The Winding Road To The Republican Nomination For President

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum fought each other to nearly a draw in the Michigan primary and may actually have to split its delegates, but together they may have lost Michigan for their party by running campaigns that were completely disconnected from the lives of middle-class voters and pushed ever farther to the right margins of American politics.

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Romney Regains Stride With Victories in 2 States (February 29, 2012)
A month ago, the state was rated a tossup in this November’s general election. But after voters got a taste of the Republican field, Michigan seems to be on President Obama’s side of the ledger, along with Wisconsin. Both elected Republican governors in 2010, but large numbers of blue-collar voters have turned away from the party after realizing how little regard it has for their interests.

Mr. Romney was unable to generate any enthusiasm in the state where he was born and where his family is well known. In fact, polls around the country have suggested that Republican primary voters are not thrilled with any of their choices so far. He won largely because of Mr. Santorum’s blunders, including his inexplicable decision to denigrate the value of college and to declare his contempt for John F. Kennedy and the Constitution’s mandate for an absolute separation of church and state.

Mr. Romney’s victory speech Tuesday night was unlikely to do much about the Republican electorate’s disappointment. Like his lightweight stump speeches around Michigan, he rattled off a long list of things he opposes: taxes (mostly on the rich), government spending (mostly on the poor), health care reform (for everyone). There was next to nothing about what he supports, with the exception of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. A blue-collar family that has suffered a job loss (or fears one) heard nothing that offered the promise of a more stable, hopeful future.

“We will abolish, finally, the death tax,” he announced. That’s great news to those with estates of $5 million or more. It was a slap in the face to those whose unemployment insurance is about to run out because his party has insisted on getting tough with jobless government freeloaders.

Middle-class voters did learn that Mr. Romney still opposes the auto-industry bailout that has saved the jobs of more than a million workers in Michigan and the region. (He called it a giveaway to unions, ignoring worker sacrifices that are well-known in the upper Midwest.) They learned how the 14 percent of Michigan residents who have no health insurance would be left on their own once the candidates get a chance to repeal health care reform. And they learned that Mr. Santorum is far more concerned about the menace of birth control and liberal college professors than he is about their struggles.

If they listened to Mr. Obama’s fiery speech to the United Auto Workers on Tuesday, however, they heard a very different set of priorities: using government action to bring an entire industry back to life, raising taxes on the rich to avoid cutting programs for the poor, keeping insurance companies from cutting off the sick.

“Since when are hard-working men and women who are putting in a hard day’s work every day — since when are they special interests?” the president asked, addressing the contempt for labor demonstrated by the candidates and several Republican governors in the Midwest. The answer explains why Mr. Obama was up by 18 points over Mr. Romney in a recent Michigan poll, and why Republican leaders are worried about their presidential field.

I agree about severing our aid to Israel. They don't need, we don't need the expense, and it not only does not help anyone politically, it hurts us internationally.

The Lost Party
The strangest primary season in memory reveals a GOP that’s tearing itself apart.

The transfiguration of the GOP isn’t only about ideology, however. It is also about demography and temperament, as the party has grown whiter, less well schooled, more blue-collar, and more hair-curlingly populist. The result has been a party divided along the lines of culture and class: Establishment versus grassroots, secular versus religious, upscale versus downscale, highfalutin versus hoi polloi. And with those divisions have arisen the competing electoral coalitions—shirts versus skins, regulars versus red-hots—represented by Romney and Santorum, which are now increasingly likely to duke it out all spring.

If either Romney or Santorum gains the nomination and then falls before Obama, flubbing an election that just months ago seemed eminently winnable, it will unleash a GOP apocalypse on November 7—followed by an epic struggle between the regulars and red-hots to refashion the party. And make no mistake: A loss is what the GOP’s political class now expects. “Six months before this thing got going, every Republican I know was saying, ‘We’re gonna win, we’re gonna beat Obama,’ ” says former Reagan strategist Ed Rollins. “Now even those who’ve endorsed Romney say, ‘My God, what a ******* mess.’ ”

But while Gingrich today seems an afterthought, his role in shaping the contours of the contest cannot be overstated.

“Of all the candidates, he has had the biggest impact,” says Steve Schmidt, McCain’s 2008 chief strategist. “By making the case he made against Romney, Gingrich did a significant amount of damage to him, both in the primary and in the general, if Romney does become the nominee.”

“The Romney campaign has realized there’s nothing it can do to communicate Romney’s record in a way that moves the needle, so their focus is on disqualifying Santorum as a plausible nominee and authentic conservative,” says a top GOP operative. “Can Santorum survive the onslaught? Gingrich certainly couldn’t.”



Santorum may be a different story, however—less erratic, less prone to light himself on fire, less saddled with XXXL baggage. “Santorum is a much more sympathetic character than Gingrich,” says the Evangelical leader Richard Land. “If a guy has 57 percent negatives, you can carpet-bomb him with impunity. But if Romney comes out swinging for Santorum, people are going to get angry. It’s a lot harder to demonize him than Gingrich.”

Yet the likelihood of Romney delivering a KO, or even a TKO, on Super Tuesday is slight. According to University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato, at least five of the ten states with contests on March 6—Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Virginia—have electorates in which more than 40 percent of voters are Evangelical. That presents a significant hurdle to Romney and advantage to Santorum, provided he emerges from Michigan with either a win or a narrow enough loss that his momentum isn’t utterly halted. True, Santorum isn’t on the ballot in Virginia. But also true is that Alaska, Idaho, and North Dakota, for which there is no data available on the size of the born-again contingent, are all caucus states in which religious conservatives (and tea-partyers) are thick on the ground.

Not one of the president’s presiding reelection gurus—David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Jim Messina—believes that, come November, their margin of victory will be as big as even the smallest of those numbers. All along, they have been operating from the assumption that the Republican base will be riled up and ready to turn out in droves on Election Day. That Richard Land is right when he asserts that, for all the lack of enthusiasm for the extant crop of candidates, no one should ever “underestimate the ability of President Obama to rally conservatives to vote against him.”

“If Romney is the nominee and he loses in November, I think we’ll see a resurgence of the charismatic populist right,” says Robert Alan Goldberg, a history professor at the University of Utah and author of a biography of Barry Goldwater. “Not only will [the grassroots wing] say that Romney led Republicans down the road to defeat, but that the whole type of conservatism he represents is doomed.”

But if it’s Santorum who is the standard-bearer and then he suffers an epic loss, a different analogy will be apt: Goldwater in 1964. (And, given the degree of the challenges Santorum would face in attracting female voters, epic it might well be.) As Kearns Goodwin points out, the rejection of the Arizona senator’s ideology and policies led the GOP to turn back in 1968 to Nixon, “a much more moderate figure, despite the incredible corruption of his time in office.” For Republicans after 2012, a similar repudiation of the populist, culture-warrior coalition that is fueling Santorum’s surge would open the door to the many talented party leaders—Daniels, Christie, Bush, Ryan, Bobby Jindal—waiting in the wings for 2016, each offering the possibility of refashioning the GOP into a serious and forward-thinking enterprise.



Only the most mindless of ideologues reject the truism that America would be best served by the presence of two credible governing parties instead of the situation that currently obtains. A Santorum nomination would be seen by many liberals as a scary and retrograde proposition. And no doubt it would make for a wild ride, with enough talk of Satan, abortifacients, and sweater vests to drive any sane man bonkers. But in the long run, it might do a world of good, compelling Republicans to return to their senses—and forge ahead into the 21st century. Which is why all people of common sense and goodwill might consider, in the days ahead, adopting a slogan that may strike them as odd, perverse, or even demented: Go, Rick, go.

My hope is that it won't work quite that way this time around, because, in a perverse sort of way, I look at a vote for Santorum as a vote to save the country from disaster.

Btw, final Michigan delegate tally is a tie -- 15 for Romney, 15 for Santorum.

For me, this is evidence that Democrats are a bunch of crypto-Republicans.