mitt romney – Page 16

Thoughts on the SC primary.

As mentioned earlier, I was kind of taking last night off, so this will be a little scatter-shot. Anyway:

Heh. Called it. Not that getting the order was all that hard, or even unsurprising; also note that I didn’t predict the percentages. By the way: the end results (Gingrich 40%, Romney 28%, Santorum 17%, Paul 13%) were pretty close to what PPP predicted (Gingrich 37%, Romney 28%, Santorum 16%, Paul 14%).
Sean Trende over at RCP has done a pretty good job explaining just how bad this night was for Mitt Romney.
I predict that we’ve heard the last of any suggestion, by the way, that Romney will skipping most or all of the remaining debates.
Most importantly: none of this suggests that Newt Gingrich is now the inevitable nominee. Just that Romney isn’t actually inevitable. But it’s going to be one of those two.
Florida is going to be epic next week. Nine days of (metaphorical) knife fights in alleys, because there’s some people out there who are scared for the first time in this campaign cycle. Hope everyone else is prepared for that, because it’s going to happen anyway.
Looking further at the schedule… Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan’s caucuses/primaries look like the results will be binding; Maine, Colorado, and Minnesota’s technically will not. Don’t expect that to be reported in the media.
If Romney doesn’t start winning primaries, the Super Tuesday narrative will have a disproportionate amount of space dedicated to the minor detail that the frontrunner is not on the ballot in Virginia. Fallout from that: if Romney wins the nomination then Bob McDonnell will not be his Vice Presidential pick.
Last but not least: if the Gingrich campaign is wondering what to send RedState in the way of a gift basket, I personally like those chocolate praline stick things. Although, honestly, I didn’t do the heavy lifting on this one.

#rsrh Further GOP debates: keep, or lose?

Ed Morrissey notes this Byron York article about how Mitt Romney would probably like to stop the debates now, please. This is my thinking on this.

On the one hand, I agree with Ed: we’ve had a godawful amount of debates so far. They’re exhausting to cover; I can only imagine how grinding they are to the people actually doing them. From Mitt Romney’s point of view, a debate must be much like how Tom Wolfe portrayed physical examinations as being for fighter pilots. Which is to say, the best that Romney can hope for in a debate right now is to not have a campaign-ending disaster.
On the other hand, I also agree with Ed: we’re actually starting to see things that look like debates, instead of an extended poking of Republican candidates with sticks to see whether they’ll attack the bars. Also, as Byron noted, the debates are popular (the ABC News poll had 6.25 million viewers).
And on the gripping hand: well, this is probably not a good time for Mitt Romney to quit debates anyway. Yesterday was… not optimal: Romney got punched hard by Santorum, frankly evaded his way through the question of whether he’d release his income tax statements, and spent most of the debate agreeing with Rick Perry. I would seriously recommend that Romney quit the debate schedule when he’s in a slightly better pole position.

I think that this is a reasonably fair take on the subject.

If Romney becomes the candidate, Obamacare is off the table.

Deal with it.

Andrew McCarthy of NRO puts his thumb squarely on one of the two central problems that I have with a Romney candidacy:

In 2008, Obamacare did not exist. In 2012, it vies with our astronomical national debt — to which it will prodigiously contribute — as the most crucial issue in the campaign. It is Obamacare’s trespass against the private economy and individual liberty that transformed the Tea Party into a mass movement, perhaps the most dynamic one electoral politics has seen in decades. And of all the Republican candidates, Romney is the weakest, the most compromised, when it comes to taking that fight to the president.

Continue reading If Romney becomes the candidate, Obamacare is off the table.

#rsrh QotD, Obama Sets A High Bar For Bad Economic Boasting Edition.

The New Yorker – yeah, I know, and believe me: they’re not being friendly to Romney on general principles – on Romney’s decision to go with a possibly semantically null ‘jobs created’ argument to justify his Bain experience:

Ironically, Romney has made a similar mistake to the one the Obama Administration made in early 2009, when two of Obama’s economists released a study with overly optimistic unemployment projections. Ever since then, critics have been able to point to that study as evidence that, if judged by Obama’s own standard, his stimulus has been a failure.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) The New Yorker is referring, of course, the infamous “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan:” the “two economists” were Christina Romer (former Chair of Council of Economic Advisers) and Jared Bernstein (former Chief Economist and Economic Policy Adviser for the Vice President). Arguably, Romer and Bernstein have the honor of being the first two individuals whose careers were sacrificed the benefit of President Obama: also, contra the New Yorker the administration was certainly happy enough to own said plan. Up until the moment that it became clear that it wasn’t even remotely going to work.

What does this have to do with Romney? Not much, except to note that if we’re going to compare goofy, meaningless economic statements the king of them is still going to be Barack Obama.

#rsrh Politics Ain’t Beanbag Watch, 01/12/2012.

If you’re wondering why various and sundry folks aren’t really too heart-broken about Mitt Romney being called a “vulture capitalist*,” it’s because of little things like this (via @GOP12):

As in so many other things, one of The Laws of the Playground applies here: Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it.

Moe Lane

Continue reading #rsrh Politics Ain’t Beanbag Watch, 01/12/2012.

#rsrh A more serious New Hampshire post.

First off, the RNC has the right idea here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2z-W6jk_XQ&feature=channel_video_title

Chairman Reince Priebus doesn’t want any part of this primary, and I think that we can all agree that this is a quite refreshing development, yes? Continue reading #rsrh A more serious New Hampshire post.

NH Romney surrogate tells us to settle for his candidate.

Via CNS (via Hot Air) comes this ‘argument’ from NH Romney supporter and state Senator Gary Lambert. To summarize it, Lambert wants us all to sit down, shut up, and endorse Romney despite the fact that Lambert himself is tacitly conceding that Romney does not share conservatives’ principles and beliefs.

No, really. Continue reading NH Romney surrogate tells us to settle for his candidate.

VA AG Ken Cuccinelli calls for primary ballot reform, write-in option.

This just keeps getting better and better for the Virginia GOP, doesn’t it? Via Ballot Access News, first we get the Attorney General for Virginia pointing out that the requirements for ballot access are far too restrictive:

I would throw out for consideration that we should lower our requirements to 100 legitimate signatures per congressional district.

Let’s face it, absent a serious write-in challenge from some other candidate, Virginia won’t be nearly as ‘fought over’ as it should be in the midst of such a wide open nomination contest. Our own laws have reduced our relevance. Sad.

…and suggesting that a write-in ballot is possible. Which, as a lot of people with perhaps vested interests in there not being any more candidates on the ballot would tell you, is: a, impossible; and b, so mind-bogglingly obviously impossible that anybody who suggests that such a thing would be possible would be as dumb as Newt Gingrich. Of course, some of the people who are most pushing the ‘dumb as Newt Gingrich’ bit are perhaps not entirely clear about Gingrich’s actual position:

“And we hope to launch a write-in campaign. We’re getting an amazing number of people who … believe Virginians ought to have the right to choose and shouldn’t be restricted to two people.”

When a reporter noted that state law prohibits write-in votes in Virginia primaries, Gingrich said: “There’s time for them to change it. If something’s wrong, they ought to fix it.”

Continue reading VA AG Ken Cuccinelli calls for primary ballot reform, write-in option.

Did the VA GOP change the rules on primary ballot access in November 2011?

Apparently, yes.

Richard Winger over at Ballot Access News has an EXTREMELY interesting post (link via here) on the mess that the Virginia Republican party has found itself in over… access to the ballot in Virginia. For those coming in late, background here and here: the very short version is that the VA GOP only certified Mitt Romney and Ron Paul for its primary ballot. Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich both had too many signatures tossed; Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum, and Michele Bachmann didn’t even try. Of the seven candidates, one (Romney) had more than enough signatures (15K) to bypass the verification process entirely. All of this has caused a lot of agitation among Republicans following the primary process, of course; and not just from people who disapprove of what the VA GOP has done. There has been a good deal of defending of the outcome; and one argument heavily used in this defense has been that the campaigns all knew the rules and that previous Republican campaigns were able to get on the ballot, so clearly a competent current Republican campaign should have done so.

One small problem with that: as Winger argues, the rules were allegedly drastically changed. In November of this year. Continue reading Did the VA GOP change the rules on primary ballot access in November 2011?

#rsrh Annnnnd this is Team Romney’s problem, in a nutshell.

They’ve got these people running around and ticking off the other 75% of the GOP electorate:

Background post here: amazingly, somebody actually thought that the above was an appropriate response to a helpful suggestion*. What it really was, of course, was an invitation for me to set up a direct-to-spam and an excuse to put up the PayPal button:

Continue reading #rsrh Annnnnd this is Team Romney’s problem, in a nutshell.