This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Sorting out cause and effect in political campaigns is not always simple. Some people look at John McCain’s nomination in 2008 and Mitt Romney’s success in Iowa and New Hampshire this year and see highly fortuitous demolition derbies. Others look at the same facts and intone “next-in-line” or some similar Iron Law of presidential politics.
So it’s not surprising there might be serious differences of opinion over the latest unlikely set of events in the 2012 contest: Newt Gingrich’s attacks on Romney’s record at Bain Capital, and the apparent revival of the former Speaker’s campaign in South Carolina.
The basic data points are all reasonably clear: immediately after finishing fourth in New Hampshire, Gingrich (with Rick Perry as his wing-man) starts blasting Romney as a job-killing corporate predator. His SuperPAC, Winning Our Future, infused with a fresh $5 million by casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, put out a lurid trailer for a “film” about Bain Capital’s alleged atrocities against companies and workers with the evocative title: “When Mitt Romney Came To Town.” (The documentary is also dubbed in accompanying publicity material as “King of Bain.”) Said film, a 28-minute masterpiece of invective, was put up on the web, to the glee of Democrats astonished at this gift to their own general-election talking points. The conservative commentariat came down on Newt (and to a lesser extent Perry) like a ton of bricks, accusing him of treason against capitalism. Gingrich danced this way and that, at first seeming to regret this line of attack, then continuing it. Winning Our Future began airing 30- and 60-second snippets from its film in South Carolina, as part of a $3.4 million ad buy. Fact-checkers tore into the film, accusing it of various slurs against both Romney’s role in Bain and the specific accusations against the company’s practices.
What came next was surprising: New polls came out showing Gingrich with rising support in South Carolina, at the expense of both Romney and Iowa co-winner Rick Santorum. Then Gingrich suddenly announced he was asking his SuperPAC to edit or take down the film, and perhaps its ads, too, if they also prove to be inaccurate. (He also demanded that Mitt rein in his SuperPAC, which did untold damage to Newt in Iowa and is now heavily buying up ad time in South Carolina.) Winning Our Future dragged its feet on complying, saying it won’t act until Romney enumerates any inaccuracies and also answers some new questions about his relationship with Bain. As of this writing, the film is still up on the internet, and Winning Our Future has moved on to a new round of attack ads against Romney in South Carolina, focusing on his own dubious claims of job creation at Bain, and his “moderate” record as governor of Massachusetts.
One key imponderable is the extent to which actual South Carolina Republican primary voters have absorbed the back-and-forth maneuverings. Few have probably seen the full Winning Our Future film, which is the source of the most controversial accusations against Romney and Bain, and of the elite conservative backlash against Gingrich for countenancing it. And it’s not clear those who do see or hear about it will fully identify with its Michael Moore-ish message (though it’s not entirely the sort of thing a lefty would produce; it’s loaded with xenophobic flourishes in addition to “corporate-raider” bashing). Complicating the picture even more is that the most likely receptive audience for this message of anger at Wall Street predators are downscale white voters in the Piedmont and Pee Dee regions of South Carolina, who also harbor lots of Christian Right/Tea Party sentiments–that is to say, anti-Romney tendencies.
The crosscurrents in South Carolina are probably best illustrated by oracular comments from the king of Palmetto State conservatism, Senator Jim DeMint. DeMint (who has said he is not endorsing a candidate) joined the chorus of criticism of Gingrich for his supposed anti-free-enterprise message, and predicted a Romney win in his state. But within the same 24-hour span, he also, in the course of saying nice things about Ron Paul, suggested there is no room for “moderates” in today’s GOP.
Need still another complication for figuring out what’s going on? A group of Christian Right leaders convened in Texas by Family Research Council chief Tony Perkins has just endorsed Rick Santorum, after a multi-ballot vote in which Gingrich seems to have done initially well, while Perry–who hosted many of the same worthies in a highly publicized event over the summer–was largely dismissed as yesterday’s news.
So did Newt’s mini-surge in the polls result from his attacks on Romney, the SuperPAC’s vicious artistry, or perhaps just an inevitable consolidation of right-wing opposition to Romney’s nomination? And of equal importance, how much of the eventual outcome of the primary will be attributed to this saga? There remains another week of campaigning, and a televised debate. But regardless of the result, the attacks on Romney could play a major role, whether it’s via damage done to Romney or to the growing anger of conservative opinion-leaders against Gingrich for raising this toxic issue in the first place. So important lessons will be learned from this strange phase of this strange nomination contest. But which ones?

Last weeks’ story — reported in Huffpo and elsewhere — about a group of James O’Keefe’s confederates who attempted to vote in the New Hampshire primary using falsified ID’s “in order to prove voter fraud is possible” has not gotten the attention it deserves.
In principle, the perpetrators’ actions are no different than walking into a church and robbing the minister at gunpoint (while covertly filming the crime) in order to “prove” the need for metal detectors in church doorways.
As it happens, the perpetrators in O’Keefe’s criminal conspiracy didn’t even get away with it. A poll watcher recognized one of them as using a false ID and alerted the authorities. The debate is now whether O’Keefe’s criminal “perps” should be prosecuted for committing a serious crime that carries a jail sentence.
But the deeper issue that has not gotten any attention yet is the profound moral red line that the O’Keefe gang has now crossed. To understand it, one just has to look back at the past.
The history of political extremism in the 20th century offers a vast number of examples of actions by groups traditionally called “provocateurs” – extremists who pretended to be members of some opposite group and then committed crimes in their name in order to discredit them. In American history the most extensive use of this tactic was by anti-union forces in the 1930’s who infiltrated union demonstrations and then attacked police or bystanders in order to provoke a violent clash and police crackdown on the demonstrators. Another example were covert payments by segregationists to Black teenagers to throw rocks and bottles during some civil rights demonstrations.
The inescapable fact is that the moment that any group decides it has the moral right to commit covert illegal acts in order to “prove they are possible,” it then becomes morally reasonable and even obligatory to take the next step and commit illegal acts while pretending to be members of some other group because “our opponents are going to do it anyway; we’re just exposing the real truth about what they are going to do.”
Just consider how small a step it would have been for the O’Keefe gang to have used African-American or Latino fraudsters and then release the video as proof that actual voter fraud had occurred, rather than as proof that fraud is technically possible. Even if the video at some point identified the fraudsters as actually working for a conservative group, once the video began to circulate on the internet, the distinction between “staged” voter fraud and “actual” voter fraud would be completely lost.
In fact, this is already happening with the video filmed by the O’Keefe gang. On many conservative sites the video is being presented as documentation of actual voter fraud not “staged” voter fraud. Before long, tens of thousands of people will be passionately citing this video as “smoking-gun proof” that actual voter fraud is occuring.
(O’Keefe has deliberatied encouraged this kind of confusion about his videos and has also directly falsified them in the past. Images of the famous “pimp suit” he claimed to have worn during covert taped interviews with members of ACORN were actually edited into his videos after the fact, dramatically altering the viewers impression of what the people being interviewed were seeing. Any moral line between adding phony pimp suits to a video after the fact and hiring African-Americans or Latinos to act as fraudsters is quite literally impossible for normally honest people to distinguish).
Right-wing “provocateur” actions of even greater malevolence are already being committed in the Wisconsin recall campaign. Opponents of the campaign to recall Governor Scott Walker are openly boasting on conservative websites of misrepresenting themselves as petition gatherers for the recall and throwing out the signatures they collect or of providing misleading information to people who wish to sign. Other opponents brag that they have deliberately signed petitions with false names in order to invalidate the petitions and the recall process in general.
There is no reason to mince words: these are nothing less than right-wing extremist attacks on American democracy itself. The perpetrators can be called with perfect justice both “subversives” and “un-American.” Democrats should not only demand that they be punished to the maximum extent of the law but that conservatives and Republicans should publically denounce these acts and join in the demand for forceful prosecution. Anything less on their part will represent a shameful wink of tacit approval and repugnant evidence of moral complicity.

Ruth Marcus’s Washington Post column “The real battle for the soul of America” clarifies the stakes involved in GOP’s bid to retake the white house:

Romney asserts that President Obama wants to “fundamentally transform America,” turning the country “into a European-style entitlement society.” In fact, Romney and his Republican presidential rivals have a far more radical transformation in mind. They envision a dramatically shrunken federal government and a dangerously unraveled social safety net.
Theirs is not the self-styled compassionate conservatism of a George W. Bush…Republicans have traditionally favored state over federal involvement, but the degree of proposed retrenchment during the current campaign is remarkable — and troubling.

Marcus quotes from one of Romney’s demogogic government-bashing statements to underscore the danger posed by his agenda:

“Well, what we don’t need is to have a federal government saying we’re going to solve all the problems of poverty across the entire country, because what it means to be poor in Massachusetts is different than Montana and Mississippi and other places in the country,” Romney said.
“And that’s why these programs, all these federal programs that are bundled to help people and make sure we have a safety net, need to be brought together and sent back to the states. And let states that are closest to the needs of their own people craft the programs that are able to deal with the needs of those folks.”

Then there is Romney’s simplistic critique of important federal programs, including “food stamps, housing vouchers, Medicaid, emergency heating assistance.”

“What unfortunately happens is, with all the multiplicity of federal programs, you have massive overhead with government bureaucrats in Washington administering all these programs. Very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them,” Romney added.

Marcus corrects:

Nice talking point, if it were true. As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has demonstrated, the major programs for the poor are extraordinarily efficient, even taking into account state as well as federal administrative costs. In 2010, 96.2 percent of Medicaid spending went for care; 94.6 percent of food stamp spending went for food; and 90.9 percent of housing program dollars went to rental assistance for low-income tenants….the impact of their plans would be to shred the safety net. Making sure that doesn’t happen is the real battle for America’s soul.

Whether Romney’s problem is ignorance or dishonesty, it’s clear he won’t be bringing much “compassionate conservatism” to his presidential campaign.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
There is good news and bad news for Mitt Romney out of New Hampshire. The good news is that he won an impressively broad-based victory that did nothing to slow his drive for the Republican presidential nomination. But it also exposed a vulnerability that could soon prove debilitating, if not fatal, to his candidacy.
While Romney is not yet a prohibitive favorite, he will be if he wins in South Carolina. And he will win, as John McCain did in 2008, if multiple candidates to his right divide the anybody-but-Mitt vote. Although emergency conservative conclaves are breaking out all over, none seems likely to lead to a unity not-Mitt candidate in time to make a difference. (If conservatives couldn’t even get Rick Perry to leave the race, how can they get either Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich to stand down? And there’s nothing they or anyone else can do about Ron Paul.)
Also encouraging was the success of the campaign’s systematic effort to make its candidate broadly acceptable to most factions of the Republican Party. Romney won 39 percent of the moderate vote in New Hampshire (matching his overall share). He did even better (48 percent) among voters who regard themselves as somewhat conservative. He even commanded 33 percent of those who consider themselves very conservative, beating Rick Santorum by 7 points.
While it’s easy to downplay these results as evidence of Romney’s home-field advantage in the Granite State, it’s harder to dismiss a recent Gallup survey: 59 percent of moderate and liberal Republicans consider Romney to be an “acceptable” nominee … and so do 59 percent of conservatives. Indeed, he’s the only candidate that a majority of Republicans deems acceptable.
In short, Romney is well positioned to win the nomination and unite his party. Most of the conservatives who mistrust him are likely to fall into line, however grudgingly, once the general election contest begins and they confront the possibility of a second term for Barack Obama. And Romney is also well-positioned to run a strong race against the President: the country is in a somewhat conservative mood and in principle seems willing to accept a somewhat conservative candidate. Republicans lose favor when they go too far right, as Gov. Kasich did in Ohio and Gov. Scott continues to do in Florida. Romney has been pretty good at keeping his balance so far.
This brings us to the bad news: The waning hours of the New Hampshire contest saw the emergence of a critique that could severely damage Romney’s general election prospects unless he figures out how to handle effectively. I’m referring, of course, to Bain Capital, which has become the prosecution’s Exhibit A against the candidate.
Bain matters because it goes to the heart of the core case Romney is making: The economy is broken, Obama doesn’t know how to fix it, and I do. If his rivals can undermine his record as a job-creator and substitute the narrative of Romney as a “vulture capitalist” who makes money by looting firms and firing workers, his path to the presidency becomes a lot steeper.
The only thing surprising about this issue is how late in the day it took center-stage. After all, an increasing number of blue-collar workers have become Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. The Tea Party movement is hardly sympathetic to Wall Street and the financial sector. And a key element of the Republican base–small business–has long regarded the corporate/establishment wing of the party with suspicion. As a populist whipping-boy, Romney is straight out of central casting.
So what should Romney do? His initial response–claiming that an attack on private equity firms is an attack on capitalism–may get him through the Republican nominating contest, but it won’t serve him very well in the general election. Most citizens make an intuitive distinction between business activities that add value to workers and the economy (running an auto company, for example, as Romney’s father did) and those that shuffle paper to the advantage only of the shufflers. It would be costly–perhaps fatal–for Romney to end up on the wrong side of that divide.
His campaign is wrestling with (some reports suggest divided over) how best to respond. There’s an understandable reluctance to open up to public scrutiny the nearly one hundred deals in which he participated as the head of Bain Capital. But there’s really no choice. Romney has to present a counter-narrative, and he can’t do that without talking about individual cases. If he doesn’t release details on his own terms, they’ll dribble out anyway, prolonging the pain. And besides, in a public culture now suffused with anti-elite suspicion, a rich man running for president can’t just say “Trust me”–especially if the skills that enabled him to become rich are the heart of the case he’s making for replacing an incumbent president.
Since his awkward run for the Republican nomination in 2008, Romney has shown an impressive ability to learn from his mistakes, and he has run a smart, disciplined campaign this time around. Now he faces what may be his toughest test. Can this proud and private man come to grips with the core of his public identity? Can he acknowledge the warts on his record? Can he level with the American people, or with himself? If he passes this test, he’ll be a formidable candidate. If not, he’ll end up on the defensive. If the economy doesn’t improve, it may not matter. If it does, how Romney handles his record at Bain–not in the fall, but in the next few weeks–could prove decisive.

Paul Begala sums up “Mitt Romney’s Charmless Win in New Hampshire” at the Daily Beast: “…It’s pretty easy to look bulletproof when your enemies are shooting blanks. Yes, Jon Huntsman ran a “comparative ad” that was weaker than baby’s pee. And, yes, Newt Gingrich body-slammed Romney in the Meet the Press debate, essentially calling him a liar and demanding he “cut the pious baloney.” But no one hit him right between the eyes with the kinds of ads Hillary and Barack used, let alone the carpet-bombing Romney’s allies used against Gingrich in Iowa.”
Seems a little early for Republican kumbaya, what with Governor Perry calling Romney a “vulture capitalist” and all.
WaPo’s Chris Cillizza presents compelling data from a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll which indicate that endorsements don’t matter much. But I still think this one opened some hearts.
The GOP’s Class ‘Warfare’ meme rings a bit ridiculous to the reality-based community. But class conflict is definitely on the rise, according to a new Pew Research poll. As CNN’s Moni Basu reports, “Conflict between rich and poor is at an all-time high, at least in the way of public perception…The survey found that 66% of adults believe there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the two groups. That number spiked 19 percentage points since Pew last posed that question in 2009…The public’s evaluations of divisions within American society, conflicts between rich and poor now rank ahead of three other potential sources of group tension — between immigrants and the native born; between blacks and whites; and between young and old…”
You think Newt’s Bain-Romney attack is hot stuff? Dig Benjy Sarlin’s TPM post, “Dems Prepare To Hammer Romney With The REAL Bain Onslaught“.
Alex Altman has an interesting analysis up at Time Swampland, “What Ad Spending Says About Each GOP Candidate-and Their Success.” Altman notes, “If Romney gets dinged by the air wars in South Carolina, he’s likely to quickly recover in Florida. The state’s size and large number of major media markets make it prohibitively expensive for minor-league outfits to play there.”
Taylor West and Peter Bell agree at Hotline on Call that it’s all about Florida as far as Romney is concerned.
The GOP spin doctors are working overtime, parroting the meme that private equity firms are mighty job-creators. But this Nobel laureate ain’t having it. “…We’re not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America Inc.”
Election prediction junkees should read this L.A. Times post by Brad Schiller before making any bets.

As Republicans battle to determine who is the “true conservative” in their presidential field, and worry over the possibility of a third-party candidacy by Ron Paul, some of their old problems with the general electorate haven’t exactly gone away. Writing at Salon, Tom Schaller takes a look at recent public opinion surveys of Hispanics and talks to some of the experts, and concludes John McCain’s surprisingly poor performance in this demographic in 2008 could be tough for this year’s nominee to match:

“The GOP’s reputation among Latinos is as bad as it has ever been, driven primarily by statements and state legislation on immigration,” Gary Segura, a Stanford political scientist, co-investigator on the National Latino Survey, and president of Latino Decisions polling firm, told me. “Though President Obama’s early inaction on immigration reform and his record deportations significantly undercut his support within the community, there is not a single Republican presidential candidate willing or able to exploit that weakness; they are all too busy tacking to the right to please their base.”
Only 17 percent of Latinos say that the Republican Party is doing a “good job,” according to a Latino Decisions poll taken last month. Forty-six percent agreed that the GOP “doesn’t care too much” and another 27 percent described the party as “hostile” to Latino interests. With a combined 73 percent of Latinos expressing generally or strongly negative attitudes to the party, the Republican nominee is almost guaranteed to win a minority of Latino votes in 2012.

Schaller doesn’t specifically mention that likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney has positioned himself as an immigration hardliner in order to exploit nativist unhappiness with Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich’s positions. But it’s going to be an issue in the general election.
Some Republicans, as Schaller notes, look to a possible vice-presidential nomination for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as a significant palliative for their Hispanic problem. But as The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn explained last September, the evidence of Rubio’s “pull” among non-Cuban Hispanics is very slim.
The Republicans’ strategy for appealing to Hispanics will become a very big deal as the general election cycle gets underway. But right now you get the sense such voters are far, far from their minds.

So amidst all sorts of chaos (with Newt “walking back,” then “walking back his walkback” of the anti-Bain message, as he is blasted by Rush Limbaugh and Jim DeMint), the pro-Gingrich Super-PAC Winning Our Future released its much-awaited 28-minute video entitled “When Mitt Romney Came To Town.” I delayed this post hoping WOF would provide an embed code, but just go to the website and watch the show. Believe me, it’s worth the time.
You can make your own judgment, but this is one of the most devilishly effective attack communications I’ve personally ever seen–a heat-seeking missile aimed directly at the white working class id. Mitt saying “A bientot” at the end (apparently harvested from Romney’s Olympics PSAs) is the capper.
And aside from the xenophobic flourishes, the film is really just a well-wrought glimpse at the underside of contemporary finance capitalism, with Mitt Romney serving as the chief villain, right up there with Bernie Madoff and other sinister characters. No wonder DeMint and Limbaugh have denounced this video: they should, because it’s an assault on everything they believe in.
Word is 30-second and 60-second clips from the video will go up on SC television tomorrow, as part of a $2.4 million ad buy (some serious coin in this low-cost state). I’ve only been able to see the 30-second version, but it’s obvious these short ads won’t pack the punch of the longer piece.
The rapidly emerging CW is that this assault on Romney will help him win the nomination, either because conservatives like ruthless financial pirates, or (as I have earlier predicted) Republican poohbahs think the contest is getting too nasty, and this particular attack very obviously reinforces Democratic talking points–not just about Romney and Bain, but about many of those alleged “job creators” generally. Hell, if I were a rich guy myself, I’d find a way to put “When Mitt Romney Came To Town” in front of as many people as possible.

Watching video clips of Romney’s flip-flopping on just about every major issue is a tiring experience. But his lurid history of pandering to exploit the latest trends in political idiocy should not distract voters from the raw truth of what he stands for today, which is an all-out capitulation to the agenda of the vulture capitalists.
The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuval explains it well in her WaPo op-ed, “Extremist in Pinstripes.” Vanden Heuval reviews Romney’s extremist positions on social issues, immigration, increasing the military budget and notes his call to push the Supreme Court even further to the right with his appointments.
She provides a disturbing account of Romney’s blase certitude in support of draconian cuts in Pell grants, Medicaid and food stamps, children’s health programs and aid to people with disabilities to “give multinationals a tax holiday” and give millionaires a nearly $300K tax cut, and adds:

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Romney, as Mike Huckabee once famously noted, “looks like the guy who laid you off.” At Bain, he was the guy who fired you. In a review of 77 major deals that Bain capital did when Romney headed the firm, the Wall Street Journal found that “22% [of the businesses that Bain invested in] either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses.” Of course, Bain produced remarkable returns for its investors, including Romney.

Romney’s flip-flopping proclivities are the easy target for commentators and pundits. But no one should be deluded by speculation that Romney will flip back toward moderate conservatism, if elected. As vanden Heuval argues,

…This isn’t the plan of a moderate. The conservative garb isn’t something Romney has donned for the primaries. These policies…are consistent with Romney’s background as a corporate raider. And as his fundraising shows, they play well in the plush offices of big finance where Romney made his fortune. He is a champion for the 1 percent, peddling a program that will ensure that working Americans bear the cost for the mess left by Wall Street’s extremes while the buccaneer bankers, corporate raiders and private equity gamblers are free to go back to preying on America.

Vanden Heuval’s article should provoke a sobering reassessment among those who have entertained the fantasy that Romney would govern as a moderate. As E. J. Dionne points out, chameleon Romney has proven highly adept as deluding his fellow Republicans across the party’s ideological spectrum that he reflects their views. Dems should not be so gullible, for there is every reason to believe his election would unleash the worst elements of vulture capitalism.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Last night was, by all accounts, a good night for Mitt Romney. He went into the New Hampshire primary needing two things: to win by a significant margin and to leave no one else with a plausible path to victory.
The results from the Granite State fulfilled both of these Romney criteria, and it’s now extremely likely Mitt Romney will win the Republican presidential nomination this year. But it’s still unclear whether he will emerge from the process with his reputation, and his polling numbers, intact.
Romney’s greatest threat now doesn’t come from any other candidate: there is no one in a position to beat Romney, and he could quickly wrap it all up with wins in South Carolina and Florida. Having won both Iowa (at least technically) and New Hampshire, Mitt is now the odds-on favorite going forward according to every precedent. Ron Paul’s two best states are behind him, and he’s going nowhere fast. Romney’s Iowa co-winner, Rick Santorum, tied for fourth in NH; whatever “bounce” he had from his Iowa performance has subsided, and he has no natural advantage when the campaign moves to the South. The candidate who is already mounting a potentially devastating SuperPAC assault on Romney in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich, has little if any personal momentum coming out of NH. Rick Perry’s predictably abysmal performance in NH further undermines any hopes of a southern comeback.
The biggest boulder in the road ahead for Mitt, the vicious anti-Bain ads being bought in South Carolina by the pro-Gingrich Winning the Future group, may not hurt him immediately, if only because no rival is poised to take advantage of it: At this point it appears the only effect would be to depress turnout. But Romney should be concerned for their impact beyond the Palmetto State–particularly in the general election. There is almost nothing in these ads that could not be directly repeated in a pro-Obama ad.
The big question now is whether conservative opinion-leaders, who have basically resigned themselves to Romney as nominee, begin to denounce Gingrich for his anti-Romney nastygrams in SC. If they fail to do that, it might tempt the struggling survivors of the competition so far–not only Newt, but Paul, Santorum and perhaps even Rick Perry, who desperately needs a southern breakthrough fast–to go collectively nuclear on Mitt. Lord only knows how many SuperPAC benefactors each of them might identify to back an apocalyptic set of attack ads; we are only now beginning to understand how much the new rules of campaign financing enable billionaires like Newt’s friend Sheldon Adelson to casually expend sofa-cushion money to wreak great havoc with ad buys. Jon Huntsman, whose all-or-nothing New Hampshire bid fell far short of victory, has a Super PAC backed by the bottomless wealth of his father. What if the Huntsmans decide to go for broke?
So we can assume Team Romney is burning up the phone lines today trying to convert his objective domination of the invisible primary and the first two voting events into a nomination. And their most powerful talking point may simply be: if you let Mitt get torched, who’s left? The previously torched Gingrich? The feckless Perry? The one-hit wonder Santorum? Surely not Ron Paul!
And thus the scenario that Democrats have long feared–the early-primary success of the candidate who fairs best in general election trial heats against Obama–is now developing in an unexpected way. Instead of convincing primary voters to cast their ballots for him, he may have to convince conservative opinion-leaders to talk his ostensibly vanquished opponents to leave him alone, or at least refrain from going medieval on him. Otherwise Mitt’s likely victory in the nomination contest could prove to be Pyrrhic.

Not a big fan of Gov Christie of NJ. But it was good to see somebody nail former Ambassador Huntsman for his shameless backstabbing careerism in going after the job of the guy who gave him his biggest break. It resonates particularly well after Huntsman’s sanctimonious “I want to be very clear with the people here in New Hampshire and in this country. I will always put my country first.” Substitute “career” for “country” and you have the real key to Huntsman’s character.
Despite’s Huntsman’s zinger citing Romney as exhibit “A” showing why the country is so divided, I have to agree with Joe Klein’s assessment in Time Swampland that “No one really laid a glove on him, not even in the NBC debate on Sunday morning, which was far sharper and more substantive than the ABC debate last night. There was a reason for Romney’s success-and it pains me to disclose it: he was well-prepped by his consultants. His answers were clear, concise, declarative sentences. None of the other candidates seemed to have been prepped at all.”
Elizabeth Warren gets the Fenway thing a lot better than did Martha Coakley.
Mackenzie Weinger of Politico reports a new Pew poll which indicates that 51 percent of “Republican and GOP-leaning voters said the candidates are excellent or good,” compared to 68 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters said they had good Republican candidates four years ago.
Here’s an interesting wrinkle from The Hill: John McCain faults the Citizens United decision for having a “damaging” impact on the GOP presidential field. “…It’s also the result of the worst decision, I think, in at least the last 50 years or so, of the United States Supreme Court called Citizens United, where they basically unleashed without transparency, without accountability, huge amounts of money from these so-called independent campaigns, which you and I know are not independent.”
Nate Silver and Micah Cohen make the case that “Ground Game Determines Candidates’ Strength,” noting that Paul and Romney have the most stable numbers of the current GOP field and the most well-organized campaigns.
New Hampshire’s influence as the earliest primary state could be overshadowed by it’s importance as the state with the strongest pro-GOP trend since 2010, according to Chris Palko at Campaigns & Elections. In addition to the largest swing in the state legislature in 2010, “according to Gallup, only Rhode Island saw a greater decline in Democratic Party identification from 2008 to 2010.”
Quentin Fottrell of SmartMoney.com has some worthwhile insights in “10 Things Pollsters Won’t Tell You: Why you should think twice about those survey results this election season.” Among Fottrell’s insights: “People lie to say what they think is acceptable” (“social respectability bias”), “”The way we ask the questions can determine the answers” and “We’re being outclassed by social network sites.”
Robert Reich’s “How a Little Bit of Good Economic News Can Be Bad for the President” notes a political booby-trap which may lie ahead for President Obama — encouraged discouraged workers.
HuffPo Pollster Mark Blumenthal crunches the numbers and comes up with “…An average across all polls should produce the clearest picture of the outcome…As of this writing it shows Romney’s support declining slightly (to 36.8 percent) followed by Ron Paul (at 17.6 percent), with Huntsman just a point and a half behind (at 16.0 percent) and rising fast, followed by Rick Santorum (11.6 percent), Newt Gingrich (10.0 percent) and Rick Perry (0.9 percent). Huntsman’s momentum is on a track to catch Paul, though who will finish on top is one of those things about which polling simply cannot be certain.”