“From The Pitiful To The Ludicrous”: The Bad Advice Stage Of The GOP Presidential Primary
The Republican primary has now reached that dread phase where we are required to feign interest in Mitt Romney’s victory in Puerto Rico — amongst voters who will not vote this November unless they catch a plane to Orlando — and to wonder whether Rick Santorum can repeat his Missouri victory in the delegate-awarding reenactment of that state’s nominating contest. Yawn.
But there is one bonus: with Romney struggling to close out the nomination against candidates who are having trouble getting on the ballot even in their home states, we get to see people of all sorts offering him advice that ranges from the pitiful to the ludicrous. First, there was Maggie Haberman’s advice to Romney last week in Politico, urging him to drop his blatant pandering in the South for a more ironic approach:
Change will take some measure of discipline, but it’s something Romney can pull off. For example, instead of a joke about grits, Romney could relate more easily to voters if he joked about being from southern Michigan.
Ba-da-bum. And then in Saturday’s Washington Post, Philip Rucker extracted this gem from religious-right leader Richard Land:
Among those being courted [by Romney] is Richard Land, a longtime leader of the Southern Baptist Convention. As a practice, Land said, he does not endorse political candidates, but he is considered a powerful barometer of the evangelical community.
Land said that after a private dinner with Romney last year at Acadiana, a Washington restaurant, Romney’s advisers have been in regular touch. Land said he recently told them that Romney could win over recalcitrant conservatives by picking Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) as his vice presidential running mate and previewing a few Cabinet selections: Santorum as attorney general, Gingrich as ambassador to the United Nations and John Bolton as secretary of state.
Ah yes. Condom confiscation at CVS stores by federal marshals, and Newt and Bolton tag-teaming our Iran diplomacy. That’ll do the trick, Mitt!
By: Alex MacGillis, The New Republic, March 19, 2012
“Totally Unleashed”: Newt Gingrich, Agent of Chaos
Liberated from the fiction of actually trying to become president, Gingrich has become his truest self — a gleeful saboteur.
If there’s one thing we know about Newt Gingrich, it’s that he is a visionary. We know this because he tells us so, over and over again.
Even Gingrich, however, cannot quite envision a future in which he becomes the 2012 Republican nominee by securing a majority of delegates in advance of the convention this August. Instead, he has an altogether more revolutionary plan, as he told Greta Van Susteren on Wednesday:
I think it’s very possible we’re going to be at the end of all the primaries on June 26 and have nobody at 1,144.
And then we’re going to have a conversation about who would be the best person to defeat Barack Obama, and equally important, who’d be the best person to solve America’s problems and to move us in the right direction.
So next week in Louisiana is only half-time. We literally have half of all the delegates left to come. And I think we’ll keep picking up delegates. It’s a three-way race, I think, at the present time. I’m third among the three, but we’re continuing to campaign, continuing to develop ideas. And I have a hunch that just as has happened in the past, the more we watch Romney and Santorum fight, the more attractive I’ll look and the more I will regain strength as people look at my solutions, rather than politics as usual.
I don’t pretend to be a traditional politician. I’m somebody who wants to really have very large-scale change in Washington.
In various reports, Gingrich and his supporters continue to insist that he has no plans to quit the race. “I don’t care,” he said in another Fox interview Tuesday, in response to the question of whether he felt pressure to leave.
There has been much analysis of whether Gingrich remaining in the race helps Mitt Romney (by taking votes away from Rick Santorum) or, rather, helps Santorum (by taking delegates off the table and making it harder for Romney to get to the magic number of 1,144). I am agnostic on that question, though I tend to think Santorum overestimates his chances in a one-on-one with Romney.
But there is something frankly delightful, to coin a phrase, about seeing Gingrich totally unleashed in this way. No longer must he maintain the thin fiction of running a campaign with the actual, realistic goal of becoming president. He is free to act as a pure agent of chaos.
By: Molly Ball, The Atlantic, March 15, 2012
“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
“A Campaign Of Denial”: Mitt Romney Meets “Peasants With Pitchforks”
Political revolutions leave chaos in their wake. Republicans cannot shut down their presidential nominating contest just because the party is in the midst of an upheaval wrought by the growing dominance of its right wing, its unresolved attitudes toward George W. Bush’s presidency, and the terror that the GOP rank and file has stirred among the more moderately conservative politicians who once ran things.
When Pat Buchanan ran for president in the 1990s, the conservative commentator lovingly referred to his partisans as “peasants with pitchforks.” The pitchfork brigade now enjoys more power in Republican politics than even Buchanan thought possible.
Mitt Romney is still the Republican front-runner by virtue of the delegates he relentlessly piles up. But Romney keeps failing to bring this slugfest to a close. No matter how much he panders and grovels to the party’s right, its supporters will never see him as one of their own.
One senses that the conservative ultras are resigned to having to vote for Romney in November against President Obama. They are determined not to vote for him twice, using the primaries to give voice to their hearts and their guts. They will keep signaling their refusal to surrender to the Romney machine with its torrent of nasty advertisements and its continuing education courses in delegate math designed to prove that resistance is futile.
The more they are told this, the more they want to resist.
Rick Santorum is a superb vehicle for this cry of protest. He is articulate but unpolished. He has pitifully few resources compared with the vast treasury at Romney’s disposal, but this only feeds Santorum’s David narrative against the Goliath that is Team Romney.
Santorum’s purity as a social and religious conservative is unrivaled, and his traditional family life — he’s always surrounded on primary nights by a passel of kids — contrasts nicely with Newt Gingrich’s rather messy personal history. It is no accident that, while Gingrich narrowly carried the ballots of men in Tuesday’s Alabama and Mississippi primaries, he was routed among Republican women who were decisive in Santorum’s twin triumphs. It was the conservative version of the personal being the political.
And while Republicans shout to the heavens against class warfare, they are as affected as anyone by the old Jacksonian mistrust of the privileged whose football knowledge comes not from experience or ESPN but from their friendship with the owners of NFL franchises. In Mississippi and Alabama, Romney again prevailed among those with postgraduate educations and incomes of more than $100,000 a year. He was defeated by those with less money and fewer years in school.
The revolt of the right-wing masses means that Romney stands alone as the less than ideal representative of a relatively restrained brand of conservatism. The growing might of the conservative hard core, reflected in its primary victories in 2010, led other potential establishmentarians to sit out the race in the hope that the storm will eventually pass.
But having decided to run, Romney must wage a campaign of denial. He buries his old Massachusetts self and misleads about what he once believed. He even tries to run to Santorum’s right. Recently, he denounced Santorum for voting in favor of federal support for Planned Parenthood, a group to which Romney’s family once made a donation. It is an unseemly spectacle.
Bush’s efforts to craft a “compassionate conservatism” friendlier toward those in the political middle collapsed into ruins years ago. This year’s Republican candidates almost never speak Bush’s name. It is to Santorum’s discredit that he did not dare defend his perfectly defensible vote in favor of Bush’s No Child Left Behind education program. Santorum, too, fears the pitchforks wielded by those who see any exertion of federal authority as leading down a road to serfdom.
And so it is on to Illinois, the next place Romney has to win to keep the resistance at bay. The Land of Lincoln would be a fine setting for a stand in favor of a more measured form of conservatism. But it won’t happen. Romney is anxious about the power of the Republican right in downstate Illinois — the very region that opposed Honest Abe in his celebrated Senate race 154 years ago.
Once again, Romney will take the moderates for granted, ignoring the last remnants of the old Lincoln party as he chases after an elusive right. And once again, Santorum’s battle cry will challenge conservatives to have the courage to complete the revolution they started the day Barack Obama took office.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 14, 2012
“Keeping Things In Tumult”: Newt Gingrich Is Mitt Romney’s Secret Weapon
For someone who thinks the “elite media” has “anointed” Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich is doing a pretty good job of helping the former Massachusetts governor get the nomination.
Gingrich, a former House Speaker, has virtually no real hope of amassing the number of delegates needed to sew up the GOP nomination ahead of the convention in Tampa. His only chance is to keep things so in tumult that the party doesn’t know what to do, and then—well, anoints Gingrich at the convention. But staying in the race is arguably having the opposite effect, since Gingrich’s presence in the race serves largely to divide the anti-Romney vote. That deprives former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum of delegates in many states, especially southern states where evangelicals and social conservatives are wary of Romney. Santorum won both Mississippi and Alabama, with Gingrich second and Romney a close third in both states. But if Gingrich hadn’t been in the race, it’s likely that the votes—and the delegates proportionately assigned—would have gone to Santorum.
Santorum, too, is highly unlikely to get the delegates needed to secure the nomination. But if he was established as the single, conservative alternative to Romney, he’d be picking up more votes and delegates. And the more he gets, the more he can try to convince people that Romney’s biggest political asset—his electability—is not unique to him in the field.
It’s frustrating for candidates when the media calls someone a “front-runner” early on, because it makes it harder for so-called back-benchers to get taken seriously. It’s particularly irritating when the moniker is assigned before a single vote is cast. Hillary Clinton, for example, was deemed the “front-runner” for the Democratic nomination in 2008 even before a single primary was held. The determination was based on early polls, which themselves were driven a good deal by name recognition. But Barack Obama overcame early expectations and won both the nomination and the presidency.
Gingrich, perhaps, had a legitimate gripe about the way his chances were described last year—though staff exoduses and bad judgment (that Tiffany’s revolving line of credit? The luxury cruise vacation in the middle of a campaign?) had something to do with it, too. But Republicans are now halfway through their primary campaign, and Gingrich has won only two states—his home state of Georgia and the neighboring state of South Carolina. That’s not the fault of an “elite media” bent on nominating Romney. That’s what GOP voters are deciding.
Gingrich seems to want to stay in the race, and as long as he can do so financially, why not? But if he doesn’t make it, he should look at the primary results—not the newspapers.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, March 14, 2012
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