Tag Archives: presidential candidate

Mitt, Rick, and Newt

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Rick Santorum called it a day yesterday afternoon.

In one of those weird campaign events, Santorum’s folks tried to keep what the event was to be under wraps until about 2pm Eastern. But, the staff got buffaloed into giving up the fact that Santorum would be “suspending” his campaign so, by the time the event started at about 2:20, every person on the planet with a Twitter account was writing about it.

Santorum’s withdrawal from the campaign was a paradox: He had done too well to stay in any longer.

The Pennsylvania primary will be held on April 24. If Santorum were to win (not a foregone conclusion) he would have been locked into the race through May and probably through June.

This is April 10. Santorum is pretty much out of money. The notion of pretending to compete against Mitt Romney for the next 10 weeks was too much to contemplate.

If Santorum were to lose in Pennsylvania (also not a foregone conclusion) then his political career would end with a dull thud. Santorum had no good way to move on, so he got out.

Much has been made about the fact that Santorum didn’t mention Romney in his exit speech, but there is not a great deal of love between the two, so we should give Santorum a pass. Continue reading →

New Hampshire & the Concept of Winning

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Let’s review the concept of winning: Winning, in our culture, means coming in first. You don’t win by coming in second or fifth. You win by coming in first.

Mitt Romney kicked butt last night in New Hampshire with (as of this writing) a 15 percentage point win over Ron Paul. As of 10 PM last night, Romney had received about 38 percent of the votes. Was it 50 percent? No. But the next closest guy had 23. And the next closest guy to him had 17.

And remember the continuing mantra: Romney has a ceiling of 25 percent of support.

To quote Rick Perry: Oops.

That, in spite of a couple of pretty dramatic stumbles in the run-up to voting day and a determined assault on the part of most of the popular press in an attempt to turn this into real news, i.e. Gov. Romney was going to be unpleasantly surprised on election day. Continue reading →

Caucuses & Primaries: Let Them Begin!

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

We know the Iowa Caucuses will be held next Tuesday. A week after that, New Hampshire will hold its primary. What’s the difference?

One week. Very funny. Not counting that.

A caucus…

SIDEBAR
The plural of “Caucus” is not “Caucii,” as someone – probably someone who OD’d on cable news programs over the New Year weekend – will likely say at the Keurig machine with great authority on Tuesday.

Caucus is not a Latin word. According to the Merriam-Webster 3rd Unabridged, the etymology of “caucus” is: probably of Algonquian origin; akin to caucauasu elder, counselor; and was first used in 1760.

END SIDEBAR

… is a meeting of people from the same precinct held at a specific time in a specific place.

Under the GOP rules in Iowa people will go to a site representing one of 1,774 precincts; will check in to ensure they are really registered Republicans in that precinct and not members of the “Occupy the Caucuses” thugs, will listen to people speak on behalf of one candidate or another, and will write the name of the candidate they are supporting on a piece of paper which will be collected in some approved manner.  Continue reading →

Des Moines Des Bate

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The thing about telling you that I watched the GOP debate that took place in Des Moines, Iowa Saturday night is I have to admit I had nothing else to do Saturday night.

— Attend Joint Chiefs of Staff Christmas Party – Pentagon

— Fly to New York to see “Spiderman” – Broadway

— Weekend cruise to friend’s private island – Caribbean

— Feed the cat

— Make a meat loaf

— Watch GOP debate

Here’s the shorthand version of what I think happened.

Newt Gingrich won. No surprise. Gingrich is leading the pack because there have been 217 debates and he’s been great in all of them. Anyone who thought he was going to suddenly collapse under the weight of being the frontrunner simply doesn’t understand the Tao of Newt.

The Twitter-verse exploded when Mitt Romney offered to bet Rick Perry $10,000 on who was right about what was in Romney’s book regarding a national individual mandate for health care. Continue reading →

Newt Up, Newt Down, Never Count Newt Out

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

I have mentioned to you before that when it comes to making political predictions I am exactly 50-50. I am wrong exactly as often as I am correct, thus you can’t make any money betting on what I say, nor betting against me.

As a case in point let me direct your attention to MULLINGS from May 20, 2011, in which I wrote: In the week or so since Newt formally announced that he was a candidate for President, his campaign has gone from sputtering to on the rocks. I, like just about everyone else inside the Beltway, declared his candidacy over and his quest for the Presidency dead.

Yeah. Well…

In a poll released late last week Mitt Romney was leading Republican candidates with 23%; but Newt Gingrich was right on his heels at 19% (just outside the margin of error which was 3.5% among registered voters in the poll). Herman Cain may be succumbing to both political gravity and the grave nature of the charges against him and was at 17 percent in this poll. Continue reading →

5 Roads to Open Republican Convention

BY TONY BLANKLEY
Reprinted from The Washington Times

Here’s a thought: The GOP presidential primaries may well prove to be inconclusive, with the nominee actually being chosen at the convention in Tampa, Fla., in the fourth week of August next year.

True, it has been generations since a presidential nominating convention actually made that decision, although, admittedly, this idea pops up every four years. The last contested GOP convention that went beyond the first ballot was 1948, when Thomas Dewey was chosen on the third ballot – and went on to lose to Harry Truman. For the Democrats it was 1952, when Adlai Stevenson was chosen also on the third ballot – and went on to lose to Dwight Eisenhower. The longest was the Democratic convention of 1924 that went on for more than two weeks and took 103 ballots to nominate John Davis, who lost to Calvin Coolidge.

There may be a pattern there. As G. Terry Madonna and Michael Young point out in their insightful Dec. 6, 2007, article “What if the conventions are contested?” “It is no coincidence that brokered conventions ended after networks began to televise them. The 1952 convention is instructive. Actually settled on the first ballot when Dwight Eisenhower beat Robert Taft, the intraparty brawling that preceded the Eisenhower victory appalled thousands who watched it on TV.”

In fact, hotly contentious conventions – whether the GOP in 1912 or the riotous Democratic Chicago convention in 1968 – often augur poorly for the general election. But whether good news or bad, five odd features of this season’s GOP primary process suggest inconclusiveness. Continue reading →

Questioning the Capacity to Lead

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

On November 6 next year – 52 weeks from tomorrow – those of us who haven’t availed ourselves of early voting, absentee voting, mail-in voting or some other form of not standing in line on election day will, in fact, be stepping into a voting booth to vote for President and Congress and for about a third of the population, for U.S. Senator.

For those of us who do this for a living, we will spend the next 12 months trying to tease out who is ahead, who’s behind and why. This process is easier when we are into the finals; when we know who the Republican candidate will be to run against President Obama.

While the popular press thinks the muddled GOP results are good for Obama, I think they are wrong. We’ll get back to that later.

The most recent poll was the ABC News/Washington Post poll which shows Romney about two percentage points ahead of Cain (25-23). That poll was, as we say, “in the field” from last Monday through last Wednesday meaning the Cain story had broken and was on everyone’s lips in between sips of coffee. Continue reading →