Having solved his Google problem, Rick Santorum drops out of presidential race

Having finally solved his Google problem (as of today's search Dan Savage's website is no longer the top result for a Rich Santorum Google search), Rick Santorum is reported to have suspended his campaign. This leaves the Republicans with virtually no option but to elect Mitt Romney the flip-flopping candidate that Republican primary voters have gone out of their way for two presidential cycles to avoid.

 Congratulations to the Republican party. You have your candidate. Read More......

Republicans: constantly stuck in the past

SHOT: April 2012 -- "Using the power of Facebook, we're going to bring the convention to you, and it's going to be groundbreaking. We're calling it the first 'Convention Without Walls.'"

CHASER: 08/25/08 -- "Linda Worthheimer stated that this DNC is 'the convention without walls.' She went on to explain that this convention has a goal of including as many people as possible, even outside of the established venues via all the technology we have today.

CHASER: 11/25/07 -- "'We're looking to break down the walls of the Pepsi Center,' Jason Rosenberg, the director of online communications for the Democratic National Convention Committee, told me the other day."

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Mitt Romney is not exactly Marco Rubio's first choice for President

Time-traveling historian Marco Rubio's endorsement of Mitt Romney should not be taken as evidence the former governor was his first, second, or even third choice for the Republican nomination. In fact, Romney is behind "a lot of other people out there."

One day after endorsing Mitt Romney for president, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio canceled out any good will he may have shown the GOP front-runner by saying he wished others had run for president.

"There are a lot of other people out there that some of us wish had run for president -- but they didn't," Rubio told Townhall.com in an interview.

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Do the Republican candidates stand by NOM?

The anti-gay marriage National Organization for Marriage was busted this week following the leak of secret internal documents showing NOM's plan to drive a racial wedge between white gays and blacks. Here's part of the offending document:

"The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks - two key democratic constituencies. We aim to find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage; to develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; and to provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots. No politician wants to take up and push an issue that splits the base of the party. Fanning the hostility raised in the wake of Prop 8 is key..."

This is pretty disgusting stuff. As John wrote on the main site, "it's all about promoting a race war between blacks and whites in order to hurt gays and the Democratic party, to hell with what it does to the black community, the civil rights movement, or the future of this country."

Last year, NOM posted an article on their blog, titled, "All Major Candidates Sign NOM Marriage Pledge, Commit to Concrete Steps to Support Marriage." This list excluded Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich, who you may recall took a bit of a hiatus last summer and was not considered a serious candidate. But the list included Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, along with Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty. Gingrich later did sign the NOM Pledge and is prominently featured on the pledge's website. Here's the pledge:

In signing NOM's marriage pledge, Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachman and Rick Santorum pledged to:

• Support and send to the states a federal marriage amendment defining marriage as one man and one woman,
• Defend DOMA in court,
• Appoint judges and an attorney general who will respect the original meaning of the Constitution,
• Appoint a presidential commission to investigate harassment of traditional marriage supporters,
• Support legislation that would return to the people of D.C. their right to vote for marriage.

So here's the question: Do Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich still stand by their pledge to the race-baiting and divisive NOM? Do they support NOM's plan to promote "a race war between blacks and whites in order to hurt gays and the Democratic party"? Do Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich think it's OK to associate with an organization like NOM? Or will Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich disavow their fealty to NOM?

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Gingrich laying off staff

Politico reports:

Newt Gingrich is cutting back his campaign schedule, will lay off about a third of his cash-strapped campaign's full-time staff, and has forced out his manager as part of what aides are calling a "big-choice convention" strategy, communications director Joe DeSantis told POLITICO. Michael Krull, a former advance man and a college friend of Callista Gingrich's who took over the campaign after a staff exodus in June, was replaced last weekend by Vince Haley, who has worked for Gingrich for nine years and currently is deputy campaign manager and policy director. "We're focusing exclusively on what it'll take to win what we're going to be calling a big-choice convention in August," DeSantis said in a phone interview Tuesday night.

Laying off staff is never, ever a good sign. It means a campaign isn't winning and isn't bringing in money. It could also mean that there were a lot of bad decisions about how the campaign was spending its money. But, at minimum, it isn't a good sign. There's nothing surprising about the third man in a two man race is heading towards oblivion. It's just a reminder that the longer Gingrich refuses to read the writing on the wall, the more public benchmarks of failure like this will occur.

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The GOP primary is functionally over

Mark Halperin starts to ring the knockout bell:

Mitt Romney’s Illinois win could be the beginning of the end of the Republican nomination fight. In order to get there, he faces two challenges: He’ll have to convince on-the-sidelines Republicans to endorse his candidacy, contribute to his campaign, and muscle Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich out of the race. And he’ll also have to persuade the media to reflect the reality that Romney is the only candidate who can win a majority of the delegates needed for the nomination and that he has a good chance of reaching that milestone well before the party meets for its Tampa convention in late summer.

The Romney campaign had made progress on both those fronts before his Illinois win, but the commanding victory is likely to accelerate his cause in the coming days. Once that happens, the normal rules that have prevailed in past nomination fights will kick back in. Santorum and Gingrich can choose to stay in the race, but they will be marginalized and unable to slow Romney down in his accumulation of delegates. They will become ghost candidates, on the ballot and campaigning, but effectively lifeless. Chatter about a contested convention will be greatly diminished.

Or, at least, this is the narrative the political press and Romney campaign will be pushing. For Romney to get the required number of delegates to win the nomination, he would need to win less than half of the remaining delegates, while Santorum would need to win 70-80% of them. That seems highly unlikely.

At some point there simply must be a reckoning that the Republican Party has nominated a candidate who is incredibly unpopular with their ultra-right base. It's not clear to me that this will prevent Romney from mobilizing the base in the general election, nor is it clear that any significant portion of the Republican base will abstain from voting because Romney is their candidate. While the GOP primary has been shorter and less closely contested than the 2008 Democratic primary, Clinton voters largely and enthusiastically came home to vote for President Obama. Of course the ideological differences between the two were functionally non-existent, while Romney and Santorum have historically greater differences. Again, time will tell.

While there has been plenty of acrimony between Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, this is politics. At whatever point that Santorum and Gingrich end their candidacies, expect them to pull on big, red Team R jerseys and to helping Mitt with trying to win in November. That's how partisan politics works and it's unlikely to stop working that way just because parts of the conservative base are cranky about Mitt Romney not being historically radical enough for their tastes.

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Will The Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up

This video is making the rounds today and it's clearly one of the highest production quality political spoof videos in recent memory. Consider this a line in the sand drawn by a random dude on the internet that the Obama, Santorum, and Gingrich campaigns will have to try to exceed in order to have a more memorable web attack on Romney.

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The Palin Party

Over at Daily Kos, BrooklynBadBoy has a piece arguing that Sarah Palin's influence on the Republican party is what's keeping Mitt Romney from locking down the nomination. It's a good read.

From the post:

The Palin Party does not want Mitt Romney. For while Palin and Romney are both ambitious to a fault, Romney's ambition is of a different variety. Romney couldn't care less about minorities, gays, women, city and suburb dwellers, immigrants, or any of the other "others" that the Palin Party despises. Mitt Romney couldn't care less about religion, including his own. That's why he doesn't like talking about it honestly in public. Mitt Romney cares about one thing and one thing only: that the top one percent stay on top and become even more top. That's a problem for the Palin Party because they believe they should be on top by virtue of being better than everyone else ... by being "real Americans" rather than rich Americans.

Generally I think Romney's problems come down to a shitty economy. He's the worst candidate for this cycle because he so obviously represents the people responsible for our current economic situation. Both Democrats and Republicans are suffering equally in this recession, and though we disagree on the solution it's obvious to everyone that the lying, stealing, and greed of the 1% got us to this point.

But BrooklynBadBoy is right about Sarah Palin electrifying the base and giving new energy to that segment of the GOP. The moralists, the racists, and the populists finally had a voice - a voice they recognized as being one of their own.

Watching Game Change last week, I was reminded of how much my aunt adored Palin, referring to her as "my kind of girl." I was also reminded of what I initially liked about Palin's arc (I know, I know!). Sarah Palin was clearly not a republican in the old white man mold, but she had no sense whatsoever that she shouldn't be there. She was clueless of how the system worked and not at all compelled to follow the rules.

BrooklynBadBoy's post concludes:

In the end, Palin's legacy will fade away as quickly as it came about. Her party is an aging, shrinking, dying demographic of rural White men. Many of the Republican party's luminaries understand this. Likely sooner than later, the GOP establishment will come to grips with the idea that if they are to survive as a political institution they will have to jettison the nutcase fringe. The reckoning will come, as the American political system tends to correct anomalies over time. But first, they'll have to blow an election that should have been easy as apple pie. For that, Mitt Romney can thank Sarah Palin.

The economy is going to help here as well. In better economic times Americans don't have as much need for moralism or scapegoats. Only the social die hards will remain and their numbers are shrinking rapidly. Just not fast enough to save Mitt Romney. Read More......

Santorum is the Not Romney

After last night's double victories for Rick Santorum in Alabama and Mississippi, a couple things seem clear about the state of the race:

• Rick Santorum is officially the Not Romney candidate that the Republican Party has been looking for over the last year-plus.
• Newt Gingrich's southern strategy has failed. Unfortunately, since he outperformed Romney in both Alabama and Mississippi, it's unlikely that his ego will allow him to drop out just yet. As long as he's in the race, he is preventing Santorum from collecting delegates. The presumption is that this helps Romney.
• Gingrich's campaign will likely go on up until the moment that Sheldon Adelson decides to stop writing million dollar checks to support it. One man is keeping Newt in the race. If I were Rick Santorum, I'd be phone banking Adelson all week.
• Ron Paul's performance is a joke at this point. For all the perceived grassroots support and small-dollar fundraising power, he has utterly failed to register in recent primaries. That said, I doubt he drops any time soon.

Despite all of this, it still looks like Romney will get the nomination. It will just be a slow, unenthusiastic slog. Conservatives don't believe Romney is one of them, but every time he casts himself to the right of Santorum, he walks himself down a path that alienates independent voters, women and Hispanics. In short, Romney's pathway to attaining the Republican nomination depends exclusively on him attaining a Pyrrhic victory. He will win in such a way as to put himself in an insurmountable hole for the general election.

Of course, if Santorum attains the nomination, we could be looking at Obama winning reelection with 40+ states.

It's silly at this point to expect there to be another candidate to come in at the convention, unless Romney is prevented from winning the required number of delegates (something which does not seem likely). Romney will continue to look more and more like Bob Dole and the only thing that is likely to save the Republican's chances of winning back the White House will be a major disaster, economic or military. In short, the GOP is going to have to make like Rush Limbaugh and root for America to fail if they want the White House back. Given how turbulent the economy has been and the lack of major popular accomplishments during the President's first term, it's fairly remarkable that the GOP couldn't nominate a challenger with a better shot at beating President Obama.

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Super Tuesday

As if the Gods of Excitement hadn't done enough already with this month Chevy Truck Month and the beginning of the March Madness tournament, today is Super Tuesday. Ten states will primary or caucus today, accounting for nearly 20% of the delegates.

Up for grabs are Georgia, Massachusetts, Idaho, North Dakota, Alaska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia, Vermont, and Ohio. Nate Silver is projecting a strong night for Romney, one which he will come out with the most delegates in almost any scenario:

This scenario assumes that Mr. Romney will win Massachusetts and Virginia very easily, and Vermont and Idaho fairly easily (winning all 32 delegates in Idaho because of the way the state’s rules are structured). It assumes a narrow Romney win in Ohio and a narrow loss in Tennessee, and that Mr. Romney wins either the Alaska or North Dakota caucuses, but probably not both. Mr. Gingrich wins Georgia only, although by a big margin; Mr. Santorum wins Tennessee and Oklahoma, although by smaller margins than were expected a few days ago.

Silver goes on to note that because of increased media expectations and the intense focus on Ohio, Georgia and Tennessee, Romney might not walk away with a performance that is sufficiently impressive. Additionally, with Kansas, Mississippi, and Alabama holding their contests within the next week, Romney will continue to face scrutiny in regards to his ability to win Southern states.

The "Can Romney win in the South?" line of criticism seems about as reasonable as the "Will woman and Hispanics turn out for Obama?" criticism of the 2008 primary. These core Democratic constituencies broke heavily for Hillary Clinton, but came home and turned out for Obama at historic levels in the general election. Whether Romney wins Mississippi or Alabama in the primary has no real relevance. If he gets the nomination, he will have a near-lock on the Deep South and this is true even if base enthusiasm for him is tepid. Much of this line seems to be aimed at continuing the primary. That isn't to say that the fact that Romney likely isn't drawing strong support in the Deep South during the primary is irrelevant, but it's unlikely to be a factor that prevents him from getting the nomination.

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