KCCI confirmed Tuesday that some Iowa Republicans have received automated phone calls from Sarah Pac, governor Palin’s political action committee.

The calls asked Iowans several questions including whether they have a favorable opinion of Palin.

Some Iowans received the calls over the weekend as did some voters in New Hampshire.

Have a look at the results from New Hampshire last night. The Great Reagan-like Hope was decisively in seventh place in New Hampshre.  In fact, “Total Write-Ins” got 1,300 votes more than the wise-cracking actor who once played a senator on C-SPAN2.

That means instead of voting for Fred Thompson, more of New Hampshire’s discerning primary voters were interested in writing in some random candidate for president like Tinky Winky, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, or perhaps even Democratic candidates selected by Republican voters who didn’t want to change their registration.

Just you wait for South Carolina. It’s all going to turn around in South Carolina his people insist. But if you look in the latest polls, he’s not even registering.

So please please please help Fred fill up the red truck.

Seriously, isn’t it a little scary that his campaign would think it’s a good idea to even engage in visual metaphors that hint that the vessel of the campaign is running out of gas? When you look at the latest fundraising appeal, it appears that Thompson is working out of his home, maybe because paying the rent on a campaign office can’t compete with rising gas prices, and he’s going to have to do a lot of driving around the Palmetto State if he’s going to be able to convince the state’s voters to choose him over Total Write-Ins.

I’m told the exit polls indicate voters didn’t like Mitt Romney’s ads, thought he went too negative. New Hampshire didn’t have the “play nice” attitude that Iowa had, but I wonder if Romney stood out a little too much with his contrast ads, compared to everyone else.

Meanwhile, Romney says he’s “gotten two silvers and one gold…. thank you Wyoming.” He seems remarkably chipper, considering.

Update: Romney plays the change card – his first point: voters “have heard Washington say they’re going to change immigration, but they haven’t.” Wonder who that was aimed at?

For results:

The Concord Monitor

WMUR 9 New Hampshire

CNN

ABC

MSNBC

(UPDATE by Dave) So NBC has called it for McCain. Let me be contrarian and say that this is good news for Mike Huckabee. Romney is fatally wounded (sorry, Tagg!) and the road to the nomination still goes through South Carolina, where Huckabee is 20 points up and didn’t hurt himself tonight. Plus Huckabee is leading in Florida and Giuliani is back in fourth (and anyway, Giuliani’s done; he actually competed in New Hampshire and got crushed). I still think Huckabee’s the money bet.

The next big fight is in South Carolina. And two new polls out today (Rasmussen and SurveyUSA) show Huckabee in a dominant position in the state. So Huckabee looks likely to take Secessionville with either McCain or Romney coming in second.

At that point you’ll have to say that Huckabee, who the GOP establishment is roundly against, is the frontrunner in the campaign. And the others are going to coalesce around an anti-Huckabee candidate. It’s not clear to me that McCain is a shoe-in for that role.

McCain is, for the most part, just another right-wing Republican. But his tentative heresies on issues like campaign finance, global warming, and immigration are still a problem in his relationship with the GOP establishment. That establishment, while hardly united behind any single candidate, has generally expressed a good deal more interest in candidates like Romney, Giuliani, and even Fred Thompson. There may be voter movement behind McCain right now – but the whole point of being an establishment is that you don’t want the voters to ruin everything by deciding these things for themselves.

It may or may not be in the GOP establishment’s power to make the decision, at this late date, as to who will be the anti-Huckabee. But they’ll try, and there’s no particular reason to believe that they’ll try to make it McCain.

In Iowa, it’s going to be Romney by a nose with Huckabee right behind him, and McCain not too far off, but a decisive third.  And it’s going to shake out a similar way in New Hampshire, with Romney taking it, but McCain not far behind him again.

Based on this prediction, you might conclude that I think Romney is going to run away with the nomination, but that’s uncertain.  What is certain that after a pair of “first in the nation” contests that prove indecisive, Iowa and New Hampshire, at least on the GOP side, will prove they’re no longer the testing grounds of presidential politics.  States like Wyoming, Florida, and Michigan are already in full-on revolt against the current primary system, and the chorus they are building will only get louder after 2008.  With a pair of narrow margins of victory for one candidate in the two states, Iowans and New Hampshireans will show that they are just as conflicted about the candidates as the rest of the country, and not the decisive, sound-minded judges of political character that we have assumed them to be.

But don’t take my word for it, look at what the campaigns themselves are doing.  The most recent evidence is the anti-Mormon smear campaign against Mitt Romney in South Carolina uncovered by CNN.  They reported yesterday on the phony holiday greeting sent to South Carolinians by “the Romney family” that plays up the Mormon faith’s history of polygamy.

What the tactic says is that while we’re a couple of weeks out from South Carolina, the campaigns are convinced that there will be no decisive victory in the Hawkeye or the Granite States for the Republican field.  It’s going to be a bruising two months, especially for the Republicans, and the winner is going to have to marshal limited momentum into deft organization as February’s “national primary” day speeds forward like a mack truck.  While it’s going to be fun to watch, it’ll be bad for those Iowa and New Hampshire power brokers grasping to hold onto their current positions.

Tomorrow, you may remember, is the deadline to vote for Yankee Magazine’s cookie primary.  And which candidate’s recipe is the winner?  Oh, you didn’t have to think about that one too hard, did you?

Because with just shy of 10,000 votes on the night of December 13, Carol Paul’s Apricot-Coconut Balls have received 93% of the vote!  The Cookie Monster, between stuffing Mrs. Paul’s balls in his mouth, was apparently stuffing the cookie primary ballot box, too. As goes Mrs. Paul’s balls, so goes the nation?

Alas, while the Paul fans may be gearing up for their cookie party, they can’t declare decisive victory yet.  We’ll have to leave that to our panel of expert tasters at Southern New Hampshire University who will be like a small caucus of voters themselves.

In the meanwhile, for those of you who will fix every online Ron Paul-related vote that you can, just remember not to eat too many of Mrs. Paul’s balls or you’ll turn into a blimp.

So as McCain sees glimmers of hope for a resurgence in New Hampshire, there are few better symbols of inspiration for him to call on than Curt Schilling, a key member of the Boston Red Sox’s unprecedented 2004 comeback from a 3-0 hole against the New York Yankees.

Schilling, who knows McCain from his days playing for the Arizona Diamondbacks, joined him at a prep school here last night to praise the Republican senator before a packed auditorium. Endorsements carry only so much weight in politics, and ones by sports figures probably even less than others, but the Red Sox brand is not a bad one for a New Hampshire candidate to be associated with these days, and at the very least, Schilling’s presence probably drew an extra hundred or two residents to see McCain — most of them even over voting age.

Of course, McCain is about to reach his own personal 86-year drought without reaching the White House, so having a Red Sox pitcher join him on that quest seems apt.

This was my favorite comment on Schilling’s blog post endorsing McCain.

Why does everybody kiss up to this guy as far as his political intelligence goes? All he knows how to do is throw a baseball. He isn’t always good at that.

And, shock of shocks, Rep. Ron Paul so far appears to be the winner – if you go by the ratings at the website to date. There isn’t a single rating for any of the candidates’ recipes, but for Mrs. Paul’s Apricot Coconut Balls, 99% said they would make the recipe again, and an anonymous commenter said, “This was so easy! A great recipe that the kids can help with!”

But if Mrs. Paul’s recipe doesn’t win in New Hampshire next month, count on Paul’s supporters to claim that the panel was biased because the culinary student who baked it didn’t use enough condensed milk.

Meanwhile, amateur gender studies specialist and fulltime journalist Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times points out an interesting trend. While Democratic male contributors were mixed on whether or not the recipe they offered was their own, or just their wife’s/grandmother’s, not a single Republican candidate indicated that he baked these cookies himself.

But I’m sure they all like to lick the bowl.

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s image as 9/11 mayor took a double hit Monday as he lost a key endorsement from the Sept. 11 commission chair to a rival, and New York firefighters and families of victims of the terrorist attacks took their campaign against him to New Hampshire.

Tom Kean, chair of the 9/11 Commission — and a Republican for Rudy’s neighboring state of New Jersey — kicked another hole in the 9iu11iani story yesterday, endorsing John McCain for president. “To the extent that we’ve been less vulnerable to attacks that we suffered on 9/11, it’s in a large part due to the extraordinary leadership of John McCain,” said Kean.

The idea that McCain has singlehandedly kept America safe for the last six years is almost as laughable as the notion that Rudy Giuliani is in some way qualified to be commander in chief because he happened to be around during the World Trade Center attack, but if Rudy can’t lock up the 9/11 commissioner — who is, again, from New Jersey — it just doesn’t look good at all.

Adding to his woes, the firefighters who have been going after Rudy for some time now, over what they consider to be his failures before, on and after 9/11, are thinking about forming a 527. They held a town hall yesterday in New Hampshire, reporting that voters were “shocked” by what they had to say.

In the hypothetical Giuliani vs. Clinton matchup, we keep hearing about Hillary’s high negatives and Rudy’s high positives. What we hear much less often — and this is not meant as an endorsement of Hillary — is that her numbers really have nowhere to go but up. And Rudy’s, as we’re learning, have nowhere to go but down.