Obama is holding on to his commanding lead in Ohio – he’s up by 4 points. Richard Adams at the Guardian points out, for Romney to win, he has to take Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado.
Romney’s increasingly narrow path to the Presidency
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On any given day in the fall of 2007, John Edwards could be heard preaching his populist prose to Iowa voters who eagerly packed into lumber barns, VFW halls and Culver restaurants across the state.
His message was less about the two Americas of his 2004 campaign — the haves and the have-nots — and more about fighting for the middle class and ending poverty in America.
The Democratic candidate had spent nearly all of 2007 logging days in Iowa traveling across the state’s 99 counties. He had every reason to believe he could be president. He felt the country would let then-Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama destroy each other and he would rise as the more experienced and safe nominee.
To many voters, Edwards could have been president of the United States. Five years later, the possibilities for Edwards are completely different.
Edwards’ criminal trial begins Monday in Greensboro, North Carolina.
He is charged with six felony and misdemeanor counts related to the money dealings of his failed presidential campaign.
Among other things, the government alleges that Edwards “knowingly and willfully” received nearly $1 million in illegal campaign contributions to hide his pregnant mistress from the public so he could continue his presidential bid. Edwards acknowledges that while his actions were wrong, they were not illegal. He could face up to 30 years in prison.
Read more at CNN…
Not surprisingly, Republican robot candidate Mitt Romney won the New Hampshire primary last night. Through a mixture of relentless ambition and stacks of GOP cash, Romney took a commanding lead, making him the very clear favorite going forward. From the NY Times:
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Mitt Romney swept to victory in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, turning back a ferocious assault from rivals who sought to disqualify him in the eyes of conservatives, in a contest that failed to anoint a strong opponent to slow his march to the Republican nomination.
Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, won by a double-digit margin, a validation of his strategy to use his neighboring state to cement his standing as the front-runner. The candidates who had hoped to use the primary to emerge as his leading rival fared poorly, leaving a fractured Republican opposition.
Superficially, this is great for Romney, but the numbers do not bode well for him in the long run. Romney won Iowa by 8 votes, and only secured New Hampshire by getting just under 40% of the vote. What does this say about Romney as a candidate?
It means no one really cares about him.
In the general election, not only does Romney face the near impossible task of matching Obama for personal popularity, but he faces the brutal reality that Republicans are not motivated to go out and vote for him. Romney will most likely win the GOP primaries as he has the Bush machine lined up behind him. But he won't be enough to take on Obama's formidable organizational capabilities and unprecedented ability to raise cash.
In some ways, it's sad to see someone as banal and deluded as Romney run for President. He genuinely believes he is the man for the job and he is willing to embarrass himself on a national stage to fulfill his ambitions. Romney will say literally anything and spend any amount of money to get the nomination signalling he really believes he can win. The truth is, he can't and he's about to find out the hard way.
The major problem with mainstream political commentary in America is that it is basically completely meaningless. There is an entire industry built around the horse race – tracking who is up and who is down, which candidate sounds the most presidential and who has the best wardrobe team. The actual business of policy and understanding which candidate is a reasonable bet in terms of running the government and who is in fact a genocidal maniac (and there are a few) is a lost art.
Take for example a recent comment on Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum by 'Commentary' columnist Alana Goodman:
Yes, he has plenty of his own flaws, and they shouldn’t be glossed over. But so far, his baggage doesn’t seem to be of the fatal sort. There’s no history of adultery, no sexual harassment charges, no problems with articulation, no shoot-from-the-hip attitude. Santorum’s debate performances have been excellent, and he’s shown a notable grasp of foreign policy issues. He also has impeccable social conservative credentials.
This is typical of mainstream punditry – focus solely on the superficial, and ignore the actual substance. Andrew Sullivan counters:
Yes: he's for criminalizing all abortion and nullifying my civil marriage by constitutional amendment. He's also for a Judeo-Christian global war against Islam, government-directed industrial policy, and torture. His "notable grasp" of foreign policy is revealed by his unique belief that Iran is seeking national "martyrdom" by engaging in a nuclear war with Israel.
Santorum might look and talk the Presidential part, but he is in fact completely insane, a small detail political pundits seem to want to ignore.
Election season is almost in full swing and this stuff is just going to get worse. I hope to provide a small bit of relief from the cacophony of gibberish coming out of the mainstream, but it's almost panick attack inducing thinking about what myself and the rest of the sane media are up against.
The NYTimes looks at the emerging art of using old videos to go negative:
It is the attack-ad technique of choice for the 2012 election: anything you have said or done on film will be held against you. And its prevalence has helped make the Republican primary campaign a ferociously negative contest. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Iowa, where commercials that portray candidates in an unflattering light now account for two-thirds of the money spent on advertising for the caucuses….
Mitt Romney employs a small team of video- and film-savvy staff members who produce ads from three editing suites at the campaign’s headquarters in Boston’s North End. Their recent productions include one 30-second Web video that shows Mr. Gingrich telling the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2010 that “Governor Romney, in his business career, created more jobs than the entire Obama cabinet combined.” Another, titled “Newt and Nancy,” ends with the words, “With friends like Newt, who needs The Left” splashed on the screen.
Footage of political candidates online is increasing exponentially thanks to youtube uploaders, meaning 2012 promises to be an extremely entertaining one when it comes to the art of smearing. It is virtually cost free to edit effective videos, so we're going to see a lot of them. And given the nature of viral videos (ie. short and shocking) they are unlikely to do much to improve the national dialogue, meaning incredibly, political discourse in America is about to get more stupid.
If you add up all the things that Ron Paul believes are unconstitutional, there would literally be no reason to have a government at all:
Why on earth this man is viewed as being a serious candidate is anyone's guess, but then looking at the rest of the GOP field, it isn't that far fetched. I'm still with Andrew Sullivan on his assertion that Paul's ideological consistency and honesty makes him the best candidate to face Obama – but that's purely from an intellectual point of view. I'd probably rather Newt Gingrich got in over Paul in terms of winning the actual Presidency. At least he believes in some sort of government, even if it were completely rigged to benefit oil companies and Wall St. If Ron Paul became President of the United States and enacted 25% of his proposals, the country would fall apart over night.
Paul might be ideologically consistent and honest, but he is also completely nuts.
Paul Krugman on the down side of Ron Paul's ideological consistency:
Unfortunately, Mr. Paul has maintained his consistency by ignoring reality, clinging to his ideology even as the facts have demonstrated that ideology’s wrongness. And, even more unfortunately, Paulist ideology now dominates a Republican Party that used to know better.
Juan Cole rips into Rick Perry and the alternate universe he resides in:
It used to be that political divisions were about the different methods proposed to deal with social problems by persons with different political philosophies. Nowadays, politics is about which fantasy-land the politicians and their admirers reside in.
I'm going to be discussing Rick Perry more this week given the recent announcement that he is running for President, but I'll preface it by saying that we all need to be afraid. Very afraid.
Bob Cesca on the alarming prospect of a Republican field so crazy that Newt Gingrich is considered a moderate:
In a world in which someone like Gingrich, one of the most divisive figures in politics of the last two decades, is seen as not sufficiently right-wing, there is absolutely no chance that a true moderate will emerge as the GOP nominee.
Some interesting data on Obama’s on the ground game in rural America like Iowa and Wisconsin. My sense is that this is far more important, as I’m sure the Clinton campaign can testify to, than John McCain getting the cable news pundit circuit to declare that you’ve “won” the week.
