“After having destroyed every conservative that came on the scene, you can’t say ‘You have to line up behind me.’ No, no, no. Conservatives are not going to jump until they hear where Governor Romney wants to take everybody.”
— Richard Viguerie, veteran conservative leader
“I still think Mitt’s electability is a myth and a lot of conservatives are going to have to sell their souls to support Mitt (More than a few of them have already gotten started). There are a lot of conservatives who’ve put their reputations on the line to assure everyone that Mitt is actually very conservative — and extremely electable. Of course, some of those same people started doing CYA-backpedaling when it looked like Romney almost had the nomination locked up, which begs the question: If you don’t think Mitt is going to win, why were you working so hard to undermine all the other candidates and push Mitt in the first place?”
— John Hawkins, Right Wing News
“Wednesday April 11th is day one of the general election. But there are things I’m seeing that tell me that Mitt Romney is kicking off the campaign in a telling defensive posture.”
— Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo
My ambition to abandon the drudgery of journalism for an exciting new career in diplomacy as the Future U.S. Ambassador to Vanuatu suffered a major setback Tuesday. When Rick Santorum promised me that ambassadorship in December — in a telephone interview, while he was still in sixth place in the Iowa polls, waiting to catch a plane during his layover in Fort Worth on the cheapest available flight from Des Moines to D.C. — I made sure I saved the recording.
Because I knew, when the miraculous Iowa victory came through, Santorum’s political advisors would try to talk him out of it.
So I was prepared to hold him accountable to that promise, and he not only won Iowa, he won 10 other states. Santorum raised $9 million in February, beat Newt Gingrich in Southern states like Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana — oh, it was so close, I could taste it. And I had the digital audio of that ironclad promise, the Word of Honor of a Christian Gentleman that next year I’d be jetting off to Porta Vila to begin my new career in South Pacific diplomacy.
Dreams die hard and, despite the professional requirements of Neutral Objective Journalism, my friends, I dared to dream.
When I’m feeling this low, it’s nice to know I’m not suffering alone: I’m not depressed; the world objectively sucks.
Yesterday, after Rick Santorum quit, my 13-year-old son Jefferson asked, “Does this mean I have to stop bad-mouthing Mitt Romney?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It doesn’t mean you have to start good-mouthing him, but you have to stop bad-mouthing him.”
UPDATE 6 p.m. ET: In a post at Rachel Maddow’s blog (!) lefty Steve Benen says, “Santorum has done something I honestly didn’t think was possible,” going on to list the miraculous successes of Santorum’s low-budget underdog operation. Beyond the credit due to the candidate and his family — his wife and kids were, at one point, nearly the only people working full-time for his campaign — much of the credit goes to the scores and hundreds of dedicated volunteers whom I mention below.
Also: Because he went so long without any significant media recognition, Santorum was always the most accessible of the candidates and was willing to answer almost any questions. That got him in trouble a few times, and drove his staff and consultants nuts, but the folks in the press corps — including liberals who totally disagreed with Santorum on the issues — appreciated the honesty and openness of his campaign.
UPDATE 4:50 p.m. ET: Video of Santorum’s speech today:
The story of Santorum’s grassroots army has been seldom mentioned in the media, even in my own coverage of the campaign. Some people were mystified by how Santorum kept winning — from Colorado to Louisiana — and so often out-performing the polls.
Shelley Ahlersmeyer had run grassroots outreach for Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign, and when she joined Team Santorum, it was a big gain for his campaign that didn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserved at the time. Ahlersmeyer brought with her not only her experience, skill and energy, but also extensive connections with Huckabee’s volunteers from four years ago.
So: How did Santorum win, for example, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama, states that had seemed likely to go for Newt Gingrich? How did Santorum stay competitive in Michigan and Ohio, despite being massively outspent by Romney?
Three words: “Phone from home.”
A comparative handful of fired-up, dedicated volunteers — mostly moms and grandmothers — each made many thousands of phone calls to Republican primary voters in those states. Exactly how many people participated in Santorum’s phone-from-home program, I don’t yet know, but there were a hard-core handful who have spent practically every day for the past four months calling up total strangers and asking them to vote for Rick Santorum.
God bless ’em, they pulled off a miracle or two — Rick’s campaign manager, Mike Biundo, told me that the top campaign staff didn’t think they could win Mississippi until they saw the votes come in — and those volunteers deserve far more credit than they got.
UPDATE 3:50 p.m. ET: Michelle Malkin came through with a crucial endorsement of Rick Santorum on Jan. 31 — the day of the Florida primary — and says of his scrappy underdog campaign:
Rick Santorum fought hard, he fought well, and he gave voice to a large contingent of grass-roots conservative activists across the country who wanted a candidate who lived the values he preached. He held Mitt Romney’s feet to the fire on health care, challenged Newt Gingrich’s green flirtations and past support for the individual mandate, and took on Ron Paul’s foreign policy extremism. His presence improved everyone else’s game — and that will serve the GOP ticket well this fall, whoever ends up on it.
Let’s not talk about that yet, huh? By the way, Michelle Malkin is hereby formally invited to “DoomCon 2012,” which I hope to convene in Tampa the day before the RINO coronationRepublican convention in August. The general theme will be, “How screwed are we?”
UPDATE 3:40 p.m. ET: Chris Moody, my young friend who was covering his first presidential campaign this year, reminds us how it was:
In the final days before the first Republican caucuses in Iowa — a contest on which Santorum rested his entire strategy — it appeared that his campaign would be laid to rest in the state where it was born. Iowa Republicans did not turn their eyes to the man who had spent more time in their state than any other candidate until the very end, but they ultimately awarded him with a surprise, hair’s-breadth victory — not formally confirmed until weeks after the vote–that helped keep his fledgling campaign afloat into the spring. The first public whispers of his impending rise came with a CNN poll released three days after Christmas that showed Santorum in third place among likely Iowa caucus-goers, higher than he had ever been before in a public opinion survey.
Santorum’s campaign represented the great hope of “full-spectrum conservatives” in 2012, and his exit will leave a mark on the general election campaign, as social issues and working class concerns will continue to resonate with the electorate into the fall.
I’d been planning to travel tp Pennsylvania next week to cover the campaign leading up to the April 24 primary. Now? To look on the bright side, I can begin planning for “DoomCon 2012.”
*** PREVIOUSLY (2:36 p.m. ET) ***
The news broke online while I was sending an e-mail, and I just watched Santorum’s speech on TV.
UPDATE: You know what’s gonna hurt? Telling my son Jefferson.
UPDATE III: Chris Stirewalt and his fellow Romneyites on Fox News are talking about how Mitt will win now. We won’t forget their glee.
UPDATE IV: More of the news I missed at The Hill. As one commenter said, “We’ll always have Iowa.” And New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Louisiana, to name some of the places I encountered Santorum on his long, wild campaign trail.
In 2008, a 30-year-old baseball stat nerd looked at the reams of public research product churned out by the nation’s 1,500-plus daily newspapers, and concluded that, though “there is nearly as much data as there is for first basemen,” the “understanding has lagged behind.” So Nate Silver launched 538.com (named after the number of votes in the Electoral College), and through sheer intellectual rigor and superior numeracy went on to outperform all comers in the political prediction business that year. As Silver later explained in The New York Post, too often “polls are cherry-picked based on their brand name or shock value rather than their track record of accuracy,” and “demographic variables are misrepresented or misunderstood.”
Silver, who was later hired by The New York Times (a blogger-to-riches story that would have made headlines a decade ago but is no big deal nowadays), is a living refutation of the Labor Theory of Value. All those thousands of big-media reporters and commentators and pollsters, paid full time to analyze and interpret political information, got their clocks cleaned by a sports geek blowing off steam after hours.
I’d heard some talk about this: Evidently, the pro-Romney leadership of the North Dakota Republican Party rigged their state convention so that, despite the fact that Mitt Romney came in third in the March 6 caucuses, he got most of the delegates. The Right Scoop has this video:
(Hat-tip: Richard McEnroe on Twitter.) The amazing thing about this is how GOP “leaders” flagrantly screw over their own rank-and-file like this — and “leaders” in the Republican Party do this all the time — and then wonder why it’s so hard to generate grassroots enthusiasm for their hand-picked candidates.
Short of tar-and-feathering the corrupt bastards, what can you do?
Rick Santorum’s campaign spokesman Hogan Gidley just issued this terse statement: “Rick and his wife Karen have taken their daughter Bella to the hospital. The family requests prayers and privacy as Bella works her way to recovery.” I’ll try to update if more deails become available.
Watching MSNBC can be a weird experience. About 3 a.m., unable to sleep, I was flipping around the channels and happened onto Ed Schultz — who reminds me of every mean drunk I ever knew — going on and on about the alleged Republican “War on Women.”
I had the sound muted on the TV (because my wife was asleep) and what I was watching made no sense. What the heck was this about?
Why was there a Planned Parenthood logo at the bottom corner of the screen with the word, “FBI”? And why were they showing a statement by Rick Santorum condemning violence? Curious, I got up and did a Google search and found this Associated Press story:
GRAND CHUTE, Wis. — Police say a homemade explosive device damaged a Planned Parenthood clinic in eastern Wisconsin.
Authorities say someone placed the small device on an outside window sill about 7:40 p.m. Sunday at the clinic in Grand Chute, near Appleton.
Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin CEO Teri Huyck said in a statement that there was minimal damage to an exam room and that the clinic will reopen Tuesday. No one was in the building at the time.
That’s all there is to it. A “small device” that did “minimal damage” at an empty office — in Wisconsin, two days before the Republican primary.
So while this is enough to make Ed Schultz devote his Monday show to haranguing us about a Republican “War on Women,” I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe this was actually some kind of hoax.
The FBI is investigating, and I’ll be eager to learn the result of their investigation because — call me a crazy conspiracy theorist — it seems rather illogical that if some kind of Cheesehead Misogynist Militia wanted to terrorize women, they’d do so with a “small device,” causing “minimal damage” at an empty office.
TWO DAYS BEFORE THE REPUBLICAN PRIMARY.
You catching my drift here?
Anyway, I hope the FBI cracks this case quickly, because MSNBC is achieving new heights of absurdity in playing connect-the-dots with this rather oddly timed incident, jumping to outlandish conclusions without any evidentiary basis. Here is Michelle Goldberg on “The Last Word” with Lawrence O’Donnell:
Again, call me crazy for suspecting that this is some kind of hoax, but the logic just doesn’t work. If this was actually done by an anti-abortion extremist, wouldn’t this person realize that they were committing a federal crime? And if you were going to commit a federal crime, would you risk imprisonment for a “small device” that did “minimal damage”?
TWO DAYS BEFORE THE REPUBLICAN PRIMARY?
OK, maybe Wisconsin is home to America’s lamest anti-abortion extremists. It’s possible. Can’t rule that out.
After a three-month investigation, Sowande Omokunde, the son of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, Michael Pratt, the son of former Milwaukee Mayor Marvin Pratt, Lewis Caldwell, and Lavelle Mohammad, from Milwaukee, and Justin Howell, from Racine, were each charged with a felony count of criminal damage to property.
Notice that it took a three-month investigation before there were any charges filed in that case. It may be months before we have any idea who committed this crime at the Planned Parenthood office, and therefore all this “War on Women” hype on MSNBC is ridiculously premature. Via Steve Ertelt at Life News, here is Rick Santorum’s statement:
“Violence is never the answer, and I will always condemn any and all violent attacks against our fellow Americans. In this country, we resolve our differences through political discussion and free and fair elections — never by violence. This upcoming election is about restoring freedom and liberty in America, and a key part of that is to restore a culture that values human life and the dignity of all Americans. While we can and should work to defund Planned Parenthood and push back against government mandates that force Americans and religious institution to violate their faith, violence against our fellow citizens has no place in a freedom-loving America.”
Violence is never the answer, and neither is voting for moderates from Massachusetts. On, Wisconsin! Vote for Rick Santorum!
As the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of the individual mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, we Americans need to remember that we have the freedom to make choices for ourselves. We, not our government, choose the food to eat, the clothes to wear, the ideas to believe. “ObamaCare” is the opposite of freedom. Under ObamaCare, the government, not the individual, has freedom. We can do better.
Just ask the Congressional Budget Office. It forecast that as many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-provided health insurance under ObamaCare, and that premium costs will rise over the next decade.
ObamaCare – based on RomneyCare, the plan Massachusetts adopted when Mitt Romney was governor – tells insurance companies which benefits their policies must offer and what range of prices they could charge. It requires that individuals buy conforming policies, and cuts $500 billion from Medicare. The Independent Payment Advisory Board will limit what treatments doctors can prescribe. . . .
According to a new scientific study, Republicans hate new scientific studies, but it is a scientific fact that Republican women have vaginas, and evidence suggests they know how to use ’em.
That’s right: Research indicates that the vagina functions as part of what scientists refer to as the “reproductive system” and that certain activities involving the vagina can result in women becoming so-called “moms,” a process by which something known as a “baby” actually comes out of a woman’s vagina!
With these scientific facts in mind, the latest scandalous headlines:
