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By Elvin Lim

The Republican nomination race is still Mitt Romney’s to lose, but he is in trouble yet again, and his cloak of inevitability is fast disappearing.

The Republican convention / L.M. Glackens (1908). Source: Library of Congress.

Even if Romney won every delegate from now on, and he won’t, it wouldn’t be mathematically possible for him to lock up 1144 delegates at least until early April. It is now too late in almost every state to get on the ballot, so barring a brokered convention where a compromise candidate can potentially emerge out of nowhere, we are down to these last four candidates. Ironically though, the longer Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich stay in the race, the more likely the Republicans will be headed toward a brokered convention, and new developments keep making what was once a journalist’s dream a palpable possibility. Gingrich’s superPAC just got a 10 million infusion from Sheldon Adelson, and with a lock on Georgia’s delegates, he has no incentive to drop out anytime soon. Ron Paul, of course, is the only candidate in this race in it for the ideas and the ideas alone, so he is guaranteed to stay on for as long as he can shape the debate. When 2012 is wrapped up, it may well be that only one person unambiguously benefited from Citizens United and the rise of the superPACs to sustain the campaigns of what would once have been longshot candidates — the same person who had initially opposed Citizens United, Barack Obama.

With a steady trickle of good news coming in about the economy, Mitt Romney’s strong suit is losing its luster, which is why the game between the two front-runners is fluid and difficult to call. With contraception in the news, Romney’s moderate credentials pale in contrast to Santorum’s authentic conservatism, or as Romney has tried to say of himself, “severe” conservatism. Funded by billionaire Foster Freiss, Santorum now has the resources to fight a longish race. More important, he is polling ahead of Romney in Michigan, where Romney’s father was once the Governor. If Santorum ekes out a victory in Michigan, he may get enough of a momentum to win in delegate-rich Ohio, a key battleground state that will cause Establishment Republicans to give him a fresh look. Things could then get really messy this summer, and this is bad news for the GOP. The difference between the Obama-Clinton battle in 2008 and the Romney-Santorum battle is that Clinton wasn’t able to pull Obama to the Right. Each of the anti-Romney candidates have taken their turn to drag Romney so far to the Right that the eventual nominee may not have time to race back to the center to stage a plausible general election campaign.

Already, the divergence of interest between the presidential and primary candidates and incumbent republicans is occurring. On the one hand, Republicans in Congress have already caved in to payroll tax cuts proposed by the Obama administration, and succumbed to the pressure to moderate in order to produce some legislative outcomes in an election year. On the other hand, the primary electorate is being invited to live in an alternate universe, where ideological purity and consistency rather than moderation will be rewarded. The net result is that the overlapping of general and primary election imperatives — the incentive to go right and go center – is going to get increasingly glaring and damaging to the GOP the longer the nomination contest goes on. The Republican party therefore has every incentive to end the nomination race soon, so that it can begin the move toward the center that

Yahoo News interviewed this GalleyCat editor about a crop of rushed books about basketball star Jeremy Lin. We singled out “Jeremy Lin: Advice from Sun Tzu on Basketball and the Art of War!!!“–a $1.99 “e-pamphlet” that basically repackages quotes from a public domain classic and addresses them to “modern day basketball warrior Jeremy Lin.”

We do not recommend buying this eBook, but we think it has created a new literary genre: “The possibilities for this mash-up genre are literally endless: ‘How Sherlock Holmes Solved the Amanda Knox Case!!!’ or ‘What Rick Santorum Can Learn from the Poetry of Walt Whitman!!!’”

What famous public domain books should be repackaged as advice books for celebrities? Share your suggestions (complete with triple exclamation points) at the #linerature hashtag, we’ll post our favorites.

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By Elvin Lim

G.O.P., reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. W.A. Rogers. Source: Library of Congress.

What changed in the last few years was an concerted effort to democratize the Republican Party, fueled in part by the success of the Democratic nomination contest between Obama and Clinton in generating an enthusiasm gap in 2008. This included expanding proportional representation in nomination contests, and an unprecedented number of debates to the calendar. The result thus far has been chaos, restrained only in part by the overriding imperative to find a candidate who can unseat Obama. Republicans are relearning their earlier intuition that more voices don’t always lead to a coalescing chorus.

The White House understands this. One wonders if the Obama administration’s blunder about a birth-control insurance mandate on religious institutions was so poorly executed that it may actually have been perfectly timed. On the heels of the Catholic candidate Rick Santorum’s trifecta win, the administration decided to announce a controversial mandate requiring that women in religious institutions be entitled to contraception coverage in their health insurance, only to reverse this decision almost immediately. Either this was spectacularly amateur politics, or a high-risk attempt to put social issues back on the Republican primary agenda on the eve of the CPAC conference to aid Romney’s Catholic rivals. Romney ended up winning the CPAC straw poll and thereby entrenching his conservative credentials, but Santorum ended up a close second.

With barely any media attention devoted to the recent victories for gay marriage in California and Washington, the Obama campaign recognizes that the only reliable issue left for social conservatives to fight on is abortion (immigration being a sensitive topic for both parties), and this is possibly why they took the risk of taking it on. Social conservatives, for their part, were very wise to quickly connect the contraception mandate to the anti-Obamacare animus shared by other conservatives, so that God may remain relevant in an election year that will be mostly dedicated to the economy and debates about big government. This ideological fusion is Santorum’s ticket to unseating Romney — at least this is what the White House hopes — because as long as values matter, the conservative alternative to Romney will.

With no closure in sight, the Republican candidates must trudge on to Michigan and Arizona. It will not be until Super Tuesday, when the big delegates counts are at stake, before Romney’s coronation can be confirmed.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decl

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It began with John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. The choice of this incompetent, unqualified, inexperienced, and stupid person as a vice presidential candidate called McCain’s judgment into serious question. Had the old war hero turned senile? How could he have put such a person a heartbeat from the Presidency? The mere thought of Palin in the White House was frightening. But McCain’s choice was far more than a scare—it insulted America and unleashed a wave of violence and racism that continues.

Never forget the crosshairs map Palin posted on her Facebook page. She urged her Twitter followers, “Don’t retreat, reload.” Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ face was in one of the crosshairs. On January 8, 2011, Congresswoman Giffords was shot in the head outside a Tucson Safeway supermarket. Fortunately she survived and is making a remarkable recovery. But America is still coping with the incivility and insults initiated by Palin and taken up by the Tea Party and Congressional Republicans.

The insults continued after President Obama was elected and took office. With exhortations to “take back our country,” the Tea Party, overwhelmingly made up of whites, spread its unsubtle racist message. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that “take back our country” meant take it back from the black guy who’s President.

Four days before the President was inaugurated, the tone was set by radio talk show bloviator Rush Limbaugh. On January 16, 2010, Linbaugh said, “I hope Obama fails.”

During the President’s first term, Congressional Republicans took up Limbaugh’s mantra, deciding to do everything in their power to destroy the Obama presidency by holding up, blocking, weakening, misrepresenting, and voting against everything the President and Democrats wanted to accomplish.

Republican senator Mitch McConnell stated the Republicans’ position quite clearly: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell told Major Garrett in an interview published in the National Review in October 2010. A month later, in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, he repeated his position: “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.” In another time, such a call of opposition to a sitting President would have been considered treason. But over the past two years, Republicans have, like obedient little soldiers, followed McConnell’s marching orders, turning their backs on their country and the people who elected them and abandoning their responsibility to participate in government.

Despite repeated attempts by the President to work in a bipartisan fashion, Republicans refused, becoming the “Party of No.” No to health care for all Americans. No to the President’s job creation bill. No to restoring regulations of the banks whose fraudulent practices caused the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. No to repealing the Bush tax cuts that added billions of dollars to the deficit. No to taxing millionaires and billionaires so they pay their fair share. Last summer, Republicans’ political brinksmanship with the debt ceiling resulted in the first downgrade in the national credit rating in U.S. history. In carrying out Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell’s dictum to bring about failure of the Obama administration, Republicans have made Congress dysfunctional and the economic recovery slower than it might have been had they spent more time working with the President instead of working against him. That President Obama has been able to accomplish so much despite Republicans’ intransigence is a tribute to his political skill, patience and intelligence.

Now we come to this election year and the line-up of potential Republican presidential candidates who are as insultingly unqualified as Sarah Palin. All celebr

by Elvin Lim

Photo by Gage Skidmore. Source: Wikipedia

Volatility, though, has been the hallmark of the nomination race this year, and there is no reason to think this will change. The higher quantity of debates has helped Gingrich build a momentum in the last week — as has his superPAC — and both are new developments from the last cycle. For the first time in modern history, the Republicans have picked a different winner for each of the first three states. For the first time ever, the Republicans are going to nominate either a Mormon (Romney) or a Catholic (Gingrich). This denominational diversity reveals a conservative electorate much more concerned about the economy than about social values, which was the major issue just eight years ago. Finally, the loyal supporters of Ron Paul are a wild card, because no one knows to whom they will turn when Paul finally bows out — and he intends to to hang around. All told, there are 1150 delegates to get to earn the nomination, so this race pushes on at least until the Spring.

Gingrich did not win in South Carolina because of “electability” as the SC exit polls misleadingly say; he won because of the rage that South Carolinians believe is necessary to take on Obama. Gingrich received the first standing ovation in the debates so far when he observed that more people had been put on food stamps under Obama than under any other president – a line he has been repeating in the last week. Obama will not and cannot receive credit for whatever he has done because his very presence in the White House is perceived by some conservatives as a criminalization of the the state in the service of socialism. This newly rediscovered “southern strategy” worked in South Carolina and it may well work beyond.

Gingrich is in a good position but not a front-leading one, however. He will not enjoy the native-son-of-the-South advantage in Florida as he did in South Carolina, so the next contest is going to be important for him to prove his viability. He would need a huge infusion of cash to be able to afford the television ads he or his superPAC will need to run in Florida. Gingrich won’t be able to sustain his momentum with just the free media, though the two debates last week will help. For now, Romney still enjoys a lead because Florida’s electorate is older and less evangelical than in South Carolina. Early voting has already started in Florida, and will continue until the 28th, so Romney’s initial lead there would help him.

It is also worth noting that Romney is the only candidate who has done well in all three states. He is still, therefore, the frontrunner. But he cannot afford any more mis-steps. The tax returns questions from the media was just poorly handled, and Romney has stuttered repeatedly on a question for which he should have been more than prepared (as Gin

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By Elvin Lim

In recent weeks, factions within the Republican party have begun jostling for power within the conservative movement. This is the bitter-sweet inevitability of being more than the party in opposition, but also a party recently co-opted into power. Whether the disagreement is between Rick Santorum versus Sarah Palin, or the Family Research Council versus GOProud , or Tea Party members of Congress and moderate Republicans debating the budget, or William Kristol and Glenn Beck on democracy in Egypt, these differences are only going to grow as we head toward Republican primary season.

There are, of course, differences in priorities within the Democratic fold as well. But the source of the president’s incumbency advantage derives from the fact that these differences will not be played out during the primary season. He will likely enjoy the benefit of not being challenged. So when Republican candidates are invariably jostling for advantage, the president can simply go about his business, looking presidential (and raising money.)

The reason why Ronald Reagan’s historical legacy has been revised upwards in recent times is because the children of his revolution know of no better way to hold themselves together. Or put another way, the celebration of Reagan only reveals the dearth of leadership in the conservative movement, which is still looking to the past because they cannot yet see anyone who can take them to victory in the future.

At this time in the 2008 cycle, Barack Obama had already declared his candidacy, alongside a formidable front-runner, Hillary Clinton.

Today, there is a long, lackluster, and uncommitted list of potential candidates on the Republican side (so much so that even Donald Trump managed to steal the show at this year’s CPAC Conference), but no major candidate has taken the plunge. Why? Because whoever takes the first plunge would become the universal target of all those not yet declared, and will suffer the irony that the first-mover advantage becomes the first-victim-of-infighting disadvantage. The more potential candidates predict infighting, the later they will declare, so that they can stay above the fray for as long as they can. No one candidate feels confident enough to pull the three major strands of conservatism – the libertarians, the social conservatives, and the neo-conservatives – together, and this is why Reagan is still the godfather revered.

Watch the lesser known candidates be among the first to declare as they would be able to secure some national media attention when the Reagan Library hosts the first Republican primary debate for the season on May 2, 2011. The better known candidates have more to lose and less to gain by declaring early.

In particular, s/he who waits until the situation in Egypt as well as the budget battle between the President and Congress unfolds would better be able to pivot toward the emerging priorities of the conservative movement. If Egypt transitions into a democracy friendly to US interests, then neo-conservatives of the Kristol variety would have won the argument