Mitt Romney won the CPAC presidential straw poll with 38 percent of the vote, finishing with a single-digit lead over runner-up Rick Santorum, who pulled 31 percent support. Newt Gingrich was a distant third, with 15 percent, followed by Ron Paul, with 12 percent. [...] For the first time, CPAC pollster Tony Fabrizio also conducted a national survey of self-identified conservatives. Romney also finished on top in that survey, by a tiny margin: he took 27 percent to Santorum’s 25 percent, Gingrich’s 20 percent and Paul’s 8 percent. – Burns and Haberman
Amid a PPP poll showing a national Rick Santorum surge and Politico articles about “angst” over Mitt Romney, the hero of CPAC ’08 comes through with a win in 2012.
From Jonathan Martin, who picked up the Romney line that had everyone scratching their heads.
“I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” Romney told the annual gathering.
The response was immediate.
“Severely?”“I have never heard anybody say, ‘I’m severely conservative,’” Rush Limbaugh noted on his show.
“That didn’t get a lot of applause,” firebrand Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) observed with a tight smile.
“Some things are too funny to comment on,” a laughing Newt Gingrich commented as he walked into the conference to give his own speech.
With Santorum surge giving Romney something to worry about again, the religious conservative Republican candidate has also gotten lucky of late with the news. He gets another gift from a href=”http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72751.html”>Catholic bishops who, predictably, have announced Pres. Obama’s historic contraceptive mandate is unacceptable.
First, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said the administration’s plan still includes a “nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients.”
[...] A senior administration official told POLITICO Saturday that the White House didn’t expect to win the support of the bishops with Friday’s updated policy. Instead, the official said, the administration was focused on achieving a balance of respecting religious beliefs and ensuring women had access to preventive services.
The bold above is a beautiful thing to read because it has the virtue of being correct on all counts.
Let Catholic bishops wage the fight and let Rick Santorum join in. All it will do is tie Mitt Romney in knots so that if he survives the religious conservative overreach he’ll be unelectable in the fall.
Republicans need to get a collective clue and step away from their irresistible desire to depend on social issues, which won’t work in the 21st century, choosing instead to turn to a platform of government overreach, which actually could gain traction.
One note about the graphic at the top. I post it in honor of fallen Newt Gringrich, who is now looking like the loser he always was, but who has done more to damage Mitt Romney than any Democrat, including team Obama.
Though I will not be supporting any candidate this year, I always enjoy a good wingnut cannibalism festival. It’s been especially delectable with Republicans tearing apart capitalism and the free market candidate, which is exactly what Newt Gingrich unleashed, with a lot of help from that crazy Texan Rick Perry, whom we all so miss.
I am reminded of the Thomas Frank book, “ What’s The Matter With Kansas. ” The central theme being how successful the right wing was at distracting conservative democrats in southern states with social and cultural issues while picking their pockets economically. These voters, slaves to their religious beliefs, were fair game for the charlatans looking to redistribute the wealth upwards. Ironically, Mr. Romney, the one republican with the slightest chance of defeating Mr. Obama ( now gone ) has become the latest victim of this Machiavellian scheme. God bless America!
Well, it’s a long way from November and I don’t do predictions.
But Romney’s got real problems in the general election, that’s for sure. They may be insurmountable and what that means down ballot is harrowing for the GOP.
Having been forced into early retirement due to a corporate takeover my wife and I decided to move to Oklahoma City (my wife and her family are all Oklahomans) to be near her aging mom and her siblings. Oklahoma is the reddest of all the states with McCain winnning all 77 counties in Oklahoma as did George W. Bush in 2004 and 2000. OKC is a small enclave of Democrats and Liberal Democrats and President Obama received his largest share of the 2008 vote in OKC but still lost the county which also includes large rural areas.The last Democratic Presidential candidate who won Oklahoma’s small number of electoral votes was LBJ in 1964.
The first, and only, poll of Republicans was just published and show that Newt Gingrich is the likely winner of the Okalhoma Republican Presidential primary on March 6th. Gingrich has built up a commanding lead (46%) among one demographic group, angry white male Tea Party supporters:
http://americanresearchgroup.com/pres2012/primary/rep/ok/
His commanding lead among angry white male Tea Party supporters is explained by a recent paper published in a peer reviewed science journal:
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/01/04/0956797611421206.abstract
Naturallly, Oklahoma’s angry white male Tea Party supporters are science deniers and will dismiss this article as left wing propaganda by peer reviewed science journals who have taken over all scientific research, largely funded by the liberal NIH.
It’s tough for a Liberal Democrat to be living in Redneckistan but the fight goes on but we never give up. At least we know that you can mark Oklahoma in the Republican column before the first vote is cast in the 2012 election which means we won’t suffer through the carpet bombing that is coming from the Koch Brothers, Dick Army and Karl Rove’s Super PAC’s who won’t waste their money in a state where the election is already decided.