Romney’s missing rival

I’m talking about presumptive candidate Jon Huntsman, who wasn’t on the stage at Saint Anselm College.

Here’s why it was a good night for him: With Romney holding a strong advantage in New Hampshire, the big question has been, who will emerge as his principal rival?

No one made much headway there. Instead, the evening’s storyline was mostly Mitt and the Munchkins.

Crisp and confident throughout the night, Romney looked like a knowledgeable national candidate. The other six seemed like niche candidates vying for a toehold with a more-limited segment of the GOP electorate like the Tea Partiers or the social conservatives or the supply-siders.

It was a particularly bad night for Tim Pawlenty. On Sunday, the former Minnesota governor had raised expectations that he would go after Romney by describing the federal health care law as “ObamneyCare.’’ But asked about his remarks with Romney there on stage, T-Paw was meek as a churchmouse.

Later, his team argued he’d had a good night because some of the early discussion had focused on his widely panned economic plan, which assumes a decade (!) of 5 percent average annual economic growth, something virtually unheard of in the modern era. No one else wanted to wander explicitly into the land of miracle growth. No one except Republican libertarian Ron Paul, that is. “Free markets will give you 10 percent or 15 percent growth,’’ he insisted. (We have 15 percent. Do I hear 20 percent?) Still, Pawlenty spinmeister Nick Ayers seemed happy that Romney had given his boss a verbal pat on the head by agreeing with him that Obama’s economic remedies have slowed growth. As to Pawlenty’s pie-in-the-sky assumptions, Ayers offered this finely tuned economic argument: “We didn’t go to the moon until we did. We didn’t win World War II until we did.’’

Speaking of the moon, Newt Gingrich asserted that if we had just turned the space program over to the private sector, we’d now have a permanent space station there as well as three or four others around the universe. On the other hand, if that program had taken after Gingrich’s campaign, it would only have gotten 10 feet off the ground before crashing spectacularly back on the launching pad.