The 2012 Speculatron Weekly Roundup For April 6, 2012

So, did you hear? This week, the GOP nomination pretty much became a settled issue. Barring some accident or emergency (or some freaktastic alchemical wizardry that his opponents have yet to deploy), you can pretty much pencil in Mitt Romney as your GOP nominee. Actually, you should have penciled that in a long time ago. If you have, go ahead and write over it in ink.

So now, all that matters is how soon the rest of the parties involved in this electoral process realize that part one, The Primarying, is over. President Barack Obama clearly has -- his campaign released its first anti-Romney ad, touching off what you should expect to be a very harsh and brutish campaign season. Newt Gingrich, while continuing to maintain that he'll be a presence in the GOP primary all the way to Tampa, briefly allowed reality to penetrate his skull, admitting that Romney is basically going to be the winner. And those "all the way to Tampa" plans? Well, they've gotten considerably more modest.

We wait now for Rick Santorum to decide what he's going to do. The presumption is that a religious man like Santorum likely knows what it means when big block letters appear on a wall. And he did decide, in the wake of his primary losses this week, to take a break. Special significances were attached to that decision. And then it came to light that Santorum was meeting in conference with conservative leaders in Virginia, to hatch a last-minute plan to wreck Romney. Those special significances followed him there. But in less than three weeks' time, Santorum -- should he decide to stay in the race -- will have to demonstrate that he can still win something. Those prospects are not looking good.

Besides, it says something that your best case scenario is one in which you get drubbed in New York, Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. But that's what's going to happen. The only variable for Santorum is whether he gets drubbed in Pennsylvania as well, and whether Santorum really wants to come out of this election cycle having had his ass kicked in his home state ... again.

But if Romney's a shoo-in at this point, he's probably going to learn very quickly that the mantle of inevitability can be weighing. After all, he hasn't exactly managed to set the world of conservatives on fire. The money quote of the week comes from MSNBC's Joe Scarborough:

Nobody thinks Romney’s going to win. Let’s just be honest. Can we just say this for everybody at home? Let me just say this for everybody at home. The Republican establishment — I’ve yet to meet a single person in the Republican establishment that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election this year. They won’t say it on TV because they’ve got to go on TV and they don’t want people writing them nasty emails. I obviously don’t care. But I have yet to meet anybody in the Republican establishment that worked for George W. Bush, that works in the Republican congress, that worked for Ronald Reagan that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election.

Of course, no one but Joe Scarborough knows how good Joe Scarborough's sources are, but his salient point is an oft-repeated one: the establishment GOP is going to take to Romney like it's a forced marriage instead of a grand love affair.

But we urge caution, here. It is definitely possible to overrate the significance of these initial feelings of "meh" that the Republican elites and their base are demonstrating for Romney at the end of the primary season. There's a pretty great curative for that called the general election, and once this matter gets clarified into a Romney vs. Obama contest, you might be surprised who picks up the pom-poms for Mitt. Or not! The point is, we want to encourage you readers to be alert to all possibilities, rather than get blindsided when the March-April vintage of the conventional wisdom turns sour.

Besides, it's possible that Romney has this exactly where he wants it. You're going to hear a lot about Romney's tricky "pivot to the center," and what he stands to gain or lose. The conventional thinking, of course, is that he'll have to snap leftward, and when he does, he'll activate all the old agitation over his past moderate stances. But Romney's opponents have been warning all along that he's a squishy moderate. So much so that you'll hear plenty of reporters from now till November opining with a variation of Alex Altman, who observes: "A very conservative party is on the verge of nominating a relative moderate whom nobody is very excited about, largely because none of his rivals managed to cobble together a professional operation."

But Paul Waldman disagrees with this:

What we do know is that when he ran in two races in the extremely liberal state of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney was a moderate. Then when he ran in two races to be the Republican nominee for president, Mitt Romney was and is extremely conservative. There is simply no reason—none—to believe, let alone to assert as though it were an undisputed fact, that the first incarnation of Romney was the "real" one and the current incarnation of Romney is the fake one.

Every single issue position that might mark Mitt Romney as a "relative moderate" is something he has cast off, whether it's being pro-choice, or pro-gay rights, or not hating on immigrants. If you're going to say he's a relative moderate, you have to explain how the Massachusetts Romney was an expression of his true beliefs, and the national Romney is the product of cynical calculation, and how you know this to be the case.

It's actually pretty intriguing, the way Romney could be poised to turn his greatest liability -- ideological pliability -- into a strength. If conservatives observe Romney taking conservative positions, that could make Romney more endearing. If moderate voters keep hearing Romney described as a moderate, from reporters and critics, they'll could lose their fear of his extremes. And if he's nakedly cynical about the process, where's the harm? There are plenty of voters for whom an extremity of cynicism in an effort to defeat Obama is no vice.

We are, as always, prepared to be wrong. But we think that the general election is going to be closer than most people expect, less conforming to convention than most people imagine, and just as ugly as most people fear.

For more on the slow transition from the primary season to the general election, and all your news from the trail this week, please feel free to enter the Speculatron for the week of April 6, 2012.

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Mitt Romney

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On one level, this week could not have been better for Mitt Romney. By putting the hammer down in primaries in Washington DC, Maryland and Wisconsin, he added to his plump delegate total and has all but put the nomination out of reach for his opponents. The added bonus in Wisconsin came in the form of an endorsement of Representative Paul Ryan, the sentient hairstyle that's come to be symbolic of the legislative ambitions of the GOP establishment. And now that the polls show him surging ahead in Pennsylvania, it looks like he'll manage to block the only avenue Rick Santorum has to mount anything that might resemble a comeback. So Mitt Romney turns out to be great at primaries! It's the whole "general election" thing that seems to be tripping him up. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus is doing his best to pretend that the gender gap Romney currently faces is just something that the media made up with mirrors and vapor, but the problem is that it's very real -- you can literally count up women in polls and find that they are none too happy with Mitt. And beyond that, there's an overall "enthusiasm gap" that Romney is going to have to surmount: according to a poll by the Economist/YouGov, "just 11% of Republican voters would be excited if Mitt Romney became the party's presidential nominee." That needs to improve if Romney wants to have an army of citizens willing to make phone calls and knock on doors in the fall. (It should be pointed out that this lack of enthusiasm is not shared by the financial industry, which keeps Romney's super PAC swollen with money.) One thing seems clear, First Read reports -- Romney could really benefit from Santorum dropping out now:

"In his Q&A with the newspaper editors yesterday, Romney expressed his desire for the GOP primary season to come to an end -- ASAP... And this is now Romney's immediate challenge: How does he convince Rick Santorum to get out, preferably before the April 24 Pennsylvania primary?" "Consider: If Santorum remains in the race, and if Romney wants to win Pennsylvania, Team Romney is going to have to go negative (as we saw in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin), and that will only drive up Romney's own negatives, as well as make it harder to unify the party for the general. But if the Romney campaign doesn't go negative, it's very possible to see how Santorum ends up winning in Pennsylvania -- and possibly some of the later contests in May (North Carolina, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Texas). And for Romney, having the inevitable nominee lose primary races is never a good thing. Given these two scenarios, convincing Santorum to get out now is probably their preferred. But how do they achieve that?"

And Romney needs to wake the GOP establishment from its overall despondency over his candidacy. But we'd caution people against taking too much stock in these April mood swings -- once Romney is officially the nominee, choices get clear and lines get drawn as Romney and Obama attempt to define themselves ... and each other. So what we know of "enthusiasm" at the moment could well change. Beyond that, Ezra Klein makes a good case that everyone is underrating Romney at the moment:

For the last, oh, six years, Mitt Romney has been running in Republican presidential primaries. Those are, arguably, the elections he's least suited to win, for all the reasons listed above. But now he's about to get a shot at a general election. And while the promises he's made and the positions he's taken will surely make it more difficult for him to swing to the center, he'll nevertheless be able to run a very different kind of campaign going forward. Maybe he'll be better at it. And it's easy to imagine his greatest weakness in the primary -- the fact that conservatives believe he's a secret centrist -- becoming his greatest strength in the general. In the end, we don't know what's written on Romney's general-election Etch a Sketch.

Let's remember that when it comes to making a "pivot to the center," it's Romney's opponents who have made that pretty easy. They've been saying all along that he's a "moderate," after all! But, about that pivot! So far, it's not clear that Romney is prepared to give the base what it wants. He's back to asserting his role as that of a tinkerer-manager, not someone who wants a lot of transformative change... and the GOP base is not lacking in hunger for transformation. And his economic argument is necessarily having to shift from one that paints Obama as the author of rack and ruin, because the economy is -- in fits and starts -- on the upswing. So Romney's got to make the case that the fits and starts could have been avoided. This is a more ephemeral argument, and thus harder to make. (Though Obama is going to be largely making an ephemeral argument of his own.) It doesn't help matters that Romney surrogates are still publicly talking about how his "real views" on matters various and sundry have not yet been made available for public scrutiny. Everyone involved in the Romney campaign has apparently decided that they'll go on saying out loud all the cynical political things that are supposed to be whispered in private. In fact, it seems that what Romney really wants to do is take the criticism that's long been heaved in his direction and see if any of it will stick to Obama:

In a new tactic...Mitt Romney has decided to accuse President Obama of being too vague in his plans for a second term. Once you get past the absurdity, there's something meaningful going on. But first, to Mitt's charges: "Nancy Pelosi famously said that we would have to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it. President Obama has turned that advice into a campaign strategy: He wants us to re-elect him so we can find out what he will actually do. With all the challenges the nation faces, this is not the time for President Obama's hide and seek campaign." Riiiiight. This probably seems to you like a weird accusation to make. After all, Obama's plans for a second term seem pretty clear: more of the same! You may think that'd be great, or you may think that'd be a hellish nightmare, but either way it's not like it's some big mystery. It isn't as though he's going to come out and really shock us with some new policy turn that is totally different from the kind of things he's been doing for the past three years. But that's what you think only if you don't reside deep in the heart of the Republican base, which is where the key to this appeal lies.

Weighing what Obama has actually done against the specter of what he might do if he's re-elected (alongside a Congress that will probably feature GOP majorities in both Houses, but -- uhm...nevermind, we guess?) is causing Romney to speak the language of kooky contradictions. As Jonathan Chait observed:

Watch Mitt Romney attempt to simultaneously assail Obama for his brutal plan to cut Medicare and for having no plan to cut Medicare: "I'd be willing to consider the president's plan, but he doesn't have one. That's right: In over three years, he has failed to enact or even propose a serious plan to solve our entitlement crisis," Romney said in a speech to the Newspaper Association of America in Washington, D.C. "Instead, he has taken a series of steps that end Medicare as we know it. He is the only president to ever cut $500 billion from Medicare. And, as a result, more than half of doctors say they will cut back on treating seniors." Obama's nonexistent Medicare plan will cut hundreds of billions from Medicare!

In order for Romney to make this bit of obfuscation work, of course, it will require the political media to be either incompetent at pointing out basic contradictions or unwilling to do so because a "lie" told in a "horse race" is just an "interesting point of view." SPOILER ALERT: This is EXACTLY what the political media is like, which is why Romney can get away with criticizing Obama for spending "too much time at Harvard," when Romney himself spent more time getting more degrees from Harvard, and is running a campaign shot through with advisers and donors from Harvard. (Harvard and Bain Capital have a rich history as well.) What Romney has failed to learn from Harvard, evidently, is some elementary common sense. How else to explain his inexplicable call for Obama to "release the notes and transcripts of all his meetings with world leaders so the American people can be satisfied that he's not promising to sell out the country's interests after the election is over." Isn't that Julian Assange's job? Could you even imagine a president being willing to do this? The DNC turned this into a fast-break lay-up:

"For example, does Governor Romney think we should release all the notes and transcripts of the President's conversations with our allies, such as the Israelis and Europeans, tipping our hand to Tehran about every last element of our strategy to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? Our friends around the world need to trust that they can speak with the President of the United States in confidence, and that these conversations will not be politicized during an election...It is yet another indication that Mitt Romney is not ready to be Commander-in-Chief."

And while the DNC inquires after Mitt's brain, voters on the stump have apparently been beseeching Romney to provide evidence that he has other internal organs common to the human race. As Caroline Bankoff reports:

At a recent gathering in Ohio, a voter stood up to tell the candidate, "I'd like you to share with all the American citizens that are watching right now ... to show the American people that you have a lot of heart." (They really don't know, do they?) These people apparently want Romney to be freer with personal details and life stories, preferably ones unlike Wednesday's humorous tale about how his father laid off a bunch of auto workers.

Ann Romney is trying to help with the whole humanization-of-her-husband thing, responding to complaints of Romney's stiffness by saying, "I guess we better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out because he is not!" This sort of made us tremendously uncomfortable, to be honest with you! And it surely didn't help that Romney's favorite surrogate, Donald Trump, has seemingly embraced this "let me unzip the real me" line and taken it in the most extreme direction possible.

GOP's War On Sex

Iraq War: What Else Could America Have Spent $800 Billion On?

Bipartisan Immigration Plan's Key Provisions

Tea Party Statements

11 Ways Immigration Reform Helps The Economy

Sen. Ted Cruz

On one level, this week could not have been better for Mitt Romney. By putting the hammer down in primaries in Washington DC, Maryland and Wisconsin, he added to his plump delegate total and has all but put the nomination out of reach for his opponents. The added bonus in Wisconsin came in the form of an endorsement of Representative Paul Ryan, the sentient hairstyle that's come to be symbolic of the legislative ambitions of the GOP establishment. And now that the polls show him surging ahead in Pennsylvania, it looks like he'll manage to block the only avenue Rick Santorum has to mount anything that might resemble a comeback.

So Mitt Romney turns out to be great at primaries! It's the whole "general election" thing that seems to be tripping him up. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus is doing his best to pretend that the gender gap Romney currently faces is just something that the media made up with mirrors and vapor, but the problem is that it's very real -- you can literally count up women in polls and find that they are none too happy with Mitt. And beyond that, there's an overall "enthusiasm gap" that Romney is going to have to surmount: according to a poll by the Economist/YouGov, "just 11% of Republican voters would be excited if Mitt Romney became the party's presidential nominee." That needs to improve if Romney wants to have an army of citizens willing to make phone calls and knock on doors in the fall.

(It should be pointed out that this lack of enthusiasm is not shared by the financial industry, which keeps Romney's super PAC swollen with money.)

One thing seems clear, First Read reports -- Romney could really benefit from Santorum dropping out now:

"In his Q&A with the ne

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FredSanders said on 6 Friday 2012 pm30 10:40 pm: No one nanylonger wonders why the first thing poor Seamus_did when released from the roof rack was to bolt to the nearest free Canadian health care clinic. Never to return. Poor Seamus_.

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Fading Fast In It To Win It

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Comments

[Larry Waters]

07:37 PM on 04/09/2012

Times sure have changed:

John Kerry-decorated Vietnam vet (enlisted)-Bad
Mitt Romney-draft dodger-No big deal
John Kerry-speaks french-Very bad
Mitt Romney-speaks french-Qui se soucie!
John Kerry-$409K to $1.8 mill-assets held jointly by Kerry and-$300K to $600K. Bad!
Mitt Romney- $150 to $200 million-Good!

[Say Amen]

07:06 PM on 04/09/2012

If you are interested in Buddy Roemer and want to learn about him, go to this webpage and read the comment and the thorough documented history about him and his career in politics:
http://fantasypoliticsusa.com/?p=5604

[hhoc612710]

04:32 PM on 04/09/2012

Best ticket ? Palin president West VP= third country . Ha, Ha, Ha.

[ethiopia1a]

09:24 AM on 04/09/2012

say goodbye snob, and don't forget to vote for President Obama...are you a man of your word

[Tmus82]

07:10 AM on 04/09/2012

Noooo don't give up I need the entertainmen.

[goldiekins]

01:14 AM on 04/09/2012

Why is Romney always laughing. Every picture he stands around with a stupid grin or outright laugh. He talks about how bad everything is under Obama, what is he laughing about? Could he be a phoney, a fake? Not really laughing, putting it on? I think so.

[blueinannarbor]

01:12 AM on 04/09/2012

This is interesting. Compare the politifact files of the two presumptive nominees. It's interesting to note that Mitt Smarmy has a 2 to 1 margin in half-truths or lower and actual truthful statements. In addition,even though significantly more of Obama's statements are rated, Smarmy has nearly three times as many 'pants on fire' statements as Obama. Is it any wonder people on both the left and the right routinely refer to Smarmy as a 'serial liar'.

http://www.politifact.com/personalities/mitt-romney/

http://www.politifact.com/personalities/barack-obama/

[opus1dog]

10:21 PM on 04/08/2012

These are desperate days in TPville: Our POTUS holds a 10% advantage in the ten swing states and a 4% national lead against Romney among registered voters without having lifted a campaign finger. Romney is downward trending now that the GOP has blown it by trying to engage social issues. Romney still cannot tell us where he stands on basic issues and does not want to tell us how and where his $250MM is hidden.

[mcmutter]

09:56 PM on 04/08/2012

will monkey-man Rick support Willard ?

that is the question ....

[windstorm46]

09:25 PM on 04/08/2012

We all know Mr. Rmoney (aka the dork) is going to get the nomination. We just don't know when the others will start dropping out. Hopefully - not until the convention - because I love circuses !

[ArizonaDavid]

09:43 PM on 04/08/2012

I love circuses too especially 3 RING CIRCUSES. Ring 1-Romney. Ring 2-Santorum. Ring 3-Gingrich. They can now: "Be the clowns, be the clowns, all of 'U.S.' love the clowns..."

[Ralph Boyd]

09:24 PM on 04/08/2012

Going on, because of the religious aspect of this race if Romney doesn't flood any primary with cash he could lose. That aspect alone means this race isn't over.

[Suzy 24]

08:46 PM on 04/08/2012

Rick give up ? not until you take his bible from his cold dead hands.

[REDSTATEREFUGEE]

10:27 PM on 04/08/2012

X 169, Suzy, for touching a memory of pre-Alzheimic Charlton Heston....

[lessbs]

08:32 PM on 04/08/2012

"Religious leader to Santorum: Exit the race" The Southern Baptists would rather have a mormon, who they view as a cult, for president than a black man. Reaffirms my atheist beliefs.

[Brush with Death]

08:02 PM on 04/08/2012

Welcome to the major league Mitt. I think you might find that the opposition is much tougher at this level. By this point in his primary, President Obama had faced three guys and one lady who were much tougher than anyone on the republican ticket this season or the last. I suspect you are not ready for what is about to happen.

[Katco]

07:46 PM on 04/08/2012

There's no greater threat to our liberty
Than programs like Social Security,
Obamacare, Student Aid,
Medicare, Medicaid,
Sapping our strength and our dignity!
(Now that should get dummies to vote for me.)

Signed,

Republican Presidential Candidate 2012