Newt Gingrich is canceling campaign events scheduled for Kansas at the end of the week to shore up support in the Deep South. The former House speaker plans to pour his time and resources into Alabama and Mississippi.
“Everything between Spartanburg all the way to Texas, those all need to go for Gingrich,” said campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond.
Also more at The Hill. There’s trouble in Newtland, boys and girls. There are 40 delegates at stake Saturday in Kansas, but Newt is forced to forfeit that fight in order to defend his “home turf” in the Deep South. Why? Because Rick Santorum’s wins Tuesday in Oklahoma and Tennessee showed that Gingrich might be more vulnerable in the South than he had previously suspected.
Gingrich’s string of third- and fourth-place finishes Tuesday have not only marked him as the weakest candidate in the field, but have prompted questions about his motives for continuing his campaign. In an excellent post at Commentary, Bethany Mandel asks:
What price tag does Gingrich put on the free publicity he’s garnering while he remains in the race? Is it high enough to forfeit what he’s claimed is the Republicans’ only chance at victory in November?
Once people start talking smack like that about your campaign, the fundraising tends to dry up and — no matter how determined you may be to carry on — the financial issues become problematic. Meanwhile, Santorum’s starting to close the money gap with Mitt Romney:
So far in 2012, for every $1 that Santorum has raised, Romney has raised $1.31 ($13.5 million for Santorum, $17.7 million for Romney). For every $1 that Santorum raised in February alone, Romney raised $1.28 ($9 million for Santorum, $11.5 million for Romney). Moreover, February was not Romney’s biggest fundraising month, while Santorum raised more in February than he had in all previous months of his campaign combined.
Recording a press gaggle with Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley,
Steubenville, Ohio, Tuesday, March 6, 2012 (Photo by Chris Moody)
WASHINGTON, Pennsylvania
We got to our hotel here about 1:30 a.m., after a 35-mile drive from Steubenville, Ohio, scene of last night’s victory celebration for The Next President of the United States, Rick Santorum.
My 13-year-old son Jefferson accompanied me on this trip, wearing a T-shirt — “Bloggers Save the World Tonight,” which I brought home from the CPAC Blog Bash — underneath his Alabama Crimson Tide hooded sweatshirt. On the way from Steubenville, we went through the drive-thru at a McDonald’s which for some reason was out of their regular hamburger patties, and so we ordered the Angus Mushroom & Swiss burgers with two large orders of fries and two large sweet teas.
Jefferson pronounced his Angus Mushroom & Swiss “the best burger ever.” He has a habit of speaking emphatically.
I don’t know where he got that.
He’s pretty handy as an editorial assistant, the main duties of which are to pack and unpack my laptop, set it up and log in online wherever we are. I use a separate full-size keyboard and mouse with my laptop, mainly because I can’t stand the cramped feeling of typing on the laptop keyboard, where accidentally touching the thumbpad causes the cursor to skip around in annoying ways. Also, I type so hard — having learned on a manual typewriter — that I have a tendency to wear out keyboards pretty quickly. A replacement keyboard can be had for about $10 at Wal-Mart, and so I use that, but the hassle of packing and unpacking the extra gear is a task I’m happy to foist off on my 13-year-old son, who doesn’t mind being paid in cheeseburgers.
Jefferson can also be tasked to other duties. Last night, after my interview with Santorum strategist John Brabender, I downloaded the audio and assigned Jefferson to transcribe it while I made a run for supplies. (There weren’t enough electrical outlets at the media table, so I drove to Family Dollar and spent $9 on an 8-outlet power strip, and also bought a $1 pack of gum as “bonus pay” for my editorial assistant.)
. . . just wait. Maybe you’re right. But if you’re right, why are liberals so eager to have Romney as the Republican nominee? Maybe you think George Stephanopoulos is stupid?
Rick Santorum will hold a party tonight in Steubenville, Ohio, which he and his supporters hope will be a “Super Tuesday” victory celebration. Yet the latest polls indicate that Mitt Romney could win the Ohio Republican primary and, coming on the heels of Romney’s narrow win last week in Michigan, a Buckeye State victory might be enough to effectively clinch the nomination as the GOP Establishment’s “It’s His Turn” candidate. Whoever wins the Ohio primary, however, the result of today’s vote will be actual news, in contrast to the ridiculous ginned-up controversy that has swirled around Rush Limbaugh for the past week. And the story of how “SlutGate” became such an all-consuming affair is worth re-examining chiefly because it demonstrates the operational methodology of what the late Andrew Breitbart called the “Democrat-Media Complex.”
Go back to Saturday, Jan. 7, when ABC broadcast from Saint Anselm’s College in Manchester, N.H., a debate among six Republican presidential candidates, with George Stephanopoulos and Diane Sawyer as moderators. After the first commercial break in the broadcast, seemingly out of the blue, Stephanopoulos posed this question to Romney: “Senator Santorum has been very clear in his belief that the Supreme Court was wrong when it decided that a right to privacy was embedded in the Constitution. And following from that, he believes that states have the right to ban contraception.… Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?” . . .
That’s from my American Spectator column today, which suggests the possibility that clueless Republicans have been manipulated like puppets on the media’s strings. And by “clueless Republicans,” I mean the 31%-38% of Ohio GOP primary voters who, according to the Real Clear Politics average, are willing to nominate the man Team Obama wants to face in November:
Mitt Romney could all but guarantee he’ll be the GOP presidential nominee by winning Ohio on Super Tuesday. …
“Ohio is a state that [Rick] Santorum cannot afford to lose,” said GOP strategist Alex Castellanos, who worked for Romney in 2008 but is neutral in this race. “If Santorum loses Ohio, it’ll be practically impossible to stop Romney.”
Exactly. For all intents and purposes, Ohio is the nomination, an unfortunate reality for which we could blame many factors, if we wanted to engage in hindsight recriminations. But there’s no point today in scapegoating the Republicans who have heretofore unwittingly aided the candidate they claimed to oppose by supporting Not Romneys who were clearly doomed from the outset.
Maybe Santorum can win tonight in Ohio, and we won’t have to contemplate the likelihood of a Romney-led debacle in November. And maybe, as I said, you think Mitt is “electable.” Maybe you think you’re smarter than George Stephanopoulos and his ABC News colleague Claire Shipman and their good buddy Jay Carney.
Why, however, are all these liberals convinced that Mitt is such a perfect choice as the Designated Republican Loser for November? I hesitate to endorse their cynical logic, but does anyone else remember how our Designated Republican Loser in 2008 grinned all the way to the nomination after winning “Super Tuesday” with a semi-secret tailwind of anti-Mormon prejudice?
Maybe all you Republicans who think you’re smarter than George Stephanopoulos are now saying to yourself, “Wait a minute! Are you trying to tell us that the Democrats would be willing to exploit such religious bigotry merely to win an election?”
Damn right they would — and will. If they can’t beat Romney with the “greedy Wall Street 1-percenter” class-warfare argument, the Democrats will not hesitate to Do Whatever It Takes to Win. Continue reading If You Think Mitt Romney Is ‘Electable’ … →
The entire crew of the blog — me, Smitty and Wombat — left home yesterday evening to attend the “Remember Breitbart” event in D.C., and got back home in the wee a.m. hours. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh issued this statement:
For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke. . . .
My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.
So “slut” joins the “n-word” on the List of Forbidden Terms, and we are now at a loss for any way to describe Meghan McCain.
With 99% of the vote in, Romney had 38%. Texas Rep. Ron Paul had 25% and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum had 24%. They were trailed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 10%.
As Ed Morrissey points out, no delegates were awarded as a result of this vote. Most news accounts omit the non-binding nature of Saturday’s vote, which was for some reason very important news when Romney lost non-binding contests in three states on Feb. 7.
State Sen. Stacey Campfield, co-chairman of Newt Gingrich’s campaign in Tennessee, announced today he is quitting that position to support Rick Santorum in the Republican presidential race.
The Knoxville Republican made his announcement in a post on his blog. In an interview, Campfield said he believes that conservatives need to unite behind a single candidate and that Santorum is best positioned to defeat “establishment Republican” candidate Mitt Romney.
Campfield’s blog post offers an extremely nuanced argument: He admires Newt, he prefers Newt, but he has come to grips with the simple fact that Newt can’t win. If conservatives are serious about stopping Romney, they have to get behind Santorum:
[T]he conservative with the momentum and ability to still make it happen is Rick Santorum. . . .
I am stepping down as the statewide co chairman for Newt Gingrich and throwing all of my support behind Rick Santorum. Going with me are the top 3 second congressional district delegates for Newt (Dr. Lenard Brown, Dr. Aaron Margulise and Scott Smith). We all now throw our support behind Rick Santorum and hope for his success. We encourage other people who are supporting other candidates (not just in Tennessee but across the nation) to follow suit and throw your support behind Rick Santorum so we can coalesce and have a conservative to lead our party, and our country back to victory and prosperity.
Campfield and his colleagues deserve praise for this tough, pragmatic decision. Santorum has dipped in the most recent national polls, and I made no secret of my bitter disappointment with the outcome in Michigan, which I saw as the result of the Santorum campaign’s self-inflicted wounds.
Nevertheless, Santorum still leads in Ohio and he also leads in Tennessee, where Newt is running a distant third. Whatever errors Santorum has made in recent weeks, it is still not too late for him to learn from his mistakes and recapture his lost momentum. If Santorum can win Ohio, Tennessee and Oklahoma on Tuesday, the contest for the GOP nomination will then clearly be a two-man race. And if conservatives are serious about stopping Romney — as serious as Sen. Campfield is — then there will still be a fighting chance, with a candidate who has shown a willingness to fight the tough fights.
Election Day reporting from Hell, Michigan, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012
THREE MILES FROM HELL, Michigan
On my way from Troy to Grand Rapids — site of Rick Santorum’s Michigan primary victory party tonight — I got a late start and realized I wouldn’t make it in time for Senator Santorum’s 3 p.m. event at his campaign office there. That’s when it hit me: I should go back to Hell.
Saturday night’s trip was fun, but I hadn’t done much actual political reporting during that visit, so clearly I needed a return trip to answer the question, “How is the turnout in Hell?”
You might think Hell would be full of Democrats, but an informal Saturday night survey of patrons at the Dam Site Inn revealed that there were a lot of Mitt Romney and Ron Paul supporters there, and so I reset the GPS and made my way back through Pinckney and hooked a left on the road to Hell.
Arriving at the general store and post office — Hell in a Handbasket — the place was empty except for the manager, who was working in Hell’s Kitchen, preparing the cilantro dijon garlic mayo for their Hellacious Cuban Sandwich. This sounded tempting, and when the manager asked if I would like one, I said, “Oh, Hell, yes!”
The general store, Hell in a Handbasket
While she prepared my sandwich, I asked the manager (who refused to give her name) if she was a Republican, and she was. Did she have a favorite candidate? Had she voted yet? No, she hadn’t voted, and she was kind of struggling with her choices.
“It has been confirmed that a robocall making the rounds in Michigan the day before the state’s GOP primary comes from the Rick Santorum campaign and urges Democrats to vote for Santorum and against Mitt Romney.”
— Evan McMorris Santo, Talking Points Memo, Feb. 27
TROY, Michigan
How much has Mitt Romney’s campaign used dirty tricks in the 2012 campaign? A lot, I’d say. While I always suspected that the sexual allegations against Herman Cain were pushed to the media by the Rick Perry campaign, others whose knowledge I trust have since assured me that Team Mitt was behind it.
Take that with a grain of salt, if you wish, but it’s something I’ve kept in mind the past three weeks as I’ve watched Rick Santorum being hounded by the media over “controversies” that looked for all the world as if they were ginned up by a certain rival campaign with a notable aptitude for “the devastating oppo hit.”
Politics ain’t beanbag, James Carville likes to say, and students of the campaign game must admire the skill with which Romney’s oppo squad digs up stuff and pushes it to the media.
Nevertheless, I was laughing along with Rick Santorum when he showed up on Sean Hannity’s TV show Monday night and was asked about his campaign’s robocall to Michigan Democrats, which Mitt Romney called “a new low” in the 2012 race.
“You mean when he runs a robocall of my voice from four years ago saying good things about him, that’s not a low moment? And when I run a call basically calling Democrats that are eligible to vote here to vote for us, and encouraging people to come and vote for us, and we talk about our manufacturing plan and what we are going to do to create jobs, it’s a very positive robocall. Talking about what we are doing to create jobs in Michigan. . .
“Of course, you know, it’s interesting that he criticize me for attracting Democrats because one of the things that Governor Romney’s people say is [Santorum] can’t attract Democrats. Well guest What? We will wait and see. I think I can.”
Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it? It’s about time Team Mitt got a nice stiff dose of their own medicine, and now Allahpundit’s sweating it:
Nate Silver’s model now gives Santorum a 36 percent chance of pulling the upset, up from 23 percent over the weekend, and PPP is reporting “encouraging things” for [Santorum] in the phone calls it made this afternoon.
Even if Santorum has accomplished nothing else, making Mitt-huggers sweat the Michigan results is what I’d call a “moral victory,” a little revenge for the bum’s rush at Romney HQ Thursday.
The downside? It might be another very long night for me, waiting at Santorum’s Primary Night party past midnight while the lead shifts back and forth and the guys on TV keep saying it’s “too close to call.” That would be a total bummer, because Santorum’s Primary Night party is in Grand Rapids, more than 150 miles from here.
So I’m picturing myself on the phone with my editor at the American Spectator at 1 a.m., pleading for more time to finish my column, filing it at maybe 2:30 a.m., then having to drive all the way back here to crash about 5 a.m., and get up in time to check out at noon. And then on to Ohio, to begin another week of coverage leading up to Super Tuesday.
Show of hands: Who thought Mitt would have had the nomination practically locked up by now? Who expected Romney would have to fight like hell just to win his home state? After Mitt won Florida and Nevada, I thought he might be on the verge of running the table, but somehow Santorum keeps on fighting back.
The state’s top elected Republican officials took their turns on the stage of the Royal Oak Music Theatre: Lt. Gov. Brian Calley, Attorney General Bill Schuette and finally Gov. Rick Snyder, who introduced the man the crowd had come to see, Mitt Romney. Wearing jeans and a navy blazer, Romney spoke for about 12 minutes, giving a variation of his standard stump speech, quoting the lyrics of “America the Beautiful” and the Declaration of Independence.
“I happen to believe that if we want to have a strong economy and good private-sector jobs, it helps to have a president who’s had a private-sector job,” the former Massachusetts governor said, drawing cheers from more than 500 supporters in attendance in Royal Oak, a suburb of Detroit. Romney said his arguments for strengthening the economy are “the reason that I can defeat Barack Obama in Michigan in the fall.”
Before he can do that, of course, Romney must first show he can win Michigan in February and, on the eve of Tuesday’s GOP primary here, that proposition was still very much in doubt. While Romney has recovered from the slump that had him trailing by double digits in his native state two weeks ago, the latest polls show the longtime Republican frontrunner barely leading Rick Santorum. (One late poll even showed Santorum with a slight lead.) While Romney has outspent his Republican rival here and has deployed his professional campaign staff effectively, the intensity of the fight in Michigan has exceeded what anyone would have predicted a month ago. In 2008, Romney defeated John McCain here by an 80,000-vote margin, and Michigan was widely expected to be a “safe” state for Romney this time around. . . .
Rick Santorum speaks in Lansing, Monday, Feb. 27, 2012
LANSING, Michigan
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says it is a “joke” to be accused of liberalism by his rival, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
Speaking the day before Michigan voters go to the polls for Tuesday’s crucial GOP primary, Santorum said he has been “leading, ahead of the curve on conservative issues.”
Michigan has “a chance to be the inflection point in this campaign,” Santorum told a crowd of about 200 supporters in the Royal Ballroom of the Lexington Hotel here.
Dismissing Romney’s attack ad campaign as a joke, Santorum said: “Michigan, you have an opportunity to stop the joke.”
In a 45-minute speech, Santorum talked about the economic plan he outlined today in a Wall Street Journal column, and slammed President Obama for the “astonishing” deficits his administration has amassed in the past three years. Obama has “blown the lid off” the national debt, the former Pennsylvania senator said.
Polls show a tight race between Santorum and Romney here in Michigan, where Romney hopes to avoid an embarrassing defeat in his home state, where his late father George Romney was a popular governor in the 1960s. One top adviser to the Santorum campaign told CNN that Santorum has “already won” a strategic victory in Michigan by forcing the Romney campaign to spend millions defending what was supposed to be a “safe” state for him.
After referring to Romney’s attacks as a joke, Santorum said some pundits have mocked him as too conservative to defeat Obama in November. “He who laughs last, laughs best,” Santorum said.
Update (Smitty): AFP sent this clip around for consumption, a Fox news summary of the AFP event and the state of Michigan going into tommorrow’s bunfight:
