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

(xpost) Unless...he calls in a favour from the superest super-delegate of them all.

I think people read too much w/r/t 'catholic' as a predictable voting demographic these days

You...you heartless cynic.

didn't john kerry lose catholics? people don't vote their religion anymore, they vote for the candidate who best matches their craziness level

I should expand that into a book

can I write a blurb or have you already chosen Morbs because he doesn't drive

well you can write one but I'm still not sending you a free copy

No copy no blurb

its not looking good out there for our boy!

:(

MSNBC just called it for Romney. lame.

booooo

my night is ruined

The Republicans need to schedule a debate. That'll bring some clarity to this.

Believe it or not there IS another debate coming up soon. Huckabee's doing some sort of new forum thing on Saturday.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/huckabee-will-host-a-presidential-forum-on-fox-news/

Mr. Huckabee will host his third presidential forum on Saturday, an executive for the Fox News Channel said on Tuesday. So far three candidates, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, have committed. Ron Paul has still not indicated whether he will attend.

The program, which is scheduled from 8 to 10 p.m., will be broadcast from Ohio, the executive said, speaking anonymously because a formal announcement had not been made.

Mr. Huckabee will focus the forum on jobs and the economy, a particularly potent subject in Ohio where the manufacturing sector has suffered greatly. Underscoring that distress, the setting for the event will be a now-shuttered DHL plant in Wilmington.

Wilmington was devastated when DHL, the shipping giant, reduced its United States workforce by 9,500 three years ago. The city, with only about 12,000 residents at the time, had thousands of jobs disappear.

During the program, Mr. Huckabee will be joined by Charlie Gasparino, a senior correspondent for Fox Business Network, and Elaine Chao, a labor secretary to George W. Bush and now a Fox News contributor, and three Ohio residents whose lives have been affected by the recession.

"So which of you hates unions more...oh wait, Ohio, they repealed that. Uh..."

Mitt sure does sound like an asshole at his victory speech. He also looks like Jim Carrey both facially and in terms of his aspect - he's got that same level of emotional detachment that he can't quite act through

That bit about Obama ranking himself one of the four greatest presidents ever--is Romney just making stuff up there? I didn't hear a thing about that.

lol Novi

He must be. Obama is one of the most self-deprecating presidents ever.

Truth has gone out the window.

Sounds like God left the stupid window open again.

mitt romney's life is actually the truman show, just done on an epic scale

this is childish & unrealistic stuff to get mad about but you know how the GOP narrative about Obama has a bit about how "arrogant" Obama is? well, what the fuck do you call the tone of this Romney speech if not arrogant?

it's weird it's like I don't like the dude but this speech is the first time I've thought like "no, fuck you, I hope you pour a whole lotta money down the crapper losing this election"

arrogant is just code for uppity, it has little to do w/ anything he actually does

yeah theoretically and practically I know that but I'm a pretty trusting & credulous person and I am kind of genetically incapable of not taking people at their word even when the evidence is overwhelmingly against them

...like, I even vote for Democrats sometimes. HEY-OHHHHHHHH

So Romney's talking about something Obama said on 60 Minutes:

“I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history,” Obama told CBS’s Steve Kroft.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/60-minutes-edits-out-obamas-claim-that-hes-the-fourth-best-president/

Well...Romeny's paraphrase is a stretch, obviously. Obama clarifies his point right in the quote: "just in terms of what we've gotten done." He's making a quantitative judgement, and I bet within that context he's right.

it bears pointing out that more than anything else What's Wrong With America is that we have massive numbers of totally uninformed voters whose reasons for voting the way they do are completely regressive. not that other countries don't have such people. i can't help but feeling that among comparably wealthy nations we rank pretty high in numbers of People Who Don't Have a Fucking Clue.

also everybody thinks they are good judges of character --against nearly all of the evidence--when it comes to politicians. "he just seems more moral." "i don't know, i just feel like i can trust him, you know?" "he seems like a good man."

would read a "you are not so smart"-style analysis of political self-delusion and its consequences.

There are a lot of problems with UK politics and the ways a lot of voters enter into them, but I was always shocked by how specific and, dare i say, "honest", the debates and interviews during election season could be.

My mother thinks Obama seems like "a nice guy", but she'll never vote Democrat and considers everything Obama has done to be a failure because she expected to get the retirement money she lost in the recession to come back. People have a very skewed idea of what politicians can actually achieve, I think.

btw i find santorum terrifying, not so much b/c he will win the election (he won't) but because of the fact that a significant minority of the american electorate appears to be OK with his explicitly theocratic, fundamentally punitive vision for america. before this election he was a pathetic has-been, now he is a pathetic has-been around whom a very vocal minority (albeit, i think, not a big one) can rally and begin to cohere. i feel that this is somewhat different than the historical "moral majority"-type evangelical coalition which largely devoted itself to voting for broadly sympathetic politicians (or those they felt were sympathetic). in santorum we now have a national figure, with some electoral constancy, who embodies and even intensifies the ethos of the most retrograde elements of our society. that worries me for the future.

i mean santorum is basically pat robertson or worse and he's leading in some polls. even huckabee was not as disgusting as this guy.

tbh, Sarah Palin looked like that person four years ago. She's still in the news occasionally, but not at all omnipresent.

that's true. actually i haven't come across a palin article for many months

but frankly i think palin would have fared not much better than bachmann in this primary. maybe worse.

that section of society has never gone away

There's a reason why Nixon's or Dubya's approval ratings never dropped below a certain number.

that section of society has never gone away

― stay in school if you want to kiw (Gukbe), Wednesday, February 29, 2012 1:17 AM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

have they ever -- in the past 50 years -- had a quasi-viable major party candidate that did not just pander to them but actually embodied their ethos quite so fully?

i think santorum is a clown who is going to fade pretty rapidly once it's all said and done. palin faded because she was so nakedly and stupidly opportunistic and obsessed w/her own celebrity and had zero credibility w/even a lot of people in her own base once she resigned as governor and after putting her foot in her mouth one too many times. even a lot of the idiots she appealed too wanted substance at some point. i think a lot of her fans turned to bachmann hoping for a more viable version of palin but quickly realized what was up. santorum i think is filling a bit of the palin gap but he's a bit of a hail mary for that base (so to speak.)

Santorum will fade away, sure, but to think that that base that loves him hasn't been there for a long time and will be there for a while feels a bit optimistic.

wouldn't deny that

Santorum only fades away with repeated washings

The base is highly situational though - it's not like he's been on 38% of the vote all along.

True, but that's also media attention. He was a joke until he managed to rally some local state support. The fact is he's a candidate who speaks his mind honestly and, as much as you can try to rip him for earmarks or (bizarrely) Arlen Spector, he's remarkably consistent in his ideals and comes across as genuine. In a way, I think, its his nutjob hardcore "moralism" that has refreshed his fans in a way that they haven't been pandered to in a while. Obviously his surge is probably over, but it also would never happened had Romney not been such a disagreeable candidate for so many. So yes, they are slaves to the trends, but Santorum is probably the most significantly attractive candidate they've had in years. And I'm including Huckabee.

the moral slump

^^ there's a lot going on in this phrase

Isn't the line on Santorum that his no-compromise neo-fundamentalism is more a campaign strategy than something he actually believes? It does get him votes, it's brought him this far, but I thought one of the ways Romney's managed to hammer his has been to point out that in Washington, he was a strategic-voting cynic just like everybody else prior to the Tea Party freshmen

however otm that it's a worrying sign for his 2012 campaign strategy, "be completely crazy," has been extremely effective

in this decadent era of abortions and insubordinance somebody's gotta run up the black flag and just start shooting people. santorum appears ready, willing, and able to delegate that job to trusted functionaries

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