South Carolina, where Fort Sumter stands as an enduring monument to not quite thinking things through, has gone and done something hot-headed again. Let’s hope this time it won’t result in four more years of a destructive presidency. But it could. Among other things, South Carolina means that Mitt Romney can’t chicken out of forthcoming debates, even though debates give Newt Gingrich a chance to shine. Newt doesn’t blandly say “Believe in America.” He says he wants to get people off food stamps and put them to work.
Newt also has no problem with the vision thing. The moment Mitt lost South Carolina came during the first South Carolina debate, when he made the biggest gaffe of all: Standing there, looking as if he believed that all he had to do to be the nominee was stand there and not make a gaffe. Can you believe the businessman candidate couldn’t sell you on the idea that Bain Capital (who came up with that name?) and outfits like it are the greatest things since sliced bread?
Mitt, call Peggy Noonan and beg her to take a leave of absence from her day job to give you the words. She’s helped your type before! Convince people you can beat Obama by beating Newt. Fight dirty if you need to. Newt will.
Romney's never had a problem fighting dirty----Fred Thompson caught him red-handed doing so in SC in 2008 and a good chunk of the reason endorsements from past GOP candidates have been so hard to come by for him is that he has this habit of compiling and leaking to the left wing media oppo research on every candidate to his right---which is just about the entire field any given cycle.
He just shopped Santorum oppo research to the networks when Santorum emerged a couple of weeks back. I'm sure part of the reason Santorum won't look him in the eye during debates while trashing Romney's record is that he has to restrain himself from strangling the man.
CAPTCHA: Pyrrhic victory
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe GOP is not called the stupid party by accident. Putting so much faith in a state like South Carolina is a good example.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAs opposed to states like New Hampshire, which a) voted for Obama last time and are likely to do so again and b) allow large contingents of liberal Democrats to vote in their primaries?
C'mon, Bill--you're way too smart for that argument. The GOP nominee HAS to hold onto the South--that's precisely how McCain lost.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMcCain lost big enough so that had he won all the southern states he still would have lost. Gingrich may well run poorly in states like Virginia and Florida, because he will alienate the educated suburban vote. I'll just be blunt about this. Newt will not run well with educated suburbanites in the general. His strength in the South will be less educated country people.
For what it's worth, Romney would probably win NH against Obama. You forget, apaprently, that even Bush won NH in 2000. In a close election these things matter.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMcCain lost 55 electoral votes in FL, NC, and VA plus another 19 in NV, CO, and NM, A 74-vote shift would have made it 291-247, meaning McCain would have needed Ohio, Pennsylvania, or NH/WI to win.
The point remains that a GOP nominee who cannot command the votes of the South----and Southwest, to your point---will lose every time.
You also need to understand that college grads are less than 25% of the electorate and far likelier to support the Democrats any given year---folks making $200,000 or more are an even tinier fraction and even likelier to support Democrats.
In 2012, it is the Reagan Democrats who are once again in play---some college or no college making the median or less. These are precisely the people Romney has no chance of winning absent some very significant gap closure ideologically.
The Bushes were aided by a much stronger New England presence than Romney has and conservative coattails he won't have either. They had more conservative records than Romney does.
It's a pipe dream to think that Romney will be propelled by the brie-eating set, the Democrat Party today being a coalition of the very poor and very wealthy. Most states are winner-take-all so small percentages in heavily blue states defecting simply won't be enough to gain any electoral votes, while depressed conservative turnout in red states may work to Obama's benefit as it did in 2008.
Romney would have to be able to appeal to Blue Dog Democrats; there is no evidence he will even match McCain---Blue Dogs like war heroes---in that regard.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"The Bushes were aided by a much stronger New England presence than Romney has..."
Wait, didn't Romney used to be the governor of Massachusetts? I can't remember any Bushes holding public office up that way. Can you?
Voles: Ah well. This is where my claim falls to the ground.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHost: Ah!
Voles: There's no possible way of answering that argument, I'm afraid. I was only hoping you would not make that particular point, but I can see you're more than a match for me!
Host: Mr Voles, thank you very much for coming along.
Voles: My pleasure.
LOL, I've not talking about brie-eaters. I'm talking about relatively educated, non-evangelical suburbanites, many of whom probably eat cheddar and mozzarella. The GOP has been driving these voters out of the party for years now. These voters are important in Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, NC, Florida, Pennsylvania (the GOP is getting creamed in the burbs there since 1988). You speak with ease about the GOP winning Colorado and New Mexico and Nevada/ Do you know how much Obama won those states by in 2008? It's a tough job and someone whose whole strategy consists of yelling at the press and who has thirty years of intemperate statements and actions for the Obama campaign to work with is not the man to do it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt's an impossible job for a blue blood, to-the-manor-born liberal like Mitt Romney.
I went to school in Colorado and lived there a number of years. I myself am in the brie-eating demographic financially---I am a college-educated white collar professional and fairly well off. But I can tell you that I don't run into many engineers, technologists, or bankers who are pulling the lever for somebody who thinks socialized medicine is just great, or that the government needs a mere tune-up, in Colorado or elsewhere.
And Newt Gingrich speaks more credibly to technocrats than Mitt Romney anyway, he of the empty consultantspeak and 59-point plans to nowhere.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"The "stupid" GOP has been turning these voters away for years"
except I guess, in 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2010.
The romney folks seem to be throwing a giant temper tantrum ...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI'm talking about relatively educated, non-evangelical suburbanites, many of whom probably eat cheddar and mozzarella. The GOP has been driving these voters out of the party for years now.
You are joking, right? Earth to Rook: those voters never belonged to the GOP in the first place. Guzzling the Democrat Kool-Aid is their drink of choice. Yet you want to nominate the socialist Mitt Obama (or is his name is Barack Romney? - all leftists look alike to me) to make yet one more doomed attempt to appease them. Include me out, please.
It may make you feel better, but shoving conservative out of the Republican Party in a frantic effort to appeal to far-Left "moderates" has a less than 100% record of success. How is the McCain Administration working out for ya?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAre you saying that Evangelicals are not educated?
Are you saying that Evangelicals don't live in the suburbs?
There are more of us than there are of you. And we are the larger majority or plurarlity in every state and region of the country other than the Northeast - where Republicans and especially conservative Republicans are in the minority among the general population.
And we're tired of the way that the moderate/liberal/RINO Elites have run the GOP into the ground.
If the Tea Partiers and Evangelicals (there is some overlap between the groups) can find a way to co-exist, GOP moderates/RINOs will never control the national party again.
Right now, Newt is finding that message to bring that about.
Keep it up, Newt!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNo Republican who fails to hold the South will win. McCain lost 3 Southern states by very close margins. But the South alone isn't enough. He also needs to win the purple states in the West and Midwest - Ohio, Colorado, etc.
The GOP's real problem isn't with the white working class, whom Obama has abandoned. It's the educated, the secular, and the women, both whites and Asians. Romney does better than Gingrich with those groups. Gingrich is a more polarizing figure, has more skeletons in his living room, and is no more reliably conservative than Romney. So the question is which group is more likely to stick with any nominee, and which is more likely to vote Obama if the nominee is someone they don't like. It's not blue collars or evangelicals.
Romney won Colorado in the '08 primary, won New Hampshire this year, nearly tied Santorum in Iowa, and could probably win his home state of Michigan. He has the best overall shot of winning the states we need to win in November, especially if he picks a veep that keeps blue collar and/or evangelicals voters happy.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe primary system itself is monumentally silly. To imagine that IA, NH, etc are representative is beyond a stretch.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThat's okay. Given DC's treatment of real conservatives like Jim DeMint, we in SC don't put much faith in the GOP.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSo not voting for Mitt is the same thing as firing cannons at a federal fort? Does shamelessly shilling for your candidate know no boundaries? Is it not possible that people in SC just think Mitt is a flip-flopper who will say what he thinks they want to hear just to get their vote and then abandon them once he has secured it? I am no fan of Newt, but I certainly understand the conservative rejection Mitt. I hope NR charges the Mitt campaign for advertising space.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYeah, Romney leaves others to fight dirty. If he has criticisms of Gingrich--and he should--he should make them directly.
I just worry the Tea Party types are now determined to pull an O'Donnell/Paladino/Angle, etc: i.e., nominate a loudmouth who will sink in the general. Unfortunately, there's a demonstrable track record here, where emotion overrides reason. And Romney does not inspire passion. All these people who love Newt now hated him a year ago, but he's saying what they want to hear and that's all that matters. If Obama win a big reelection he will have Juan Williams and Jon King to thank for it. Ultimately I don't believe the TP'ers really care whether the GOP wins or not, as long as their candidate makes a lot of noise as he goes down. It's like Goldwater '64.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think the nation would have been far better off with Barry Goldwater as President than who we got. The mistake wasn't nominating Goldwater.
The mistake is that we didn't elect him.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt wasn't the "Daisy" ad which killed Goldwater's campaign but Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle bullet the year prior to the election.
Note that the very same electorate elected Tricky Dick, he of the infamous House UnAmerican Affairs Committee, who ran on the Silent Majority (i.e. conservatives) law-and-order platform in 1968. They reelected him in a landslide in 1972.
In fact, the only Democrat to serve two terms since FDR has been Bill Clinton---who ran as a populist Democrat Leadership Council (i.e. conservative) Southerner with another Southern DLCer on his ticket. The campaign---complete with the Sister Souljah moment and Tipper Gore (she of the campaign against obscenity in music)---was in significant ways run to the right of Bush the Elder's---whom they successfully portrayed as an out-of-touch, to-the-manor-born patrician.
Hmmm, sound familiar?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBoy are you rewriting history. Goldwater was an unmitigated disaster for the GOP (and the country). Nixon's margin 1968 was shrinking and he only won because the Democrats were hugely divided and discordant (like the GOP today). In any event, Nixon was never the conservative people seem to think he was.
I'm not arguing, by the way way, that Americans won't elect a conservative. Ryan or Rubio would have been great. I am arguing Americans won't elect Newt Gingrich, who isn't a conservative anyway.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI'm not arguing for Newt---I won't support him if he's the nominee because his support of DeDe Scozzafava and sitting on that park bench with Nancy Pelosi in support of the global warming hoax made clear he is no longer a conservative to any real degree.
The Democrats were divided because the manifest failures of liberalism---the Great Society triggering race riots, the "expert" approach to warfare having yielded bloody stalemate in Vietnam, the "root cause" approach to law enforcement having produced a stunning rise in violent crime---divided them as to the solution to these problems. In 1964 none of these things were yet widely apparent----but 1968 proved Goldwater to be right.
I never said Nixon WAS a conservative---but he did run as one. His imposition of price controls, his handling of social issues, and his embrace of Kissinger's foreign policy rather clearly demonstrated he wasn't. But he was an opportunist and an anti-Communist and his election in 1968 and 1972 was a rebuke to liberalism and to the notion that conservatism didn't sell at the postwar ballot box. Nixon after all took out George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller---a huge loss for the liberal Republicanism which had held sway since before the Civil War.
MittBots who invoke the ghost of Goldwater act as though it's still 1964. It's not---liberals can't even run as liberals anymore but had to drag out the long-dead "progressive" label, when they don't seek refuge in that of "moderate".
You do this because it is the only argument you can make for Rockefeller Republicans to hold the reins of the GOP.
Unfortunately for you, John McCain killed that narrative stone dead last time around.
And this time, even if Romney pulls off the impossible and seizes the nomination, the conservative base won't be holding their noses and voting for him in anywhere near the numbers we did for John McCain.
I officially joined the Tea Party today and I'd bet I won't be in a small minority in doing so. If Romney is the nominee, I fully intend to register as an Independent---until the Tea Party makes it official and becomes the home of conservatives. Romney's nomination would be the surest sign that the GOP is simply dead and no change will come until a truly conservative party is on the ballot.
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