Month: March 2012

It's not the long primary that has sucked enthusiasm out of the race, it's the front-runner: 

[I]t's hard to imagine what sort of messaging would have worked better for Romney, especially considering his record. One of the arguments the consultants make elsewhere is that Romney hasn't captured the conservative media. … A little more outreach might have softened the skepticism, but it also might have illustrated how little Romney likes to be challenged on questions about his policy decisions, and how slippery he can be when anyone tries to pin him down. Romney isn't struggling because of his campaign. The campaign is struggling because of Romney.

Jim Antle adds: 

Sure, I've been puzzled as to why the Romney campaign hasn't anticipated obvious lines of criticism or why they seem intent on irritating conservatives by boasting of the likelihood they will win a nomination they should have already had in the bag by now. But the candidate is a bigger problem than the campaign. Campaigns matter, sometimes a lot. But they matter less than political consultants think they do.

(Photo: Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks to Sprint President and CEO Dan Hesse during the driver's meeting prior to the start of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway on February 26, 2012. By Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

Mercifully, Rick Santorum has now disowned the remarks of the bigot who blessed and endorsed him.

"Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It's almost like an Etch a Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again," – Romney senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom, on the campaign's message.

David Corn – on video – eloquently expresses much that I have learned about our president.

I'll be on Real Time with Bill Maher this Friday night – live from Los Angeles.

Yglesias is untroubled by America's growing debt. Millman counters:

Borrowed money needs to be repaid or rolled over at whatever interest rates prevail in the future. And the party won't last forever – eventually, the United States will not enjoy the advantage of borrowing so cheaply. Indeed, we hope we don't – our cheap borrowing costs are substantially a function of things that are wrong here and elsewhere in the world (uncertainty about the Euro-zone, the underdevelopment of Chinese financial markets, slow real growth prospects in the United States) that we hope will be ameliorated over time. If we borrow primarily in order to finance current consumption, we will not have improved our capacity to shoulder the burden of the debt we incur. But we will have gotten used to a higher level of consumption than we can actually support with our own productive activity. That's not just a missed opportunity. That's the road to a crisis.

And that's why, despite some incredulity at a Catholic's decision to balance the entire budget on the backs of the poor and cut taxes on the wealthy after three decades of soaring inequality, I can see the attraction of Ryan's proposal, in its long-term impact on the debt. It does twice as well as Obama. And the refinement of his Medicare proposal is a positive thing. But the fantastic cuts to basically all discretionary spending, the decision to forgo tax reform as a means to raise revenues as boomers retire and the working poor cope with harsher and harsher global competition, and the meekness of the defense proposal make this the right target wrecked by truly skewed, ideologically-driven priorities. I think Matt Miller grasps the core point – and illustrates why the GOP has now become unmoored from its conservative sister party in the UK:

The crucial thing to understand about Ryan is that he is not a fiscal conservative. He’s a small-government conservative. These are very different things.

The fastest-growing federal program in Ryan’s new budget is interest on the debt, which nearly triples from $234 billion next year to $614 billion in 2022. He doesn’t even pretend to balance the budget until 2040, and then only under utterly dubious assumptions. These are not the choices a fiscal conservative makes. A fiscal conservative pays for the government he wants. Ryan wants government smaller than the one Reagan led even as America ages, and he doesn’t want to pay for it. Instead he adds trillions in new debt and makes no bones about it.

Politically, it seems to me, the balance in this package, its draconian cuts for the poor and lavish further goodies for the rich, and its delay of a balanced budget for thirty years, make it an easy target. I wish the Obamaites could grasp tax reform as a key revenue raiser and move closer to Ryan's realism on Medicare.

But for now, fiscal conservatives are again homeless. Romney's massive proposed increase in defense spending and his refusal to raise revenues puts him in a tight box of brutal entitlement cuts when he claims to want to cut, cap and balance the budget. Obama came near to the kind of Bowles-Simpson Grand Bargain last summer – but it fell apart. Could a re-elected Obama try again? I guess we can hope, can't we?

Sedona, Arizona, 8.30 am

Kilgore calls it:

To put it simply, April should be gangbusters for Romney, and might well put it so far out of reach that Santorum gives up or donors give up on him. If he survives, though, Santorum could have a false spring in May, when primaries are dominated by the South. The final hammer comes down in June when winner-take-all New Jersey and Utah, plus winner-take-all-by-congressional-district California, are almost certain to go massively for Mitt.

Nate Silver basically calls it:

At the betting market Intrade, Mr. Santorum is now given just a 1.5 percent chance of winning the nomination — lower than the combined total for a series of dark-horse figures like Jeb Bush, Sarah Palin and Chris Christie, who together have about a 3 percent chance. The race will continue on until Mr. Romney clinches or everyone else quits, but the only real question is whether Mr. Romney could somehow beat himself.

I think it's over now too, in the simple sense that I don't see an open convention fight – just a war of attrition. And if Romney hasn't beaten himself by now – how many damaging gaffes can he utter and still remain the front-runner? – it would take some enormous screw-up to falter in the next month or two. 

Nonetheless, I note that in a state where Romney did very well, with a 12 point margin over Santorum, that he still lost non-college educated whites by 7 percent and was essentially tied with Santorum among those earning under $50,000 a year. I think this means real vulnerability to the attack line coming in the fall that he is the Wall Street mega-rich candidate who wants even more tax cuts for people like him and Ryan-style cuts in the safety net.

And he still lost the white evangelical vote by seven points.

I don't think his weakness among the very conservative matters much for the general. They'll turn out for him. But I do think his continued weakness with the core enthusiasts in the GOP base, white evangelicals, is a potential problem for turnout this November. Some of it is surely about his Mormonism; some of it his patrician Yankee style. But he'll need something powerful to motivate these voters, while not poisoning his appeal to moderate Republicans by emphasizing issues like abortion, gays and contraception.

My bet? Probably Israel. It's the one issue where he can call Obama an Islamist trying to destroy the Jewish state. Of course he won't say that. But others will. And he'll echo them in code.

(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty.)

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