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

what kind of yes men does rick perry have, jeez

kevin drum getting pessimistic:

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/how-do-you-solve-problem-mitt-romney

I'll be surprised if the GOP primary race goes much beyond the end of February, and I'll be shocked if Super Tuesday on March 6 doesn't end it completely. This means that the Republican base will have six months to resign themselves to their fate and come to the conclusion that Romney is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being ever to run for president. And they will. When Job 1 is beating the anti-Christ, learning to love Mitt Romney will be a piece of cake.

So what does this mean for Team Obama? My guess: the flip-flopper charge probably won't get much traction. It's mostly a problem for conservatives, who don't fully trust that Romney is one of them, but by the time summer rolls around they're going to be his most fire-breathing supporters. They'll have long since decided to forgive and forget, and independents won't care that much in the first place as long as Romney seems halfway reasonable in his current incarnation. It's possible that Obama can do both — Romney is a flip flopper and a right-wing nutcase! — but if he has to choose, my guess is that he should forget about the flip flopping and simply do everything he can to force Romney into the wingnut conservative camp. That'll be his big weakness when Labor Day rolls around.

k drum veering a lil too into the abstract, romneys biggest weakness is that hes a droid

but by the time summer rolls around they're going to be his most fire-breathing supporters.

so not gonna happen

Obama's gonna paint him as an out-of-touch plutocrat, gonna go hard on the populist angle

Haven't seen any mention of it in recent days but I'm now idly wondering how much of the non-Romney sentiment really IS driven by "Mormons, ew."

is there a documented case of Romney creating jobs in a failing company as opposed to downsizing until the company is profitable? because I have only ever heard/read the latter

my understanding is all he's ever done is the latter

so can we raise enough money to produce commercials accusing Romney of wanting to deport unemployed Americans, since that is where his expertise lies

i don't know if it's quantifiable. frankly i think a lot of liberals are overstating it out of hope.

frankly i think these interdenominational divisions are just not that important anymore as long as everyone is "conservative". there have been mormon senators and governors in good right-wing standing forever now. a generation ago catholics and baptists and jews and all the rest had huge alignment problems but now those lions and lambs are laying down just fine. thanks, pro-life movement, and 'clash of civilizations' etc.

sure mormonism is a little wilder with its heresies but as long as your policy positions are where they need to be all the angels-on-other-planets shit is just irrelevant

xp to ned

feeling very frank today i guess

No, that makes plenty of sense through and through. I was mostly shrugging the idea off as well and was only struck by it a bit today given that Texas meeting from all the Perry backers that was announced.

These hand-wringing conservatives will start to chill out when they realize President Romney will nominate the, er, right kind of judges to the bench and SCOTUS.

idk, I think the religion thing is gonna be important for some, maybe not a lot, but my aunt (in her 70s, Oklahoman, staunch Baptist) is going to have a REAL tough time voting for a Mormon.

if he wins he'll win w/ a congress that's even more right-wing than he is, so yeah, they'll be fine

RedState is starting to cave on the point.

despite being very political and very conservative for as long as i can remember, my aunt did not vote in 2008 because she was so disillusioned by McCain's nom. even though she hates Romney/Santorum/Paul even more than she did The Mav, she is going to vote GOP no matter what b/c of devil Obama

this time

Rick Perry would make a "better general election candidate" in which country?

is texas a country yet

so many errors in that Red State post

i have a friend from college who is still pining for perry, so to speak

One of the commenters talked about pulling for Perry and well there you go.

Perry's basic problem atm, aside from his blatant failure to attract voters, is that he took a shitload of money from his wealthy Texas backers in order to run for POTUS. If he quits now, those folks are going to be mad as hell if he walks off with their money with nothing to show for it. My guess is either they're going to make him stay in the race or else they'll force him to endorse their second choice - or they'll make his life a living hell for screwing them out of $$$.

what? that makes no sense.

political donations disappear as soon as they are made. there is no "ROI" unless your guy wins, which perry isn't going to do. his donors are going to demand he keep going to burn more of their money? why?

yeah I don't get that

If nothing else, Perry's 'wealthy Texas backers' will just keep getting paid off in-state.

This meeting with them is probably to arrange that in-state payback and to abase himself for running such a damn fool campaign he made Phil Gramm look competant by comparison.

mitt romney's phone game, interesting stuff

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/2012/01/romney_s_iowa_win_it_took_a_lot_more_than_money_.single.html

But what was more important for Romney’s team was not just that his total share of the vote remained steady but that the individual voters who comprised it didn’t move either, making it easy to keep track of who they were and to mobilize them personally.

It was the ability to pinpoint and track supporters that settled Romney’s decision to publicly commit to winning Iowa late this fall. Romney’s campaign made a big show of converting the former video store into a headquarters, while spending millions on local television ads and dispatching the candidate to travel the state more aggressively than he had. But a ruthless yet largely invisible strategy had already been in place for much of the year, tracking both Romney’s supporters and his opponents. Only when Romney’s count appeared to exceed any rival’s did advisers unveil the trappings of a traditional caucus campaign.

iirc, unspent campaign contributions accrue to the donee, who then has wide latitude on how they are spent, even if he can't blatantly shove it in his own pocket. If Perry has a big unspent war chest and it was full of hundreds of thousands of my dollars, I would demand to retain an interest in that cash. Perry isn't the sort of pol who'd say fu to that either. He knows he's just a puny man propped up by these rich guys.

well i doubt perry is flush atm, and as to what perry could do right now to carry out a donor's interest in that money, my point stands. i really don't get where you're going with this. perry wants to quit but his donors are begging he keep going, for the money?

And speaking of Perry:

Perry spoke to reporters in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday following his disappointing fifth-place showing in the Iowa caucus...Perry clearly wants to put his Iowa experience behind him. He called Iowa a "quirky place" with "a quirky process."

I kinda wish more candidates that flop would just flat out shit talk the place for the LOLs.

And from the Mormon who did stay out of Iowa about Romney's endorsements:

“It seems the more establishment piles on, Dole, McCain, all the rest, nobody cares. Nobody cares about this."

[quote]Texas Gov. Rick Perry says he is leaving the ''quirky'' state of Iowa to continue his presidential race among ''real'' Republicans in South Carolina.[/quote]

("real" = "not those freakin' Yankees")

man if he is casting iowa as yankeeland it just shows how bad he is at politics

Perry's donors may not understand the depths of his inability to win. I mean, they sank a lot of money into him because they believed quite the opposite. If they think that his campaign is salvageable, say, by a radical replacement of his staff and shift of strategy, then they might be very pissed off if he fails to make a last ditch effort to turn it around.

These are Texans -- people who are used to celebrating football players who stay on the field with broken ribs and make the tackle that saves the touchdown and the game. It may not make sense in a practical context, but this is Texas... you win or you come back on your shield.

http://i.imgur.com/T1AiN.png

RELATED: Jon Huntsman Says Iowans ‘Pick Corn,’ Not Presidents

too honest to be president

who was president sterling?

― goole, Wednesday, January 4, 2012 5:18 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

prez of stanford, in whose office the hippies were "sitting in" to protest vietnam

Up in New Hampshire:

Wandering around the event, Romney supporters were surprisingly difficult to find in the crowd, even among those sporting campaign stickers and signs. Outside the event, a small group of backers politely argued with a group of unidentified protestors dressed in animal costumes, including a dolphin mocking Romney’s “flip flops.”

“We loved him as governor,” Amanda Stradling, who moved to the state from Massachusetts, told TPM, holding a nine-month old baby wearing a Romney sticker.

But for every Romney, there seemed to be plenty of undecideds, independents, and even Democrats. One group of three friends, two of whom said they plan on voting for Obama, came up from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut as “political tourists” just to check out the candidates.

“It’s just too early to decide,” one twenty-something in a Boston Red Sox hat said.

Simona Amiet, a homemaker who immigrated from Switzerland 20 years earlier, said she was leaning Romney because he was “knowledgeable with enterprise,” but had yet to decide. A Hillary Clinton supporter in 2008, she said she knew she wouldn’t be voting Democrat again in the general election, upset with both deficits and how he treated her favorite candidate four years ago.

Al Plass, 57, said as an independent he was still not sold on Romney, and that he was beginning to even warm up to Rick Santorum. But he was still holding out hope that his dream candidate would run: Donald Trump.

“He has way more business experience than Romney,” he said. “He’s straightforward, he’s a patriot, he loves this country.”

Outside the event, a small group of backers politely argued with a group of unidentified protestors dressed in animal costumes, including a dolphin mocking Romney’s “flip flops.”

I can't even

in what way is Trump a patriot

did he kill a muslim I don't know about

Simona Amiet, a homemaker who immigrated from Switzerland 20 years earlier, said she was leaning Romney because he was “knowledgeable with enterprise,” but had yet to decide. A Hillary Clinton supporter in 2008, she said she knew she wouldn’t be voting Democrat again in the general election, upset with both deficits and how he treated her favorite candidate four years ago.

asd vjudfoivsj8ivu aeugjSEUfioihaw4egyvhfaduighaertghaohdu;fvuos dfhaegv98yfhaguer tgyhauoshdfjlw4 hfasduo yfalf;jaw;efser fkwer84aiiv893as fas gatjjyghk jhgcn gdsfbrg bkjghn

sounds like newt's her candidate then

“knowledgeable with enterprise"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWIEyZFwZ8k

An Iowa caucus is basically like a livestock auction crossed with a general assembly, right?

and a New Hampshire primary is basically a Rotary Club crossed with a toadstool.

link courtesy nro/the corner but i put here so more people would see

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/my-night-at-michele-bachmanns-headquarters