Huntsman out, to endorse Romney: Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman is dropping out of the Republican presidential race. He’ll endorse Mitt Romney at an event in South Carolina at 11am ET. Huntsman’s third-place finish in New Hampshire was worse than he was hoping for, and he never got a bounce in South Carolina, with recent polls showing him way down in single digits. Why now? Huntsman’s exit now allows him to go out on the relatively high note of New Hampshire – as opposed to the drubbing he might have gotten had he stayed through South Carolina. And while Huntsman and Romney have a complicated relationship with a shared faith and lengthy family rivalry, the two candidates have plenty in common. And while a Huntsman endorsement doesn’t help Romney much in the polls, it does underscore the narrative that Republicans are now coalescing behind Romney.
Except the Evangelicals… Top leaders of the Christian right met in Texas over the weekend with the goal of getting behind one of the conservative candidates in the interest of stopping Mitt Romney. The horse they chose? Rick Santorum — a Northeastern Roman Catholic. Will South Carolina’s Evangelicals agree with the choice?
A new national poll has Pres. Obama and Romney in a statistical dead heat nationally. Fox News finds Obama at 46 and Romney at 45.
Check out Newt Gingrich attacking Mitt Romney for knowing how to speak French. I guess knowing a foreign language is a deal-breaker to some Republicans. Finally, today we remember Dr. Martin Luther King, who gave everything for his dream of a more equal society. msnbc Political Analyst and Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene Robinson imagines Dr. King if he were alive today: “He would be an elder statesman now, a lion in winter, an American hero perhaps impatient with the fuss being made over his birthday. At 83, he’d likely still have his wits and his voice. Surely, if he were able, he would continue to preach, to pray — and to dream.”
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