COMMENTARY | The harassment of presidential candidates through heckling and the asking of embarrassing questions is more frequent during the 2012 New Hampshire primary than it was in 2008 or other past primaries I have witnessed. I saw Mitt Romney being lambasted by an Occupy Wall Street activist and a Chinese-American woman fed up with Reaganomics and perceived racism at his Dec. 4 appearance at Manchester's Central High, the day after he won the Iowa caucus. Romney was endorsed by John McCain at the event.
In a piece in Politico, Roger Simon called the Central High rally "the event from hell. Or from heck, since Mitt Romney does not use words like hell." Simon scolded Romney for picking out people, during the question and answer period, from the front rows who turned out to have an animus against him.
Simon said he was sitting next to a woman with a dozen printed questions, ready to interrogate Romney, and sure enough, he called on her and she hit him with a hostile inquiry. The event had been very carefully planned by Romney's crack advance team, yet -- Simon said -- it became a disaster.
"Things like this happen to low-rent, seat-of-the-pants, run-of-the-mill campaigns," not to Mitt Romney.
I did not think the Central High rally was all that contentious and believe Romney handled the hostile questioners with aplomb. It was a different story altogether at Rick Santorum's campaign stop at the Belmont Hall and Restaurant in a working class neighborhood of Manchester.
This was the epitome of a the "low-rent, seat-of-the-pants, run-of-the-mill [campaign]."
In contrast to Romney's advance team, one overworked advance man tried to prepare the small restaurant, which had set up 75 seats in its banquet room. By the time Santorum was due, the place was packed with 200 people. The fire marshal announced the limit was 100, but people refused to leave. The event was shifted to the parking lot.
What the advance man didn't know was that OWS was rallying nearby and planned to picket the restaurant. Santorum was heckled by a gay activist and a Ron Paul libertarian before the OWS arrived, like the cavalry, towards the end.
As I sat on the ground in the parking lot near Santorum, I looked at the crowd and, sure enough, I saw a man with printed questions. And just like Simon's Central High gal, Santorum picked him and got his ears pinned back in a way that slick Mitt didn't.
The man called Santorum a hypocrite for trucking in anti-Washington talk while actually walking the inside-the-Beltway walk during and after his Senate career. He was chided for sending pork back to his state via earmarks. Santorum claimed he eventually turned against earmarks, but inexplicably let the man keep questioning him.
He then was grilled over specific instances of using the revolving door between government and business after leaving the Senate, accepting money and jobs from companies whom he did favors for as a Senator, including one company he had garnered an earmark for.
Santorum floundered as he defended himself, saying he had to feed his family, before being pulled away by his staff. It was political street theater at its most astounding.
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