The debate among the Republican candidates over Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital has raised again questions about whether Romney’s tenure in the “1 percent” will damage his campaign. The Obama team certainly welcomes this debate. After all, they have been attacking Romney along precisely these lines:
The day after Mr. Romney squeezed out a razor-thin victory in the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Obama’s political brain-trust trained most of its fire on him, painting him as both a Wall Street 1 percent type and an unprincipled flip-flopper.
Yikes, this isn't even going to be close. Mitt Romney is opening up a massive lead in Florida, the state that could be the front-runner's capstone to securing the nomination. A Rasmussen poll yesterday put Romney more than 20 points ahead of the nearest candidate. He drew 41 percent to 19 percent for Newt Gingrich. Rick Santorum had 15 percent, and everyone else was in the single digits.
If it weren’t bad enough that he’s become the face of leveraged buyouts, Mitt Romney is facing another fresh challenge in the next three primary and caucus states. As Arthur Delaney points out at Huffington Post, the first two states to vote for a GOP nominee have weathered the recession relatively well—a boon for the laissez-faire front-runner. It’s a different story in the next three: South Carolina and Florida, with 9.9 percent and 10 percent unemployment respectively, and Nevada, which tops the country in both unemployment (13 percent) and foreclosures (one of every 16 homes in 2011).
Rick Perry has a new minute-long campaign ad out today, and he's pulled out all the emotional stops. It covers all requisite Ken Burns bases—there's baseball, war vets, and even a Tim Tebow kneeling in the rain. There are planes, trains, and automobiles. Watch the magic for yourself.
Summerville, South Carolina—The surest sign of Rick Perry’s anemic support in South Carolina is how incredibly low key his appearances have been. Whereas Mitt Romney drops in for rallies, and Rick Santorum holds town halls, Perry contents himself with small towns and smaller restaurants. Today, he held a “main street walk," which is exactly what it sounds like: He walks down the (usually quaint) main street of a (similarly quaint) town, speaking to voters and posing for photographs.
I normally try my best to ignore the latest Blair Witch film sting from conservative provocateur James O'Keefe, he of ACORN and Planned Parenthood fame. But O'Keefe's new gotcha video unfortunately dips its toes into my beat, so I'll briefly grant him some of the media attention he craves.
For fans of the horse race, this presidential election comes up a little short. The remaining contests are worth watching to see how the Republican Party's competing factions reconcile the fact that they must put aside their differences and support Romney if they hope to defeat Barack Obama, but any semblance of drama disappeared once Romney won the first two nominating states. He now leads the polls in the upcoming primary states.
Yesterday, the Pew Research Center released a report showing that the American public now perceives the conflict between the rich and poor as more prevalent and intense than conflicts between black and whites or conflicts between immigrants and the native-born. The number seeing those class conflicts has jumped 19 points since 2009, and amazingly, even 55 percent of Republicans think there are strong conflicts between rich and poor. For the GOP, about to nominate a guy who earned a couple of hundred million dollars as what one of his opponents calls a "vulture capitalist," this is disconcerting news. First, a graph:
That the biggest story of the New Hampshire Primary has, in the 36 hours since, received relatively little comment attests to our perception of politics as a game of colliding strategies rather than a psychodrama. If nothing else, this coming electoral year we’re about to get a lesson in the strange Oedipal dynamics between fathers and sons. Ron Paul is running for president. He’s not just running for president up until next week’s South Carolina Primary or the Florida Primary at the end of the month; he’s not running through March or June or even up until the combustible convention days of September when the Republican Party meets in Tampa. Ron Paul is running for president forever, which includes—unless he dies first—next November 6.
In this first presidential campaign since Citizens United, I wonder if any advocates of that decision—a group that would include pretty much the entire GOP—would say that as a result, we have better, more democratic campaigns. Is there anyone willing to stand up and say that superPACs are a healthy thing? Well, it appears the Republican party is now saying we should just give up the charade and let corporations buy candidates directly already:
The score between Romney and "Anyone But Romney" stands at 2-0 after the former governor’s victory in New Hampshire last night, and the likelihood that a Santorum or Gingrich gets the nomination gets slimmer every day. All the candidates have gone south for the rest of the month. The other candidates know that if Romney wins the next two primaries, they have no reason to stay in the race, and are campaigning as if their political lives depends on it.
