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

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

http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/imgad?id=CICAgICQgZ76gAEQrAIY-gEyCJ2VF7RJk73p

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3bYBkGgRCE

okay the reveal at 1:22 is just too much

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

In fairness, it spent six months not being that effective until it was joined in a pincer assault by his strategy of "Don't be Mitt Romney or Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry or Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney". Most of the "Ask the people how they're voting" pieces I've seen have a lot of his voters talking more about how they need to make a stand against Romney / Obama than saying "I am fired up for President Santorum". If they were Democrats I'd say they were holding their noses, but the Republican style has always been more the fixed grin and panicking eyes.

yah santorum might be crazy but he comes across mainly as just a huge dweeb, no one is that psyched abt him, they just don't like mitt dawg

he really got where he is atm by everyone else being eliminated rather than any merit of his own

he's a bit of a hail mary for that base (so to speak.)

― omar little, Wednesday, February 29, 2012 1:44 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol subtle

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...

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Wednesday, February 29, 2012 1:12 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM. I think aiding his recent rise (other than being the last viable non-Mitt)has been jumping on the contraception thing, and expressing his uber-Catholic views - which are more or less shared by Evangelicals - in a way that Mitt and his Mormonism cannot. (Newt is a recent convert, and has no moral high ground anyway, except in his own mind.)

btw Newt, stfu about debating the president. You're a single-digit (in MI) non-entity, and if I hear one more time about how Obama bowed to the Saudi king I'm gonna lose it.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_02/santorum_loses_catholic_votebu035714.php

So based on prior evidence, there’s really no particularly reason to think the “Catholic vote” was ever Santorum’s to lose. His voting base has always been conservative evangelical Protestants, who also make up a high percentage of the voters fixated on making abortion illegal, a particularly strong Santorum demographic. I’m sure the JFK slur didn’t help, but this is one “surprise” in Michigan that really shouldn’t have been that surprising.

Interesting, thanks. From the comments:

Women! Women! Women! As a female Catholic I wouldn't touch Santorum with a ten foot heavily used turd pole

Spreading Santorum, the page defining 'santorum' as a by-product of anal sex, has finally dropped from the top results on Google.

now it's urbandictionary ahahahahahahaaaa

win some, lose some eh rick

I like to think this whole campaign has simply been an effort to generate enough news mentions to change his Google search results.

I hate politics.

ok I lolled at this onion headline:

Romney Thanks State He Was Born And Raised In For Just Barely Giving Him Enough Votes To Beat Total Maniac

From WaPo "The Genesis of a church's stand on race":

At church functions, Gray said, he and other black Mormons suffered the assurances of their white brethren that “you will have the priesthood in the world to come,” or encouragements that if they lived worthy lives, “you will find your skin will become lighter and lighter.”

I'd say, "You can't make this up" except people already did make it up.

you can make this up, using one weird trick

Rick Santorum is NOT making friends among caretakers of the developmentally disabled.

Exhibit 1

Exhibit 2

for that libel alone santorum should be... i don't know if i can say it on a message board.

*plop*

With Michigan behind him, Santorum smells victory

srsly?

Interesting spin by Santorum camp. Basically, he's saying, most of the early voters didn't really mean to vote for Romney. It only looked that way.

He's obviously deluded over the long haul, but I think his point about early voting is valid (I've mentioned the same myself). The voters in this campaign have had the attention span of a flea, and I also think it would have made a difference if all the votes had been cast after Santorum's three-win night.