Tag: politics

Santorum, Gingrich presumably to follow post-South Carolina….

From National Review Online:

A Tight Race in S.C.
By Rich Lowry

There are now three polls in S.C. showing the same basic trend–Romney essentially flat but on top, Gingrich in a solid second, and Santorum falling back a bit from his post-Iowa highs.

This is just getting downright embarrassing for the “conservative” media.

Mitt Romney’s top ten campaign contributors:

Goldman Sachs
Credit Suisse Group
Morgan Stanley
HIG Capital
Barclays
Kirkland & Ellis
Bank of America
PriceWaterhouseCoopers
EMC Corp
JPMorgan Chase & Co

At least Obama had the decency to lie to America and pretend that he wasn’t going to hold her down while the bankers took turns raping her. If the Republicans are foolish enough to nominate Mitt Romney and he wins the general election, he is going to permit the pillaging of the American economy in a manner that hasn’t been seen since the Roman legions pillaged Carthage.

39% Romney
23% Paul
17% Huntsman
10% Gingrich
9% Santorum

Lost in the inevitable media hype about Romney winning New Hampshire and Iowa is the fact that he actually performed rather poorly in light of his supposed inevitability. Here are the winning percentages of the last three meaningful New Hampshire primaries:

1996: 27% (Buchanan)
2000: 49% (McCain)
2008: 37% (McCain)
2012: 39% (Romney)

The fascinating thing is that Romney only got 7% more votes in 2012 than he did four years ago, assuming that the present numbers hold up, despite campaigning there ever since the last primary. And he performed about as expected; the two final polls had him at 37%. This is pretty bad for a candidate who is supposed to have the nomination sewn up already, in fact, it indicates that most Republicans simply don’t want to vote for him. The Huntsman vote is probably the largest collection of pure anti-Romney votes, as there is no reason to see them as anything but a protest given the ideological similarities between the two Mormons.

Ron Paul, on the other hand, outperformed. He was supposed to win around 17% of the vote versus 15% for Huntsman. Gallup had him as low as 12%. Instead, he got 23%, which in consideration of Santorum’s very poor performance, puts him in a strong position as the alternative to Romney. So, Perry is done, Huntsman isn’t a player but can pretend to be for a little while, and both Gingrich and Santorum should be done but won’t quit before South Carolina.

We can be confident that Paul did much better than expected in New Hampshire because National Review’s Corner has assiduously, and bizarrely, avoided discussing him in 20 posts about the primary, despite devoting several apiece to Huntsman, Gingrich, and Santorum.

RINO wrote:

A lot of conservatives stay home if Ron Paul wins as well, I’m not sure why no one here understands that.

Fascinating. If true, this clearly shows that a lot of conservatives must be lying about how defeating Obama is so very important to them. Now, I understand why a Ron Paul supporter doesn’t care if either Obama or Romney are in office, since both men will continue the foreign interventions, the bank bailouts, the debt-spending, and Obamacare.

But this raises the significant question of why a conservative supporting Romney would prefer Obama to Paul. What is the vital issue that separates Paul from Obama in Obama’s favor in the eyes of these “conservatives”?

Republicans cannot honestly argue that Mitt Romney is the only Republican capable of beating Obama in the general election any longer:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, run neck-and-neck with President Obama in a general-election matchup, according to a new CBS News poll released late on Monday that shows the two front-runners in Tuesday’s New Hampshire GOP primary running stronger against the president than their fellow Republicans. Romney posts a two-point lead over Obama, 47 percent to 45 percent, within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points. He leads Obama, 45 percent to 39 percent, among independent voters.

Obama’s lead over Paul is just one point, 46 percent to 45 percent, as Paul leads among independents by 7 points.

Factor in the way in which more Republicans and libertarians are likely to stay home rather than vote for Romney, and it is clear that putting forward the more moderate candidate will lead to another Republican loss.

Remember, Reagan and George W. Bush were the more conservative candidates. (Bush ’43 wasn’t really conservative, but he was definitely perceived that way.) Both won two general elections. George H.W. Bush, Dole, and McCain were the less conservative candidates and Bush ’41 won one general election. However, I was at the Republican convention in 1988 and I can testify that he was being pushed as the natural heir to Reagan and billed as a True Conservative. By the end of his first term, everyone knew better.

But even if we include him as a moderate, this means that when Republicans have nominated the more conservative candidate, they have gone four for four. When they have nominated the more moderate candidate, they have gone one for four. Logic therefore dictates that Ron Paul has to be the nominee if the Republicans want to win in 2012. Of course, as I have often pointed out, the Republican establishment would much rather lose a presidential election than see a real conservative in office, much less a libertarian who respects the U.S. Constitution.

National Review makes a half-hearted attempt to defend Santorum against Ron Paul’s charge of corruption, then throws in the towel:

I agree with you that for the Paul team to cite the leftist CREW in the way they did was a low blow, and the rest of the commercial comes with the usual attack ad trimmings. At the same time, it makes a fair point in contrasting Santorum’s current attempts to create an aw shucks outsider image with the actual Beltway reality…. Was I terribly surprised? Unfortunately not: it’s how American government currently works and, Santorum is, for good or bad, ultimately a government guy.

Which is, of course, the entire point. Santorum is “ultimately a government guy”. He is ultimately a corrupt phony who is just as much a creature of the Bank Party’s status quo as Romney, Gingrich, or Obama. He’s not an alternative to Romney, he is simply yet another variant.

One wonders which of these two reasons will serve as an excuse for Obama to abandon a run for a second term:

On December 15, 2011, Defendant, President Barack Obama, moved for dismissal of Plaintiffs’ challenge to his qualifications for office. The Court has jurisdiction to hear this contested case pursuant to Chapter 13 of Title 50, the “Georgia Administrative Procedure Act.”

For the reasons indicated below, Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss is DENIED…. Accordingly, this Court finds that Defendant is a candidate for federal office who has been certified by the state executive committee of a political party, and therefore must, under Code Section 21-2-5, meet the constitutional and statutory qualifications for holding the office being sought.

Obama has always been dependent upon the courts preventing these sorts of legal challenges from being heard, which he has successfully prevented to date. But once the cat of his ineligibility is out of the bag – and we already know that he released a fake birth certificate and has a fake social security number – the Democratic pressure for him to step aside in favor of Hillary should be irresistible.

His illegal “recess” appointments when the Senate is not in recess are unlikely to help his cause.