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By: Elvin Lim,
on 3/27/2012
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By Elvin Lim
Rick Santorum had a great night, but he would need to win 70 percent of the delegates moving forward to unseat front-runner Mitt Romney. That’s not going to happen, but it’ll be a painful road toward the increasingly inevitable. As late as it is in this game, powerful conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Rush Limbaugh, and Tony Perkins are still advocating for Rick Santorum and other non-moderate candidates. Every day they continue to do this, they make less likely confident predictions from outside the beltway that Republicans will come together in the fall against Obama.
The problem could go away if Rick Santorum bowed out, but he has absolutely no reason to. At worst he would be a Hillary Clinton — a serious challenger to the eventual nominee, someone who ran a very credible campaign, and the candidate all eyes will turn to first in the next nomination race. Since all the benefits accrue specifically to Santorum and all the cost is diffused across the entire party, the candidate is here to stay for as long as Romney has not clinched his 1144th delegate.
This means that Romney wouldn’t be able to turn to a frontal, undistracted campaign against Obama just when Americans check out, tune out, and head to the beaches in summer. Most Americans would have made up their minds about their vote by then, and there may not be enough time between September and November for the constant barrage of negative messages and psychological massaging to convince independents that Obama is so bad that he needs to be fired.
The Republican “establishment,” otherwise read as Romney’s supporters, fear this more than anything, and for the love of God — no pun intended — simply don’t understand why Tea Partiers and Southern evangelicals are continuing on the road to electoral perdition. Yet while resentments are building and intra-party strife is festering, it isn’t the moderate Republicans but the Rush Limbaughs of the world who are ironically assuming that an upper-crust, French-speaking Mormon from the Northeast who entered the one percent by way of Wall Street would be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again before the party faces Barack Obama. Hubris!
Next up are Washington, DC and Wisconsin. That means relatively cash-strapped Rick Santorum now has a windfall of a week and some to gloat over his victory in Louisiana, and consolidate the narrative that he is a credible candidate and the truly conservative alternative to Romney. Yet each time the Republican Party has thrown an anti-Romney candidate a lifeline — and doing so has been the leitmotif of campaign 2012 — it has deprived itself of one in the real contest that is to determine the eventual occupant of the White House.
All this is also to say that we are witnessing the maturation of American conservatism. For years observers have described liberalism as a bloated tent filled with too many strange bedfellows. But all we were saying is that it is necessary for a dominant ideology to co-opt many disparate factions in order to form a governing majority. Finally, American conservatism, nearly 60, is big enough to have its own internecine feuds played out in the public square (and not just in the Na
By: Elvin Lim,
on 3/6/2012
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By Elvin Lim
The clumsy elephant / J.S. Pughe. (Puck, 1908). Source: Library of Congress.
Mitt Romney had an ok Tuesday night, no better or worse than the ones he’s had so far. But it is still a story because Romney needed his wins in Arizona and especially Michigan. No news is great news for a campaign’s whose
raison d’être has consistently been “take whoever is the anti-Romney candidate down.”
And therein lies the weakness of Romney’s candidacy. He had his donors sweating yet again when news spread that Democrats in Michigan’s open primary were going to turn out to tip the state in Santorum’s favor. The result is that Romney’s three-point win there pales in comparison to his lead over the eventual nominee back in 2008, which was nine percent. In 2008 there was only one anti-Obama candidate by March. Romney faces not one, but three anti-Romneys this late in the game. Looking ahead to Super Tuesday, Newt Gingrich has a home field advantage in the biggest delegate prize so far in Georgia and Ron Paul is positioned to do well in the Alaska and North Dakota caucuses.
Rick Santorum, for his part, still has some momentum left in him because the Michigan results were partly masked by the fact that 184,000 had voted early and Santorum’s surge occurred only recently. The campaign will try to clinch a symbolic win on Sunday in Washington, which is a caucus state (but whose delegates will not be bound by the results). With or without Washington, Santorum has a real shot at victory in Ohio, where he polls well with blue-collar conservatives. All told, there are still not implausible ways out of the Romney nomination.
This is not all the candidate’s fault, however — bland and awkward performer he may be. If the RNC wanted to lengthen the nomination process and expand proportional representation (rather than winner-take-all) in the races, it should have waited until there was an open race on the Democratic side as well. In other words, Republican elders tried to mimic what the Democrats managed to do in 2008 and it is starting to blow up in their face. What compounds this strategic misstep is that in order to punish states who had moved their primaries up the calendar, the RNC, by stripping errant states for front-loading, made it even more possible for a slew of early contests to name a different frontrunner than in previous contests. Thereby they permitted more chaos when they should have known that this would occur alongside an incumbent Democrat with no challenge to his nomination. And of course there was the added wild card of Citizens’ United and the resulting superPACs that has made the survival of little-known candidates more likely than before.
Moving forward, the RNC will have to weigh the costs of controlling the primary calendar, because doing so has weakened the momentum of whoever emerges as the party’s nominee and shortened the time left for him to campaign as a general election candidate. For his part, Romney will be throwing everything but the kitchen sink in to sustain his air of inevitability; but the RNC has effectively determined by rules set in 2010 that the deal definitely won’t be sealed next Tuesday.
0 Comments on Romney’s double score in Arizona and Michigan as of 1/1/1900
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
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
