Romney in 2012

UPDATE: It's started http://mitt12.com/

Ron Simpson over at the Cluttered Eclectic Mind is a committed Mitt Romney supporter. I left this in his comments:

McCain (unless he self-destructs, which isn't out of the realm of possibility) will get the GOP nod and lose to Obama/Clinton. What Mitt can do is burnish his conservative credentials over the next 4 years (and maybe replace some of that money that he spent from his personal fortune).

He could throw his support towards Dr. Paul now (since McCain pretty much has the nom locked up) and up his standing with conservatives. Since Dr. Paul isn't going to run in 2012, and the economy will be an issue at that time as well (and not terrorism). Romney could position himself to pick up the only segment of the GOP base that's growing, the libertarian Goldwater wing of the party.

Mitt is certainly more than capable as a politician and a good executive, but his credentials as a principled conservative have always been a sticking point with me. Could I vote for Mitt in 2012? He would have to reverse his position on the Iraq war, but I truly believe that it will be politically palatable 4 years from now because of the deteriorating economic situation here. People are going to be looking for places to cut government spending and the only place that is going to happen is in foreign policy.

That being said, Romney is young, (he's 60 but looks 50) and has the bankroll (and shown more than a willingness to use it) and he has shown great organizational skills. So 2012 could mark "his turn".

UPDATE:

It looks like Bryan over at Hotair is thinking the same thing:

What Romney doesn’t have and never really established is his conservative bona fides (the same goes for Huckabee, for that matter, whose social conservatism is solid while he lacks on the economic and national security fronts). Romney won endorsements from credible sources, but the voters either didn’t warm to him personally or didn’t trust him philosophically because he hasn’t always stood on the same side of many issues. From an organizational and personnel point of view he ran a great campaign, but from an ideological and emotional point of view he never made the deal. That’s the bad news.

The good news for him is that he has a few years in which the conservative mantle is up for grabs. No one owns it or has earned it. It could be his if he chooses to earn it. Reagan changed his positions on some issues over time, so it’s not the case that an honest change of mind is permanent political poison. It’s not. But Romney has to prove that where he is now is where he will always be and that he’s a studied and worthy leader.

The $49 Million Delegate

That's how much Rudy Giuliani spent on his doomed presidential bid. For all of that money, Rudy received a total of ONE delegate to the GOP convention. I wonder where the $12 mil that's left over goes?

At least he's not John McCain, who, while the presumed front runner for the nomination, had at the end of the 4th quarter about $3 mil cash on hand. He probably has had a surge in funding with his recent primary victories, but there is no way that he's going to be able to compete with Mitt Romney as far as cash for advertising is concerned.

Even worse off is Mike Huckabee, the Iowa caucus winner reported just under $700k cash on hand for the end of the 4th quarter. He's done after Super Tuesday.

Mitt Romney has a personal fortune of around $250 million and has lent his campaign around $40 million of it to date. His 4th quarter donations from people other than himself totaled around $9 million. He ended up with around $2.5 million cash on hand.

The big winner in the money raising race for the 4th quarter? Ron Paul. His donations totaled nearly $20 million, with the balance sheet reading nearly $8 million cash on hand by the end of the 4th quarter. What's interesting is that despite the media blackout, the lack of speaking time at the debates, and his ability to attract his fair share of kooks, nuts, and geeks. His fundraising totals have grown each and every quarter.

The FEC reports are here and a good write up from the LA times of last quarter is here.

Of course all of this pales in comparison to Barack Obama. In the month of January, he raised $32 million dollars.

My god, the GOP is gonna lose and lose big.

Mitt Romney has Good Listening Skills

While McCain, the soon to be departed Giuliani, and Huckabee have always been easy to dismiss as serious contenders for my vote for various reasons (too statist, too crooked, too much of a nanny stater, respectively). Mitt Romney, like Fred Thompson, got a second look from me a while back. Mainly because I wasn't too familiar with him and he did have a trackrecord of turning around enterprises that were failures (the SLC Olympics comes to mind).

I did have a little bit of sympathy for Mitt for the attacks that he had to endure because of his religion. However, this is the second high visibility time that Mitt has done the bob and weave when asked a direct question that you could tell he was unprepared for and it shows. The first time was here.

At issue this time is the income tax. Talk radio show host Mark Larson out of Tampa interviews Mitt and asks him to consider the "one tax" which is a value added tax on M1, so transactions at all levels whether it's a company that purchases huge volumes like say Walmart or Staples, or it's individuals who are at the 7-11 buying those nasty hot dogs that have been sitting all day under the heat lamps, the transaction is charged at 1 percent. It's an interesting concept and would definitely be an improvement over the current income tax. But an even better proposal would be to scrap the income tax and really shrink the size of the federal government. It's OK if the government at the state level expanded, if that happened, you could always move to another state while staying in the US.

Anyway, I get the feeling upon listening to the interview a second time, that Mitt didn't hear the part about "transactions at all levels" maybe the interviewer could have hit that point harder but I doubt it. You can listen to the whole Mitt interview here. However, I like the youtube version because Larson talks a little more about the interview during his next segment.

The Crossed Pond: Primary Rundown

One thing I know for sure after today's voting:

On the Dems side, John Edwards should pack it up. It's down to Obama and Hillary with Hillary a little ahead on the momentum.

Today's primary contests in Nevada and South Carolina courtesy of Brad at The Crossed Pond:

For the Republicans, Nevada was weirdly uncontested, so Romney gets crowing rights and an impression of continued viability basically handed to him by his opponents. I think part of what has left this Republican field so wide open is the terror of ALL the candidate to even compete in states that aren’t already in their pocket. So they essentially get divvied up before voting even begins. The only people even appearing to run national campaigns at this point are McCain and Huckabee, which is why they’re winning. In any event, Romney gets a boost and said impression of continued viability from Nevada, enough so that he can probably count on being the third man in the race going into February 5th.

The whole analysis is here

What is missing in most of the MSM and the Pajamas Media Blogosphere coverage that Brad does talk about is Ron Paul's second place showing in Nevada and the demographics that go along with it:

It’s a little unfair for people to mitigate the showing by saying the rest of the candidates didn’t campaign there, as it’s not like John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, or Fred Thompson are nobodies that have to shake a lot of hands to be viable anywhere. Ron legitimately beat them here, and now HE gets to remind dismissive interviewers that he has beaten at least once every candidate in this race, and along with a national 4th place showing, has a small but existent cache of delegates (actually, there are a lot of reports coming out from Nevada that Ron may have actually done a lot better with the delegates than with the preference polling, and though it’s not being reported, he could well walk away with half of the delegates out of Nevada, which remember has more than South Carolina; it could turn out that Ron Paul comes in third today on the delegate count), and that his support isn’t large, but it’s not shallow or regional either.

That said, it also indicates that even in a field which his opponents very publicly pass on, Ron can’t break to 20%, meaning he’s running less against his opponents than against his own glass ceiling. Of course the flipside of that is even WITH his opponents in the race he STILL gets comparable results, which is interesting in its own right. In any case, he comes out of Nevada with an underreported silver medal that nevertheless gives him bragging rights and a bit of righteous credibility from now on. His campaign is legitimately more viable than Fred Thompson’s, John Edwards’, and, I would argue, Rudy Giuliani. Which is not to say Paul is particularly viable (he’s not, for the nomination), but he is JUST as viable as those other guys.

The cross-tabs are interesting also. Ron won—outright won—the independent vote (only 12% in this race), which is what pushed him past McCain (who is no slouch among independents). The only other demographic he outright carried was those who identify as having no religion. But most interesting to me is he continues to get about 20% of the under-30 vote in every single voting state, which is providing him his engine of vote-getting. When a party that is having a lot of problems staying viable in the face of shifting demographics, and which is in large part bleeding potential support, in particular younger voters, having this fly on the wall candidate who is nevertheless able to mobilize the youth of the GOP in a way nobody else this cycle is ought to be something the Republican party pays attention to.

Could Dr. Paul be the only man who can save America the party? The GOP has been in freefall since it became the party of big government and foreign interventionism. All of the other candidates (save Fred!) have nothing to offer but more of the same. McCain, Romney, and Huckabee offer nothing but a 3rd term for Bush IMO. Ron Paul and to a limited extent Fred have a fundamentally different message than the "heroic conservatism" garbage of the others. But Thompson is most likely out with a poor 3rd place showing in SC.

Other thoughts:

What will be interesting to see is who bails out on the race because of money. Fundraising comes into play with Florida and Uber-Tuesday coming up. Pretty much all of the GOP (except Romney) are going to have to pick and choose where to campaign.

Will the history of the winner of South Carolina winning the GOP nomination hold? For all that is holy in this world I hope not. I don't know what I'm going to do if McCain gets the nomination. I can't vote for him.

Rudy is still in this race, isn't he? He is going to look like either a genius or the biggest dope if Florida doesn't come through for him. According to the NYT article linked above, he's running short on cash also. Where the heck did all his money go? It doesn't seem like he's been campaigning anywhere.

The Weekly Buchanan: Subprime Nation

UPDATE - It looks like the Asian Markets are starting to feel the effects of recession fears in the United States - Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index is down 4 percent.

Pat is on fire this week:

Since it began to give credit ratings to nations in 1917, Moody's has rated the United States triple-A. U.S. Treasury bonds have been seen as the most secure investment on earth. When crises erupt, nervous money seeks out the world's great safe harbor, the United States. That reputation is now in peril.

Last week, Moody's warned that if the United States fails to rein in the soaring cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the nation's credit rating will be down-graded within a decade.

Our political parties seem oblivious. Republicans, save Ron Paul, are all promising to expand the U.S. military and maintain all of our worldwide commitments to defend and subsidize scores of nations.

It's not that they are oblivious Pat. It's that their world view is such that preserving and strengthening the status quo can only involve the continual expansion of government. Even among the GOP candidates, except for Paul and Fred (to a much lesser degree), the idea of reducing bureaucratic interventionism is remarkably absent in word (McCain, Huckabee) and deed (Huckabee, Romney, and Rudy).

Romney and "The Speech"

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney delivered the speech yesterday, allegedly to address concerns about his Mormon faith. Whether to make it or not has been subject to internal debate for awhile. I haven't watched it, because it's not an issue to me. But apparently it's enough of a concern to enough GOP voters that the campaign went with it. You can view the speech here.

The reaction to it by the punditocracy was what caught my attention. Hugh Hewitt gushed:

Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech was simply magnificent, and anyone who denies it is not to be trusted as an analyst. On every level it was a masterpiece. The staging and Romney's delivery, the eclipse of all other candidates it caused, the domination of the news cycle just prior to the start of absentee voting in New Hampshire on Monday --for all these reasons and more it will be long discussed as a masterpiece of political maneuver.

Which led to Bryan at hotair.com commenting:

I liked Romney’s speech quite a bit, but Hugh is making out like it was the St. Crispin’s Day speech as delivered by Winston Churchill in the Sistine Chapel on the first Christmas with Nazi bombers overhead.

Either that or the declaration of independence speech by President Whitmore on July 4th before he hopped into his airplane to attack the giant flying saucers.

With apologies to Shakespeare a bit of this masterpiece of snark from one of the readers at hotair:

Journalist nor pundit, shall over free men
Be by flowing words a common will deny.
This civic will the good man teach his son;
And Election Day shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be triumphant,–
We Free, We Happy Free, We Americans.
For we that day that cast our votes in free
Rule we together; be we ne’er so vile,
This day shall our wisdom show forth:
And “Great Men” in our land now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurst they were not there;
And hold their statecraft cheap whiles any speaks
That voted with us upon Election Day.

Ron Paul on the Religious Litmus Test

Pilfered from RedStateEclectic:

Howard Fineman of Newsweek interviews Ron Paul on Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee



More to come, I'll post as I find them.

Fred Thompson interviewed on Fox News

What is it that Larry David said from "Curb Your Enthusiasm"? "I'm completely nonplussed"



Pilfered from Hotair.com

With Fred in the race, it looks like we have all of the Spice Girls:

Mitt Romney is Posh - good looking, polished but sometimes out of his depth
Mike Huckabee is Sporty - he is into healthy lifestyles
Rudy Giuliani is Scary - in your face attitude, and I'm sure he's had paternity issues to deal with
Fred Thompson is Baby - welcome to the party
John McCain is Ginger - a cool demeanor with a hint of crazy, which makes him cool to hang out with but he missed his opportunity and he's getting long in tooth.

What about Ron Paul? He's Elvis.