“No Acclamation For Mitt”: GOP Convention Floor Fight Starting To Look More Likely
Is it time to take the Republican convention seriously as a potential battleground?
Republicans should know better by now. Their still-putative nominee, Mitt Romney, lacks the conservative support to capture the kind of expectations-exceeding primary win necessary to capsize underfunded but motivated rivals Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.
Romney didn’t do it in South Carolina, Colorado, or Tennessee. He proved unable once again Tuesday to claim victory in a state, Mississippi, that seemed tantalizingly within reach.
The months-long trend makes clear Romney will have to win the GOP nomination with math, not acclamation, steadily accumulating enough delegates in friendly contests until he reaches the nomination-clinching number of 1,144. But that path is fraught with risk. There is always the chance that he’ll fall just short of the magic number, which raises the possibility of a contested convention this August in Tampa.
The notion was mocked by many a month ago but now seems increasingly likely. “After last night, you have to start think it’s possible,'” said Republican political consultant Curt Anderson, a former political director of the Republican National Committee who advised Rick Perry before he quit the race. “It seems more possible than before, that’s for sure.” The Santorum and Gingrich campaigns are each eagerly embracing that very scenario.
In a memo released this week, the Santorum campaign argued that some delegates ostensibly pledged to Romney would switch to the onetime U.S. senator if Romney fails to win on the first ballot at the convention. Combined with a difficult remaining schedule for Romney, that dynamic ensures Romney won’t acquire enough delegates, the Santorum campaign contends.
“The reality is simple: The Romney math doesn’t add up, and he will have a very difficult time ever getting to a majority of the delegates,” the memo said. “The situation is only going to get worse for them and better for Rick Santorum as time passes. Simply put, time is on our side.”
That sentiment was echoed by Gingrich supporters, including Rick Tyler, an official with the Gingrich-allied super PAC Winning Our Future. “We’re in a position now where convention delegates are going to decide who nominee is,” Tyler told National Journal.
Whether Gingrich will be at the convention seems like more of an open question, even as the candidate himself vowed Tuesday night to make his case all the way to Tampa. “Because this is proportional representation, we’re going to leave Alabama and Mississippi with a substantial number of delegates, increasing our total going towards Tampa,” he said. “We’re going to take a much bigger delegation than we had yesterday.”
The former House speaker’s political base was supposed to reside in the Deep South, but the twin disappointments of Alabama and Mississippi will increase calls from some conservatives for him to step aside to let Santorum battle Romney one-on-one.
Gingrich’s viability could depend on his super PAC, which, with the benefit of multimillion dollar donations from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has kept him visible on TV and radio. Whether those funds will continue to flow to and from the outside group remains unclear — Tyler declined to comment. He did concede, however, that Gingrich had missed a chance Tuesday to “change the narrative.” He added, “That doesn’t mean it won’t change tomorrow.”
Tyler said Santorum, whose campaign has urged Gingrich to quit the race, actually would benefit from Gingrich sticking with it — that way, the two men can work together to gobble up enough delegates to prevent Romney from reaching 1,144 of them. As Gingrich put it Tuesday night, “the conservative candidates” (meaning himself and Santorum) “got nearly 70 percent of the vote” in Alabama and Mississippi.
The Romney campaign pointed out that despite the disappointing returns in the South, it still increased its delegate lead thanks to victories in Hawaii and American Samoa. The Associated Press delegate count Wednesday put Romney at 495. Santorum had 252 and Gingrich had 131 — well behind Romney even when added together.
“Our goal was to come in, take a third of the delegates,” Romney senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said in an interview with CNN. “We’ll do that, and once the dust clears, you’ll be able to look and see that there really will be no ground that our opponents have made up against Mitt Romney, and as you look at the upcoming contest on the calendar, there are no opportunities for them to have significant wins that allow them to accumulate large numbers of delegates so they can close the gap with Mitt Romney.”
It may not be inspirational, and it may not prevent drama at the convention, but it’s a plan.
By: Alex Roarty, The Atlantic, March 14, 2012
“Let My People Vote”: David Axelrod To Republicans On Election Engineering
Barack Obama’s former right-hand man accused Republicans of passing laws to shut out Democrats from voting in the next presidential election. “There’s no doubt that Republican legislatures and governors across this country have made an attempt to try to win the elections in 2012 and 2011 by passing laws that are restrictive, that are meant to discourage participation, particularly by key constituencies that have voted Democratic in the past,” said David Axelrod, former White House official and current senior advisor to the Obama campaign.
The comments were made in an online Q&A following the premiere of “The Road We Traveled,” a 17-minute film directed by David Guggenheim and produced by the Obama campaign. Questions were submitted over Twitter, and the topics ranged from how the president will handle Iran to whether Axelrod ever got in arguments with fellow senior advisor David Plouffe. The final question posed to Axelrod was about the string of laws Republican state legislatures have passed over the past year that will restrict access to the ballot in the name of combating voter fraud.
“The bottom line is we’re going to have to fight this in every state,” he said, “with every set of rules through organization, through commitment on the part of the campaign but also on individuals to find out exactly what the rules are in their state.” Axelrod and fellow Obama staffer Mitch Stewart then touted GottaRegister, a website started by the Democratic National Committee that helps voters register and navigate their local voting laws.
Seven states have passed strict voter ID laws since the 2010 midterm elections, though some of those have been held up after objections from the Department of Justice.
Immediately after taking power, newly elected Republican majorities in state legislatures rushed to combat voter fraud, a constant fear among the conservative base. But research has shown that these laws—and other restrictive voting measures such as repealing same-day registration or cutbacks on early voting—will make it incredibly difficult for certain groups of citizens to cast a ballot: senior citizens, racial minorities, the poor, and the young.
Republicans claim that it is just a coincidence that these groups targeted by the bill happen to vote consistently for Democrats. But Axelrod didn’t mince words about Republicans’ intentions. “We’re going to thwart this cynical attempt to depress voter turnout,” he said in the video. “The difference between our party and their party is we’d be comfortable if every single American who was qualified to vote did vote. We think that’d be a great thing for this country.”
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, March 16, 2012
“A Lying Candidate Will Be A Lying President”: More On Mitt Romney’s Lies
Is Mitt Romney a guy who tells a bunch of lies, or is he a liar? That the question Jonathan Chait asks, and he winds up sort-of defending Romney, saying that his lies, many of which revolve around his effort to deny his own history, have been practical in nature. “It’s Romney’s bad luck that fate has dictated his only path to the presidency lies in being a huge liar,” Chait says, so those lies don’t tell us much about what’s deep in Romney’s character.
There are two problems here. The first is that Romney lies about President Obama as often as he lies about himself. It’s just that when he does the former, he does it with actual squirming (if he’s sitting down), the phoniest smile you’ve ever seen, and panic in his eyes, so it’s really obvious. The second problem is that Chait’s distinction applies to pretty much every political liar in history. There’s always a reason why a politician lies. The biggest lies come when they get caught doing something they shouldn’t have (Nixon with Watergate, Reagan with Iran-Contra, Clinton with Monica Lewinsky). They might be telling themselves, “Taking responsibility is all well and good, but it’s better for the country if I get out of this scandal and continue with my duties.”
In fact, saving one’s own skin, whether from scandal or the displeasure of the party base, is a near-universal motivation for politicians’ lies. In Romney’s case, what he got caught doing wasn’t trading arms for hostages or getting serviced by a young intern, but supporting abortion rights and health care reform, which to the people whose votes he’s now seeking are sins even more deplorable. I’d argue that Romney’s lies about Obama (see here for some ) are the worse ones, because it wasn’t like some reporter backed him into a corner and he was grasping at straws to keep primary voters from hating him. He could make a critique of Obama that’s just as persuasive without making things up, but he chooses not to, fairly regularly.
So is there a real meaningful difference between a politician who’s a liar, and a politician who tells many lies? No—or, at least, none that will matter to us as citizens. Experience tells us that a guy who lies as a candidate will not only tend to lie just as much as a president, but will probably lie about the same kinds of things. If he’s lying on the campaign trail about whether he has cheated on his wife, it’s a good bet he’ll end up telling us more lies about future cheating. If he’s lying on the campaign trail about what his tax plan contains, it’s a good be he’ll end up lying to us about his tax plan when he tries to pass it, as George W. Bush did.
So the really important thing to watch out for is the guy who tells lies about policy. Which would seem to apply fairly well to Mitt Romney, whatever happens to lie deep within his heart.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 15, 2012
“A Path To Second-Class Citizenship”: Marco Rubio Takes The Dream Out Of “DREAM Act”
Senator Marco Rubio missed the mark on the DREAM Act today when he said that he’d consider offering a path to legal status, but not citizenship, for undocumented students. As a Latino Republican, Rubio has been criticizedfor his stance against the DREAM Act, which in its original form would permit students who had completed high school and either gone to college or joined the military, a path to eventual citizenship.
During a radio interview with Geraldo Rivera today, Rubio teetered between defending his current opposition to the DREAM Act and trying to find a way to appease Latino voters who will prove an important demographic for Republicans during the election season. Rubio delved into his new position on the DREAM Act:
The DREAM Act, as it is currently structured, has a series of problems that not only denies it the support that it needs, but I think would be counterproductive to our goal of having a legal immigration system that works. … It could be expanded to millions of people, which is problematic. But I do think that there is another way to deal with this. And I think that one of the debates that we need to begin to have is there is a difference between citizenship and legalization. You can legalize someone’s status in this country with a significant amount of certainty about their future without placing them on a path toward citizenship. And I think that is something that we can find consensus on and it is one of the ways to address the issue of chain migration.
Rubio’s suggestion for a DREAM Act would mean that potentially millions of kids who grew up in the United States without the right papers would be forced to be non-voting residents of their home country. Rubio may be using the rhetoric of defending Latinos against right-wing attacks, but the Republican policies don’t play out well for Latinos, specifically on the DREAM Act. The Republican presidential candidates are running on extreme immigration policies, and it would take a lot for Latinos to regain trust in the party. Offering a path to second-class citizenship is not exactly the olive branch Latinos are looking for.
By: Annie-Rose Strasser, Think Progress, March 15, 2012
GOP: “We Don’t Consider Violence Against Women To Be An Important Issue”
The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is up for reauthorization this year, and for the first time since its original passage, it’s facing pushbackfrom Republicans.
Female senators are not happy about the sudden resistance to a usually uncontroversial bill. A few new provisions in VAWA add protections for undocumented people, the LGBT community, and Indian reservations, which have prompted a change of heart from anti-immigrant Republicans like Jeff Sessions, who said, “there are matters put on that bill that almost seem to invite opposition.”
In a Senate floor speech today, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) argued that our values should demand that everyone deserves protection from domestic abuse:
The bill includes lesbian and gay men. The bill includes undocumented immigrants who are victims of domestic abuse. The bill gives native American tribes authority to prosecute crimes. In my view, these are improvements. Domestic violence is domestic violence. I ask my friends on the other side: If the victim is in a same-sex relationship, is the violence any less real, is the danger any less real because you happen to be gay or lesbian? I don’t think so.
If a family comes to the country and the husband beats his wife to a bloody pulp, do we say, ‘Well you’re illegal, I’m sorry, you don’t deserve any protections’? 911 operators, police officers, don’t refuse to help a victim because of their sexual orientation or the country where they were born, or their immigration status. When you call the police in America, they come regardless of who you are.
Feinstein added, “To defeat this bill is almost to say ‘we don’t need to consider violence against women — it’s not an important issue.’ It is.” Indeed, with all the recent attacks focused around women’s issues, Feinstein had a larger suspicion about blockage of the bill: “I hope that this bill is not part of a march. And that march, as I see it, over the last 20 years, is to cut back on rights and services to women.” Watch it: http://youtu.be/2MyEPpl3AHY
In a show of general strength and support, the women of the Senate took to the floor today to fight for passage of the bill. Among the floor statements were both Democrats and Republicans, though no men spoke.
By: Annie-Rose Strasser, Think Progress, March 15, 2012
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