis looked the way he did in a tank in 1988. The change in Bachmann's presentation -- hair, makeup, styling in general -- tells me that she has thought about "raising her game," and in a much more sophisticated way than what we see in the evolution of Sarah Palin's appearance through that same period.

2) She showed that she is an absolute genius at the established political technique of "giving the answer you want to give, no matter what the question was." Schieffer reeled off a list of whopper-scale false claims she had made -- for instance, that Obama had approved "only one" offshore drilling permit, when in fact he'd approved hundreds. Her response, every time, was some variant on "the real question is why President Obama has misled us." Or, on policy: what specifically would she do to create jobs? "The real question is why President Obama has failed to create jobs." See for yourself from CBS's site.

I am not endorsing this as the ideal way to lead a public discourse, and you can't get away with it forever. (Schieffer closed the show with a manful for-the-record note that he had tried time and again to get answers to his questions about her falsehoods, and hadn't.) If you have only this one trick in your array of responses, eventually this will be what the press constantly harps on. But it is a part of a big-time politician's arsenal, and she showed that she knows how to use it.

When I say these are signs that she is serious, I don't mean that by my lights she suddenly has practical, plausible answers to the nation's problems. It means that her run could be more disciplined and professional than some other ill-starred long-shot campaigns we've seen recently.