Advice to Santorum

Poll: Santorum’s Pennsylvania Lead Vanishes.

Excerpt:

Support for Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania is crumbling, according to a new Franklin and Marshall College Poll of the state he represented in Congress for 16 years.

Mr. Santorum, is statistically tied with Mitt Romney in the poll with a 30% to 28% lead, within the poll’s margin of error.

Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich came in with 9% and 6% respectively.

By contrast, the college’s February poll found Mr. Santorum with a commanding 45%-16% lead over the former Massachusetts governor.

The landscape changed significantly during the last month as support for Mr. Santorum has been dropping nationally, but Mr. Santorum has been banking on Pennsylvania’s April 24 primary to help keep his candidacy viable.

Comment: Advice to Santorum ... bow out after Wisconsin (April 3rd).

Fat Lady tuning up

Illinois

Illinois - a Romney win?

In Illinois, Santorum’s Chance at Nomination Is Slipping Away

 Excerpt:

Illinois had appeared to offer Mr. Santorum a chance at a breakthrough. Instead, unless the polls are very wrong, it may represent a breakthrough of sorts for Mr. Romney – by far his biggest delegate grab and margin of victory in a Midwestern state so far. If Mr. Romney wins Illinois by that margin, it will take the political equivalent of the Bartman ball to cost him the nomination.

Comment: Santorum keeps calling Romney a weak candidate but if that's so he's weaker!

Inexorable Delegate Math

Romney won Tuesday delegate haul

 Excerpt:

After Tuesday votes in Mississippi, Alabama, Hawaii and American Samoa: DELEGATES WON

• 41 Romney
• 35 Santorum
• 24 Gingrich
• 1 Paul

Comment: The Romney train moves on. Paul stays in because of message. Gingrich stays in because his campaign pays him and because of his GIANT EGO.

Republican Primaries - the Fat Lady is about to Sing!

Republican 2012 race 'mathematically' over: Graham

 Excerpt:

Mitt Romney has all but won the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, top senator Lindsey Graham said Sunday, agreeing with the candidate that "mathematically, this thing is about over."

Romney has won 14 of 25 state-by-state votes that decide which Republican candidate takes on President Barack Obama in November, compared to eight wins for Rick Santorum and just two for former House speaker Newt Gingrich.

These victories have given Romney almost 40 percent of the 1,144 delegates needed to secure the nomination. He has 446 delegates, Santorum 199 and Gingrich 117, according to authoritative poll aggregator RealClearPolitics.

"Mathematically, Rick would have to win 75 percent of what remains," Graham, a senior Republican who serves on various Senate committees, told ABC's "This Week" program.

"He's done an outstanding job, Rick has, of starting with almost nothing and being a real contender, and Newt's come back from the dead two or three times," Graham said. "But mathematically, this thing is about over, but emotionally it's not."

Graham was speaking ahead of two do-or-die contests for Gingrich on Tuesday in the conservative southern states of Mississippi and Alabama -- although the former House speaker has pledged to stay in the race until the bitter end.

Comment: Image Source.

CNN's delegate count

CNN's delegate count

Delegate Math

How math virtually guarantees Romney's nomination

 Excerpt:

The Associated Press' estimate puts Romney currently at 415 delegates, to Santorum's 176, with Gingrich and Paul controlling 105 and 47, respectively. A candidate needs a majority of all delegates in order to win the nomination, which this year comes to 1,144.

Two of the remaining winner-take-all states will be uncontested, Utah and Pennsylvania. Romney is all but guaranteed to win Utah's 40 delegates on June 26, and so if Santorum win his home state's 72 delegates on April 24, his net gain is 32 -- leaving him about 200 behind Romney, with about 1430 remaining. The remaining states are scattered geographically and demographically, distributed evenly between Romney's base (the Northeast), Santorum's (the heartland), as well as the Romney-leaning West and the Gingrich-Santorum South.

If Romney were to stumble and win only a third of the delegates in the remaining states, Santorum would have to win more than half of all the delegates in order to pull ahead, meaning that Gingrich and Paul together would have to be held below 16 percent. To date, not even counting Romney's blowout in Massachusetts, Romney has won nearly half of the delegates while Santorum has won about one-fourth. That means the only path to Romney losing is Santorum doubling his past haul, while Romney dropping by about 70 percent. That's not likely.

Comment: Image from Romney campaign email. Remember delegate math is imprecise. On why Gingrich continues (basically his campaign is paying him):

Gingrich, meanwhile, directly benefits from continuing to run. His campaign has paid him, personally, more than $100,000 in "unspecified expenses in what amounted to petty cash," as the Washington Times' Luke Roziak puts it. The Gingrich campaign has also paid or otherwise subsidized Gingrich's for-profit enterprises, in the process raising his profile and, presumably, his speaking fees. Gingrich's top aides are rewarding themselves with plenty of Sheldon Adelson money, too -- one super-PAC aide paid herself $220,000 for about 10 weeks of work.

The MSM and Repubican "Bloodletting"

Romney Scores Big Win; Press Fails to Notice

Excerpts:

Romney is being widely panned by the press for an “inability to close the deal,” and yet the description seems far more apt for Santorum, who now has blown huge leads in the most critical contests of recent weeks, Ohio and Michigan. If anything, the more voters look at Santorum, the more concerned they become and less likely they are to sign on the dotted line.

...

All reporting is now sports reporting. Reporters love a battle and they love to go on TV and rave about how exciting everything is. And editors seek a bracing and never-ending storyline because it draws readers and ultimately pleases their corporate bosses, who want to sell papers and generate pageviews.

 The headline “Romney Scores Six Wins and Continues Methodical Drive Toward Nomination” is just not going to drive eyeballs to your story.

 And reporters also tend to be moderate to liberal. Bloodletting among Republicans at some level is agreeable to many of them. I have to believe that if this was Obama instead of Romney, the stories would be about the growing inevitability of Obama’s nomination.

That Romney is in all likelihood on the march toward nomination will probably soon become too apparent for any serious journalist to deny. At that point, for the reasons listed above, we will begin to hear feverish talk about the prospects for a third party candidacy.

Comments: Source of images: 1. bloodletting; 2. Screen capture.

Rick Perry's bona fides

A Texan's ‘exceptionalism’

Excerpts:

Social issues, especially abortion, are gateways to the Republican nominating electorate: In today’s climate of economic fear, a candidate’s positions on social issues will not be decisive with his electorate — but they can be disqualifying. Perry — an evangelical Christian, like most Republican participants in Iowa’s caucuses and the South Carolina primary — emphatically qualifies

...

Between 2001 and last June, Texas — a right-to-work state that taxes neither personal income nor capital gains — added more jobs than the other 49 states combined. And since the recovery began two Junes ago, Texas has created 37 percent of America’s net new jobs.

Perry Breaks With a Fellow Texan: Bush

Excerpts:

... in recent years, Mr. Perry has broken politically with Mr. Bush, questioning his credentials as a fiscal conservative, accusing him of going on “a big government binge” and playing down some of Mr. Bush’s accomplishments in Texas in light of his own.

Mr. Perry’s public statements exposed a long-simmering rivalry that had been little known outside of the political fraternity here but underscores the rightward drift of the Republican Party since Mr. Bush was president. More acutely, Mr. Perry’s criticism holds potential peril and benefit for him should he decide to mount a presidential campaign, allowing him to establish an identity distinct from Mr. Bush but risking a guerrilla campaign against him by the former president’s inner circle.

...

The rivalry has become lore in the state capital, at times bordering on urban legend. “An eight-foot alligator in the sewer,” said Mr. Perry’s chief political strategist, David Carney. Stressing that the two men were friends with more similarities than differences, Mr. Carney said, “They are in the same church, different pews.”

Neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Perry would be interviewed for this article, and people close to both said the rivalry existed far more between their aides than between them personally.

The relationship between the camps includes a rich mix of political differences, class distinctions, loyalty questions and perceived slights of campaigns past. And it is a uniquely Texan story, opening in the Western dust bowl where both emerged — Mr. Perry as a conservative Democratic state lawmaker from a modest farming family, Mr. Bush as a failed Republican Congressional candidate of famous New England stock.

Mr. Bush had returned to his hometown of Midland in 1975, to break into the oil business, after his years at Phillips Academy, Yale and Harvard Business School — time away from the state that Mr. Perry’s close associates brought up frequently in interviews. Mr. Perry returned to his struggling family farm in Paint Creek roughly two years later, after graduating from Texas A&M and serving as a captain in the Air Force.

Successfully running for the Texas House of Representatives in 1984, he won early attention as a dogged campaigner who flew himself to his own events in a beat-up propeller plane.

In 1989, Mr. Rove, already a powerful Texas political consultant, helped persuade Mr. Perry to join the Republican Party and run as agriculture commissioner.
...

Mr. Perry is said to believe that there is a big opening for a Republican like him in the race, and aides are mapping out how a campaign could come together. “The Republican field of candidates looks like a drought-stricken cotton crop,” said a close friend, Cliff Johnson.

Comment: First article is George Will's; second NYTimes. I think Perry could fire up the Republican race! Tim Pawlenty's star is setting because of poor showings in debates. I see the # 1 being Romney and # 2 being Bachmann (who looked good in Iowa last week!).

Pawlenty: Real change is about telling hard truths

Pawlenty: Real change is about telling hard truths

Excerpt:

As a candidate for president, it would be easy for me to just tell the American people we can solve our debt crisis and fix our economy without making any tough choices. But we have now seen where that type of leadership gets us.

Leadership isn't about fancy speeches and empty promises. It's not about telling people just what they want to hear. It's about telling the truth. Like too many Washington politicians, President Obama governs with an eye toward the next election, at the expense of the next generation. He would rather pretend there is no crisis and attack those who are willing to stand up and try to solve it rather than risk doing anything about it himself.

Comment: I'm impressed with Pawlenty!

Early Look at the Possible Republican Presidential Candidates

Comment: 1st article: George Will doesn't think much of Huck or Newt; 2nd: NYTimes graphic early possible GOP Candidates. Later ... my early view.

George Will: Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and the spotlight-chasing candidates of 2012

Excerpt:

There are at most five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon - Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.

So the Republican winnowing process is far advanced. But the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates [editor: Huck and Newt] to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons.

NYTimes: Possible Republican Presidential Candidates

Final comment: I see Romney as the early front runner. I see Pawlenty as a good VP running mate. I'm impressed with Daniels. Re Newt: I see him as an important Republican theoretician ... not a viable candidate.