2012 republican presidential nominee III: can romney get santorum out of his hair?

maybe. i still think the way he hit the word "mortgage" was unfortunate, like it was a situation he couldn't imagine.

uh romney's glee that ted kennedy had to take out a mortgage on his house when running against him might not play that well in housing market under water florida

whoa for real? this guy has zero clue how to be a tough guy. it's like he was raised by his sainted rich mormon dad and then went out into the world, and the first like cool assholes he ran with were other investment bankers

yeah the entire sentence was "i didn't win but ted kennedy had to take out a mortgage on his house running against me" like is that supposed to be badass?

I was going to mention the Kennedy line too. Second time he's thrown that out--it's creepy.

Romney wins when he doesn't lose, so I guess he won. Tonight shouldn't change anything, but when both Romney and Gingrich are calmly answering questions, I get the feeling it slows whatever movement there's been in Gingrich's direction.

great find on that didion thing, max

from reviews i've read newt's fake history isn't 'what if the south' won, but like odder and dumber. like the civil war is different somehow but the north still wins, ww2 is different but the nazis lose. yeah idk either.

re: romney mortgaging his house, that comes off as crass. and it's a talking point, he's said it before. it's in really bad taste because kennedy isn't around to defend himself - leave the man in peace.

yeah it was just gross all around

the other reason why it's a poor talking point is that HE LOST THE ELECTION

haha that didion piece :D

i know! "i didn't win but the other guy went broke" makes you seem like a jerk and pathetic at the same time!

Then, midway through this tuned and calculated Christmas reverie, Mr. Gingrich drops, abruptly and inexplicably, through the ice, off message: “At heart,” he dismayingly confides, “I am still a happy four-year-old who gets up every morning hoping to find a cookie that friends or relatives may have left for me somewhere.” This cookie is worrisome: Was it forgotten? Hidden? Why would they hide it? Where are they? Are they asleep, out, absentee friends, deadbeat relatives? The cookie was the treat and leaving is the trick?

xpost and the other guy didn't go broke, and then the other guy won the election and helped elect obama and then obama passed health care for all!

lol "dismayingly" "worrisome"

last didion quote i pormise

Those arguments in To Renew America not immediately suggestive of ethical conflict tend to speed headlong into another kind of collision. We have, according to Mr. Gingrich, “an absolute obligation to minimize damage to the natural world,” a “moral obligation to take care of the ecosystem,” but since this collides with his wish to lift the “ridiculous burden” of “environmental regulations hatched in Washington,” the fulfillment of our moral obligation to take care of the ecosystem is left to a constituent in Mr. Gingrich’s district, Linda Bavaro, who turns two-liter Coca-Cola bottles into T-shirts, which she sells at Disney World. “Linda,” Mr. Gingrich notes, “has a good chance of doing well financially by doing good environmentally. That is how a healthy free market in a free country ought to work.”

oh wow, didion. <3

never stop imo

xp

i just got sad for linda bavaro right then

i don't even understand. she turns them in to t-shirts?

i think newt might have gotten that story wrong tbh

If You Give a Newt a Cookie.

Maybe the stress of taking out a second mortgage contributed to Kennedy's death; Romney can take some solace in that.

"...if, as now seems possible, Obama wins in a landslide"--sometimes I think Andrew Sullivan's reading of this election is as reality-challenged as those he decries.

there are so many good quotes in that didion piece and its amazing how she mostly just lets newt hang himself but i thought this was sorta the newt phenomenon put v succinctly:

The real substance of Mr. Gingrich’s political presence derives from his skill at massaging exhaustively researched voter preferences and prejudices into matters of lonely principle.

I think Andrew Sullivan's reading of this election is as reality-challenged as those he decries

shocking

As I mentioned upthread, I think he's written some really smart stuff the past few days in analyzing what's going on on the Republican side; he just kind of loses it when he glides past Obama's problems going into the election.

Okay--this is huge:

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/01/fred-thompson-endorses-newt-gingrich.php?ref=fpnewsfeed

Reader comment: "Next he'll get the much coveted Wilfred Brimley endorsement."

amazing

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/2012/01/23/liveblogging-absurdity-5/

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intel/2012/01/23/24-tampa%20debate.o.jpg/a_560x375.jpg

I would guess Brimley is a Paul guy.

hey folks reassure me that there is NO chance of a gingrich presidency.

b/c i dunno i might prefer a military coup to that.

Remember the margin by which Clinton creamed Dole or Reagan creamed Mondale? Uh yeah, it will be tighter than that, even with Gingrich's billions of foibles, but Obama should take it in a walk.

i mean the thing is that gingrich won't even have the support of half of his party. it'd be like humphrey or something.

Can I just....?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ab/ElectoralCollege1984.svg/800px-ElectoralCollege1984.svg.png

I was only ten when this happened and I don't remember what kind of candidate Mondale was. All I remember is that Ferraro was his veep-hopeful and that Reagan was on tv every day and night. I can't imagine how gutted Democrats must have been that night. Any reported suicides?

i remember watching those results with my dad at his office - his office threw a late-night election party, they were all big lefties - and even at my very young age i remember knowing something had gone very wrong, wrong beyond banter, beyond jokes

mondale was game but everybody knew reagan would win in 1984; four years before was the shocker. the one surprising thing in 1984 was when reagan spaced out & started babbling at debate's end. intimations

i still think (hope?) that 2012 will resemble 1972, when mcgovern/dems tilted way left to appease the hippies and wound up badly miscalculating how liberal the country actually was. same thing now w/republicans and the far right. look i know how conservative america is at heart - i'm from cincinnati. but not THIS "conservative."

Mondale was the only candidate I've ever seen who actually PROMISED to raise taxes.

"By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two-thirds. Let's tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did."

I think a lot of lessons were probably learned from that :)

So who ran the third-most disastrous campaign for the Republican nomination in the past quarter-century? Now that Gingrich has secured endorsements from Rick Perry and Fred Thompson, Phil Gramm's must be imminent.

Best moment by far last night: Gingrich's long silence at 30:38.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG5WnwsBwsI

"Let me be very clear"--shades of the master.

"By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two-thirds. Let's tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did."

I think a lot of lessons were probably learned from that :)

Yes: let's all be Republicans and cut taxes.

The Wall Street Journal gets tetchy:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577178594236642420.html?mod=wsj_s

The problem is that voters also know that Gaius Gingrich is liable to deliver his prime-time speeches in purple toga while holding tight to darling Messalina's—sorry, Callista's—bejeweled fingers. A primary ballot for Mr. Gingrich is a vote for an entertaining election, not a Republican in the White House.

Thanks WSJ. I like this part better than the economic analysis in that piece Ned linked to.

Finally, there are the men not in the field: Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour. This was the GOP A-Team, the guys who should have showed up to the first debate but didn't because running for president is hard and the spouses were reluctant.

Bitches be crazy, amirite?

Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour. This was the GOP A-Team, the guys who should have showed up to the first debate but didn't because running for president is hard and the spouses were reluctant. Nothing commends them for it.

I think there's something commendable about putting your family's welfare above your political ambitions but I guess that's why I'm not a WSJ writer.

Also, this is classic grass-is-greener stuff. There's no reason to think any of these five have the chops to run a national campaign; Christie maybe the only one, and it's pretty hard to see the hard-core conservatives flocking to him any more than they do to Romney.

my god this little fucker is blaming the wives

this is like listening to someone wonder aloud for weeks why that one person they went on a date with hasn't called. maybe they got stuck in a well! no, dummy...

the "better men" of the GOP decided to sit this one out because obama's position isn't nearly as weak as conservatives believe and they didn't want to waste time losing

besides, daniels and barbour (and maybe a couple of the others on that list) were "running" as of a year ago, but saw the vast oceans of money mitt romney was swimming in and figured out the primary was hopeless too

I would be v. surprised if Jeb ever runs -- there's a lot of skeletons in his closet.

13.9%

Having seen a little more of Christie the past couple of months, I think there would have been a 10-20% chance of him being a give-'em-hell type voters took to, and an 80-90% chance he would have been a very iffy loose cannon.