This week I filed a sworn supplemental complaint against the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) with the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC). The 37 page document accuses (NOM) of not reporting $345,400 in contributions that it received from 11 donors in 2008 including GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. NOM was the single largest contributor to California's Proposition 8 campaign that year.

I previously filed a complaint against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) with the FPPC in November of 2008 for not reporting all the money it had spent to pass Prop 8. The Mormon Church was prosecuted, investigated for 18 months, pled guilty on 13 counts of election fraud and was fined by the FPPC. I am also responsible for the ongoing 2½ year investigation of NOM by the state of Maine for money laundering in that state's 2009 election to repeal gay marriage.

In the Maine case, the Attorney General's office subpoenaed 29 documents, including NOM's 2008 federal tax returns. Exhibit #10 is where these 11 missing large contributions appeared. The names were never reported to the California Secretary of State as required by law.

Was NOM Trying to Protect its Mega-Donors?

In 2008 the brand new NOM was trying to flex its muscles on Prop 8 and show what a great fundraiser it was, but its two leaders Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown somehow forgot to report over $345,000 in contributions that they received that year.

Missing from NOM's campaign reports was $100,000 from Sean Fieler of the New York based Equinox Partners who also serves as Chairman of NOM's American Principles Project. NOM also inadvertently left off the $150,000 that it received from "Delivery from Heaven Foundation" President Michael Casey. Casey and Fieler had each previously given $5,000 to NOM's legal arm ActRight.

The recently unsealed documents in Maine also revealed that NOM received $10,000 from Mitt Romney on October 14, 2008 through his Alabama PAC "Free and Strong America" which it did not report. That was only 3 weeks before the Prop 8 election. NOM board member Craig Cardon of Mesa, Arizona gave $25,000 that NOM did not report either. Elder Cardon is a member of the Mormon Church First Quorum of the Seventy and had served as a stake president, bishop, high councilor, counselor in a stake presidency and bishopric, elders quorum president, institute instructor, and Gospel Doctrine teacher of the Mormon Church.

The "NOM Eleven" Secret Donors

Below is the list of the eleven contributors that the "National Organization for Marriage California -- Yes on 8, Sponsored by National Organization for Marriage" did not report to the California Secretary of State in 2008 and did not want us to see.

Michael Casey - $150,000
Jamestown, RI

Sean Fieler - $100,000
New York, NY

Craig Cardon - $25,000
Mesa, AZ

Free and Strong America (Romney's Alabama PAC) - $10,000
Belmont, CA

Charles Stetson - $20,000
New York, NY

Timothy Busch - $20,000
Irvine, CA
Reported $10,000 $10,000 Not Reported

Brian Harrington - $10,000
Newtown, CT

Brent Bowden - $10,000
Mesa PA

Jim Vargas - $10,000
La Jolla, CA

Kenneth Kremensky - $9,500
El Cajon, CA
Reported $9,100 $400 Not Reported

Mark O'Brien - $5,000
Swathmore, PA

NOM was formed in 2007 to qualify and pass Proposition 8. Ever since 2009, NOM appears to try and launder money through its national organization, its Educational Fund, one of its state PACs or numerous other entities it has established to defeat pro-marriage equality candidates and pass constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage across the U.S.

The statute of limitations on filing campaign ethic's violations in California is five years.

This week, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum decided that the time to quit his upset bid had finally come. He shuttered a campaign that had risen from the depths to become a surprising success and, for a time, a real burr in former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's side. But with the heavy risk of flaming out for a second time in his home state, Santorum opted to go out on as high a note as possible, and in so doing, he officially made the primary season a secondary concern.

Yes, Texas Rep. Ron Paul still has some leverage to wield, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has some shout left in him, but this race has ended up where we mostly thought it would, with Romney as the GOP standardbearer and President Barack Obama as the incumbent hoping to hold forth. Neither man is unprepared for this matchup. Romney has, almost from the beginning, spent more time looking past his fellow GOP contenders and kept his eyes on his eventual general election opponent. And the Obama campaign never indulged too heavily in the speculation that one of Romney's competitors was going to end up tripping Mitt at the finish line. Each has anticipated the other, and by and large, so have we all.

Now, the question that gets raised is what sort of race we should expect from here. On that regard, Politico's John Harris predicts that the coming campaign will be a model of "self-restraint in an age of rage."

The general election will pit one exceptionally self-contained, self-disciplined, self-motivated man against another with precisely the same traits.

Voters have a choice between two men whose minds gravitate to rationality and logic — both of whom have expressed disdain for the disorder and surliness that pervade modern governance.

There may be more than coincidence at work with this seeming paradox. During a time when politics is defined by media saturation and relentless attacks, there is a premium on politicians who live by an ethic of constant self-control.

It sure is pretty to think that this is what's likely to happen. But this week's "Rosengate" flap suggests otherwise. This is a matter we've already opined at length about, so we won't repeat ourselves. But the whole incident demonstrated that civility can go out the window entirely when the right buttons get pressed. In this case, we had Romney's yawning gender gap, and the vulnerability that poses for him, intersecting with the traditional "leave the spouses out of it" rule of decorum.

The result: a silly vendetta. The Romney team went full-teeth after someone who's got nothing at all to do with the campaign. The Obama team ordered its allies to go out with a baseball bat and not return until they'd managed to get a Hilary Rosen-shaped dent embedded in the wood. Whatever value there was to be had in a discussion about women or moms or the economy got lost. The only thing Romney gained was an opportunity to push the assassination joke by his new backer, Foster Friess -- and the sixth birthday of "Romneycare" -- out of the headlines. The only benefit to Obama was a cheap scoring of a "Sista Soulja moment." And in the end, the entire contretemps only really had salience with the cosseted elites of the Beltway and the media by which it is served.

But one of your Speculatroners' regular readers emailed in with a good point: If Hilary Rosen had made the same comments two months ago, no one would have said a blessed word about it. And that's the difference between the primary season and what we're on to now. We're no longer in the part of the process where Romney gets shot at and he has to abide by Reagan's 11th Commandment and stay his hand. It's open season on everybody now.

We'd like to believe in the fantasy that Harris is describing, but we don't. (In fact, we think that all Harris is doing is setting up the "I'm so disappointed in the direction the election has taken" article that he already plans to write.) This week's sharp turn into rage was predictable, considering last week's kerfuffle between Reince Priebus and Democratic rapid-responders, who bypassed arguing a substantive point and went straight to trying to score cheap points arguing Priebus' metaphor.

But here's all you need to remember. Obama is happy to wage a negative campaign. Romney has already calculated that lying will need to be a key feature of his campaign (and his surrogates have actually admitted this). And both of these guys will be backed by stacked super PACs, that only really exist to allow someone affiliated with the campaign to get elbow-deep in the dank.

So we're at a crossroads here, and the candidates have choices. They could wage a high-minded campaign, rooted in substance, and wage a valuable debate that edifies and empowers voters. Or they could choose a nasty, brutish, interminable slog to November. We'd love to see the former, but we predict the latter.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail, the smooth road for Gary Johnson's quest for the Libertarian Party nomination hit a roadblock, Newt Gingrich expanded his fight with Romney to a fight with a former employer, Ron Paul's campaign waged an unseen battle in Missouri that could presage his future, Obama's campaign battled ts own sense of cockiness, and Rick Santorum had a surprisingly potent bid for respectability. For all of this and the rest of the news from the rapidly receding campaign trail, please feel free to enter the Speculatron for the week of April 13, 2012.

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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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This week the attention that's mainly been lavished on covering the 2012 campaign got reoriented, slightly, in the direction of the steps of the Supreme Court, for three days of oral argument concerning what amounts to the Obama administration's chief accomplishment -- the Affordable Care Act -- and the relative constitutionality of the individual mandate that underpins its mechanics. So, chances are you already know that things did not exactly go well for the Affordable Care Act.

"Train wreck," is the term CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin used as a catch-all review of the government's lawyering, before he amended it to "plane wreck," and then went searching for the proper maritime disaster to reference if the government's lawyer, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, managed to somehow set the court on fire by accident, whilst arguing severability. (We would have gone with the USS Eastland, in which more than 800 people were killed while the ship was still moored.)

So the phrase of the week is definitely the term for the thing that Verrilli argued inadequately: limiting principle.

Should the Affordable Care Act fall -- and it really now depends on where the egos of Justices Roberts and Kennedy take them either in the direction of historic judicial activism or defining their own day-saving limiting principle -- the limitations placed on many of the candidates could outpace the freedoms they offer. For the Obama administration in particular, it presents the high-tension challenge of running for a second term after your biggest accomplishment has been snatched from your pocket. Will the absence of Obamacare make the Democratic base's heart grow galvanized, or more despondent? And what's the individual mandate-free Plan B that you get passed through a hostile Congress in the second term?

For Mitt Romney, not having to run for office with the similarity of Obamacare and Romneycare shining spectrally on the larger debate, having the issue essentially struck from the stage probably feels freeing at first. Nevermore will he have to parse the puny distinctions between the two health care reforms as if they were wide philosophical gulfs, or have to answer interrogations over whether he truly meant Romneycare to be a "model for the nation." But the freedom comes with a limit -- presumably someone is going to remember to ask him what he plans on replacing Obamacare with, seeing as he's running on "repeal and replace," and the SCOTUS was nice enough to do half the work. Does Mitt Romney have a second health care innovation -- a mandate-less one at that -- to pull from his Bain brain?

Rick Santorum, of course, came to Washington, stood on the steps of the Supreme Court, and declaimed his desire to see the Supreme Court strike it down. To which someone should have said, "Rick, what are you doing, man?" If the SCOTUS knocks down the Affordable Care Act around the time the primaries are wrapping, and Santorum's been successful at keeping Romney from hitting the magic number of 1,144 delegates, then he only has one argument he can make to the party's elite -- that Mitt Romney's insufficiently equipped to argue health care against the incumbent. That's his case, in its entirety. (And you have to get it right, or else he'll swear at you.) If the Supreme Court makes the matter moot, there'll be no convincing anyone that Romney can't carry the banner.

The truth is, the Supreme Court can alter the tenor and course of the race in any number of terrifying and interesting ways, and we're not really convinced that anyone has a plan for what to do if they fail to find in favor of the current law. (Well, except for Gingrich, who we expect is planning on winning the nomination by chloroforming all of delegates in Tampa and performing inception on them.) The decision could create new urgencies, fresh problems or sudden escapes from harm. It's hard to say, and harder still to know anything other than the fact that even on a week where you're put on the newscycle's back-burner, you can still get scorched.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Newt Gingrich took a trip to the zoo and hatched a new plan, Ron Paul stayed true to his alliances, Mitt Romney got new endorsements to go with new entanglements, Rick Santorum took a second round of bull droppings from the media, and Barack Obama's great polling numbers ... are also his campaign's new cause for alarm? To find out about all of this week's goings on, please feel free to enter the Speculatron for the week of March 30, 2012.

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The secret documents that show the divisive, racially-driven strategies of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) have received enormous media attention since they were unsealed a day ago by a federal judge.

Receiving much less attention, however, is the fact that it all began with Fred Karger, the openly gay man who is running for the Republican nomination for President and has used his campaign to try to focus on the issue of marriage equality while criticizing the networks for not allowing him in the televised presidential debates.

Appearing on my radio program on SiriusXM OutQ on Monday, Karger explained how he'd filed a complaint, as the head of Californians Against Hate, with the Maine Ethics Commission back in 2009 regarding NOM's refusal to disclose the names of its donors. NOM contributed money to the ballot initiative in Maine in 2009 to ban gay marriage and under Maine election law the group was required to disclose its donors.

Karger had previously exposed the Mormon Church's involvement in the campaign to pass Prop 8 in California, which led to an investigation in that state which found the LDC church guilty of political malfeasance. The Maine Ethics Commission took Karger's complaint seriously, he said, and determined NOM had to disclose the donors. NOM refused and challenged the Maine law in federal court, eventually losing after being rebuffed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Still pending is a separate appeal on another case; if NOM loses that case it must reveal the names of the donors, including three that had given over $1 million each.

"I saw that NOM was putting about $400,000 into the campaign without reporting any of it," Karger said. "I sent a letter to the ethics commission. They asked me to specifically file a formal complaint. And then they asked me to come and testify. It was 3-2 that they agreed to investigate NOM."

Karger explained confidential documents showing the racially-divisive strategies were among those that the Maine attorney general had collected from NOM after it decided to challenge the disclosure law in federal court. Now that the case is over, the federal judge in the case unsealed the documents. Karger says there could be more confidential documents coming.

Listen to the full interview below:

But as important as the win in Illinois was for cementing Team Romney's delegate realities, the most critical turn in the race wouldn't come until Wednesday, when Jeb Bush -- a critical member of the still-dreamed about group of GOP contenders that never were -- offered Mitt Romney his endorsement, and bestowed a new blessing from the Republican establishment. Bush personally delivered the news to Romney and his trusted aide, Eric Fehrnstrom.

"Well, Jeb, we're very glad to have your support! Ha. Ha." said Romney. "I think your endorsement could be a real GAME CHANGE."

"What are you doing there?" a perplexed Bush asked.

"What do you mean?"

"The way you said 'Game Change,' right there, like you were italicizing it, or something?"

"Oh!" said Romney, "That was nothing. Ha."

"And then you did, like, this take to an imaginary camera, or something?"

"Ha. Don't worry about it, Jeb!" Romney took a thoughtful pause. "Jeb Bush, eh? Is that French-Canadian, or something?"

"Not really," replied Bush. "I think we're from Texas? Anyway, I wanted you to see the draft of the statement I'll be giving out concerning this endorsement."

Fehrnstrom looked it over, and was immediately hit in his psychic solar plexus by what he read.

"I hate to be a nudge, here, Jeb. But the language, here ..." Ferhnstrom trailed off.

"What's wrong with it?" asked Bush.

Fehrnstrom cleared his throat and dove in. "Well, it's not too terribly enthusiastic, is it? You talk about how it's time to unify the party and come together around -- and I quote -- 'the guy who is basically going to win, anyway.'"

"I think that if you read on, you'll see I'm very full-throated in support for your candidate," countered Bush.

"Well, I'll tell you, Jeb, I'm reading further down, and I come to this section which you've titled, 'Making The Best Of It.'"

"Right! See. I call your candidate 'the best.'"

"And there's the way you keep saying 'your candidate,' that sort of troubles me," Fehrnstrom said, adding, "And I see the second page is just ten paragraphs of how great a vice president Marco Rubio would be."

"Gotta think about the long game, Eric."

"It's just that you seem boundlessly enthusiastic about Marco, and not so much into Mitt."

"Eric, I promise you, I am very excited about this endorsement."

"Jeb, everywhere Marco Rubio's name appears in your draft, it's written in red ink," Fehrnstrom said, pointedly. "And instead of the o's in his name, you've drawn hearts."

"I think you're reading into it," Jeb replied.

At this point, Romney interjected. "Let's not turn this into a thing, Eric. Here let me see it." Fehrnstrom handed him the draft statement, which Mitt hefted in the air and studied meticulously.

"Jeb," Romney enthused, "This is great. Just the right weight for an endorsement. We thank you."

"I'm glad to hear it," said Bush, relieved. "And look, guys, you can keep your own counsel on who your running mate will be. I just think that Marco is a solid conservative, a good spokesman for the party, and he could be a real game change for your ticket."

Romney immediately froze, mugging for an unseen eye offstage.

"You're doing it again."

The above passage, which we have imagined for "Game Change 2: The Changening" (the sequel to "Game Change," a book of invented scenes about the 2008 campaign), perfectly encapsulates the state of the race this week. Mitt Romney continues to win the slog through the primaries, and continues to accrue the delegates necessary to win the nomination.

But even as Romney wends his way to almost certain triumph, his favorable ratings continue to submerge. He's acceptable, but not particularly well-liked. The brain likes his odds in November, but the heart can't get very pitter-pattery about it. And Jeb's endorsement sort of underscores this. What reason does he cite for endorsing Romney? He leads with this: "Primary elections have been held in thirty-four states." Translation: "This is pretty much going to happen, so, meh ... I guess."

Meanwhile, the candidate that appeals most to the conservative heart, Rick Santorum, may be growing in the estimation of voters, but -- well ... primary elections have been held in thirty-four states, you know? Santorum may have peaked at the right time to become Romney's main co-competitor, but it doesn't look like he did it early enough to actually win. With time running out and opportunities drying up, the Santorum campaign released its own version of delegate math in an effort to convince the media of his viability. But it was pretty clear, upon a cursory examination, that the Santorum team's logic was mostly constructed from gossamer and the daydreams of kittens.

A lot of what could undermine Santorum's reasoning played out in Missouri, where Mitt Romney's alliance with Ron Paul managed to rob Santorum of delegates that he would have liked to have out of a state he won. But Santorum's cash-strapped campaign had trouble competing with Romney and Paul's well-oiled machines. And yet! The mere fact that Romney needed help from Paul only proved what Santorum's been saying all along -- that Romney's a weak candidate who's growing weaker and who can't earn the nomination on his own merits.

But there's nothing to be done but look ahead. Romney sees a slew of eminently winnable states on April 24th as his next best chance to clear the race of the dead weight. Santorum looks ahead to a more immediate contest in Louisiana, where he hopes a big popular vote win will play louder than an almost certain tiny share of the delegates. And Newt Gingrich? He's looking all the way ahead to Tampa, where he hopes he can tear everyone's hopes asunder with his knack for sowing discord. That's where we are.

Elsewhere, Gingrich tried to feud with a film star, Gary Johnson outlined some bold promises, Rick Santorum got rooked by the media, a pair of long-shots won consolation prizes in Puerto Rico, and the Romney camp said something it might regret -- and we're not referring to "Etch a Sketch." For all your campaign news and notes, please feel free to enter the Speculatron for the week of March 23, 2012.

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I was in Puerto Rico for six days leading up to the Republican Primary there. I was one of 6 Republicans on the primary ballot. I differ greatly from the other five on many issues.

Support Statehood and Spanish as First Language

I have supported Statehood for Puerto Rico since I worked for President Ford in 1976, as long as the citizens of Puerto Rico do. I also believe that Spanish should remain the first language of Puerto Rico as it has been for over 400 years. Washington DC should never try and change that if Statehood happens.

Running Spanish-Language Commercial

I had the only Spanish-language television commercial on the air in Puerto Rico "Hola Puerto Rico." I have long reached out to the Hispanic Community to support Republican candidates going back to our "Viva Duke" campaign 30 years ago when we managed George "Duke" Deukmejian's successful campaign for governor for California.

Romney and Santorum are driving away America's fastest growing voter group in the hopes of placating the right wing of the Republican Party. This will only inflict long-term damage to the GOP and is a major mistake.

The Hispanic Community and the Republican Party have much in common. We should work very hard to emphasize all our shared beliefs and work together to defeat President Obama.

I was well received on the island, and even beat Ron Paul Sunday's election.

Last week, after the dust had settled on Super Tuesday, we surmised that you couldn't really call the 2012 GOP primary contest a battle between Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul. Rather, it had become a race between Mitt Romney and a contested convention.

Well, we may have performed inception, folks. Our little idea could be on its way to changing everything. At the moment, we're starting to see the thought of post-June wranglings, brokered deals, even the possibility of a bona fide floor fight start to creep into the minds and campaigns of Romney's opponents. Now, they're still facing very long odds -- Romney's path to a clean 1,144-to-notch the nomination delegate count remains the likeliest outcome of the primaries. And even if Romney can't get there by the time the curtain comes down on the final contests, GOP party bigwigs have plenty of time to hash out a deal that ensures his coronation. So don't go wild on InTrade betting on a tilt in Tampa just yet.

Where the idea currently lives is in the mind's eye of Romney's opponents, who all have to face the reality of his advantage, weigh their own wants and needs, and game out the best possibility of success.

If you're Ron Paul, convention wrangling is what you're all about, only you're doing it at all the state conventions that have yet to meet and decide what to do about the delegates voted out of their early caucuses. This is where Paul wants to cause the most trouble -- grabbing unexpected delegates, messing with his competitors' projections. But Paul's long game isn't about burning bridges -- he wants to deepen the connection between the movement he's built and the Republican Party. So he'll probably use what leverage he has long before delegates arrive in Tampa. In that way, he cements a legacy for others to follow. Like his son. Or, like the many Paul acolytes who are getting a master class in presidential politics in the caucus states.

By contrast, Newt Gingrich has no intention of finishing this battle with a genial deal reached ahead of the convention -- he's out for pure havoc. He's already made it clear that his aim is to stop Mitt Romney from reaching the nomination. But that doesn't really capture it all. According to Robert Costa's "go read the whole thing right now" latest, Gingrich is looking to do something historic -- and it's no less than sowing total "convention chaos."

Coupled with Gingrich's ambition to be a Reagan-like player at the Tampa convention is a lingering sense that this presidential campaign could easily be his last. At 68 years old, he is keen to plod on because, quite simply, he relishes being in the arena -- not merely sitting outside of it, talking about politics on cable news, as he did for the past decade.

[...]

Over the past few weeks, [conservative activist Richard] Viguerie has been calling his influential friends within the conservative movement, asking them to join with him in urging their old friend to respectfully withdraw. But after working the phones, he is resigned to the fact that Gingrich will make this decision alone, and probably at the last possible moment. "I'm not optimistic that he's going to get out anytime soon," he says wistfully. "He's hoping for a deadlocked convention -- for lightning to strike."

And then you have Rick Santorum. He's not looking to summon lightning from the skies, but he nevertheless has correctly surmised that he'll need an "act of God" to win the nomination. Though ironically, he's the guy who's actually in the position to pull off Newt Gingrich's "stop Romney" strategy. But as George Stephanopoulos points out, he "would have to basically sweep all the big states left" to pull it off:

Illinois next week. (And even that win might not get him most of the delegates because Santorum’s off the ballot in a few districts.)

Then he needs upsets in Wisconsin and Maryland on April 3rd – plus a sweep of New York and Pennsylvania at the end of the month.

In May, he’d need to win big on the 8th: Indiana, West Virginia and North Carolina – and hope that gives him enough momentum to win three of the five contests on June 5th. One of those wins would have to be either New Jersey or California.

All that would cripple Romney heading to Tampa.

But would Santorum go with Gingrich's nuclear option at the convention? Here's where things get murkier. Not long ago, Santorum might have been inclined to force the issue. As recently at this week, he was imagining that he might be the candidate to finally catalyze a union of conservatives on the convention floor. But while Santorum's success hasn't provided him with a clear path to the nomination, it's nevertheless provided him with some intriguing options: talk of being next in line in 2016 (or 2020), as well as talk of being on the ticket. Those prospects could convince him that staging a melee in Tampa is not in his best interests.

Of course, Mitt Romney has an entirely different take on all of this: "Look, we're not going to go to a brokered convention." He's probably right. He hopes so, anyway.

Elsewhere, Ron Paul achieved a historic win that was also somehow a blowout loss, Gary Johnson made plans to break bread with a key kingmaker, Mitt Romney's battles continue to put strain on his warchest, Rick Santorum got snippy with Fox News, and does anyone know what was going on with President Obama's polling this week? Probably something terrible/wonderful that will make him sorry/grateful when his campaign reaches its regretful/happy conclusion. For all the good things getting better and the bad things getting worse, please enter the Speculatron for the week of March 16, 2012.

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This is the fifth installment in a series of stories about my experience on the campaign trail with Fred Karger, an openly gay candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

Two words sum up my disappointment with Fred Karger's campaign for President of the United States: Rick Santorum. It is Rick Santorum who has taught me about the consequences of self-imposed limitations in politics, and the lesson began one summer day in Iowa nearly two years ago.

They say, "You can take the boy out of Chicago, but you can't take Chicago out of the boy." Maybe that's why I felt so at peace sleepwalking through O'Hare Airport.

It was August 2010, and I was spending the day at the Iowa State Fair with Fred Karger. The red-eye I had taken from Los Angeles was so early that the tram from United Airline's Terminal for Tomorrow wasn't running yet. The trek to the commuter gate for my flight to Des Moines was a long one, especially with all my camera gear, but I didn't care.

The feeling of not belonging, which I wrote about in an earlier installment, applies to groups of people, not individuals, and certainly not geographical locations. As a filmmaker, one learns to appreciate the power of locations. And O'Hare Airport is a gateway to one of the most significant ones in my life.

In a similar way that the banks and currents of the mighty Mississippi provided Huckleberry Finn and Jim their route to freedom, the ravines and bluffs of Lake Michigan in Illinois, where I cavorted in my youth, bestowed on me such a sense of autonomy and security that I grew up believing I was capable of anything. So indelibly imprinted on my psyche are they that when graduating from Stanford and facing the awkward task of coming out of the closet, I chose Chicago, not nearby San Francisco, for the passage. With Wrigley Field and St. Clement Catholic Church as my sentries and the Great Lake as my shield, I was able to recapture the invincibility I felt as a boy and wage an earnest if uncertain campaign for manhood.

They also say, "People in Chicago do what they say they do," which is true, especially from the perspective of someone who now calls West Hollywood home. It's even truer in Iowa, which casts an ironic if unsettling tint on the events that were about to unfold at the Hawkeye state fair.

First up on Fred Karger's schedule that day was an in-studio interview with Jan Mickelson, the conservative voice of Iowa radio, and although Fred had already been on his show once, long-distance, this was to be his first face-to-face sit-down with the radio host.

I hit pay dirt immediately.

Jan's guest right before Fred was none other than the former Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, and he was there for the same reason as Fred. I knew more than a little about the socially conservative Rick Santorum. The 18-point repudiation he suffered at the hands of his Pennsylvania constituents in his bid for reelection in 2006 had been a hopeful sign to me at the time, pointing the way toward a more reasoned partisan discourse, especially in terms of issues important to gays and lesbians.

That 18-point drubbing also made his presidential ambitions seem even more far-fetched than Fred's were quixotic, which cast him as a perfect character foil to my story's hero. Former Senator or not, Santorum couldn't compete, I thought, with Fred's chutzpah. What Fred lacked in bona fides he more than made up for in charisma, strategy, and determination. He was, hands down, a better story, too. Don't take my word for it, though. Take WHO TV's, the local news channel that ran a story about the two political longshots that day:

I relished the prospect of Fred publicly debating the likes of Rick Santorum. Too bad, I figured, that the Pennsylvanian wouldn't make it past the Ames straw poll.

By the time Fred and his ragtag band of supporters had moseyed up to the station's studio on the fair grounds' main esplanade, Jan and Rick were already deep into their segment, and their friendly-sounding banter echoed off the rows of festooned booths hawking everything from fresh-squeezed lemonade to chops of plump pork and sweet and savory deep-fried delights of every type. The topic of the day was the proposed construction of a Muslim mosque just a few blocks from "ground zero" in New York City. I sighed as Santorum ran through a litany contrasting the prophet Mohammed to the messiah Jesus Christ. He had all the rancor of a South Park episode, with none of the insight or self-deprecating humor. Dutch law and "Islamofascist fatwahs" notwithstanding, I smiled at what a Trey Parker-Matt Stone match-up between the two holy men (like the one they pulled off between Jesus and Santa in "A Christmas Story," their short video that launched the animated series) might look like.

Insight is not something Rick Santorum will ever be accused of having, unless you count specious arguments like the one he made at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference that American's founding document is the Bible. He did, however, display a knack for self-deprecation when Jan poked fun at him for the raunchy definition of his name that a Google search brings up, courtesy of another Chicago Catholic boy, writer and pundit Dan Savage.

As he good-naturedly allowed Fred to have a picture snapped with him during the break between their two segments, I'm tempted to say that I rethought my assessment of the Senator's viability. But that would be disingenuous, because although he seemed affable enough, he also looked like a deer caught in the headlights, and those headlights belonged to an 18-wheeler named Fred Karger rolling right for him.

How wrong could I have been?

The fact that I'm even writing about Rick Santorum this late in the primary season baffles my mind, as does the role Illinois, the state of both Fred's and my births, might play in his insurgent candidacy. But I get it. Rick Santorum has done it the old-fashioned way, with a lot of shoe leather left on the main streets of Iowa and a healthy dose of religious conviction. Fred Karger, on the other hand, has been all over the map, literally and figuratively. In Saving the Boom, he talks about how his 27 years in politics taught him the shotgun approach: "throw everything out there, and something will stick."

The buckshot in this case has included Big Oil:

The National Organization for Marriage:

Partisan rancor:

Mitt Romney's voter registration, getting America fit, teen suicide, amending the voting age to 15, and even demon frisbees, which, as the commercial's maker, I'm proud to say made it onto The Rachel Maddow Show and a top-10-wackiest-political-campaign-ads list:

The thing about shotguns is you don't have to be a very good shot to hit something, and Fred Karger hasn't done anything more than just fire at the wall.

If only Fred Karger had taken his potential seriously and believed in himself. If only he had believed in me, or his aide, Kevin, or any of the folks along the way who were touched by the idea of his candidacy, because I believe any good campaign is about the people behind it, not the ego headlining it.

His talk before the recent Michigan primary of the importance of actually winning delegates, which any self-proclaimed "gay Shirley Chisholm" (as Fred likes to call himself) would have known since the outset, does offer a ray of hope, since Karger intends to stay "in the race" through the California primary. But it's a ray that may have already faded, and winning those delegates and really making the history he talks incessantly about will require Fred to get out of his comfort zone, which so far he has seemed unwilling to do.

Fred describes himself as a micromanager, comparing himself to Jimmy Carter. That's a nice way of putting it. But the point is well taken, and the lesson is learned.

Rick Santorum feels like vomiting? This JFK already has.

Up next: Part 6: AIDS Does Discriminate

It was the summer of 2010. I was sitting at an outdoor table at the Element Lounge, a gay bar in Manchester, N.H., when an energetic presidential hopeful, in khakis and a white oxford, skipped over to my table and invited me and my wife to attend his open-bar event at the Element the following night. He introduced himself as Fred Karger, an openly gay Republican presidential candidate. I nearly spit my Miller Lite onto my jeans.

I remember so vividly the inauguration of President Obama. I was moved to tears as I witnessed history changing. I felt such a deep sense of hope, and even one of pride, as the United States had actually elected a black president. But a gay, Jewish Republican president? Oy Gevalt!

Nearly two years later, I've been following Fred's virtual campaign trail, and I have developed a great respect for the battles he has waged, in an arena where he is not even remotely wanted or accepted.

I caught up with Fred March 8:

You are an openly gay Republican. Is that like being a gay Iranian executioner?

[Laughs.] Well, you know, there are many Republicans who are far ahead of President Obama and other Democrats in equality issues. I think it's important to have two parties representing LGBT issues so that the Democrats do not take our issues for granted. I think it's important that the Republican Party is once again the leader for civil rights.

In an interview with BigThink.com, you said you are trying to bring the Republican Party back to its roots of Lincoln and Roosevelt. Lincoln fought for equal rights of all people, and Roosevelt was an environmentalist, responsible for tightening the reins on capitalism. Those sound like values that are more aligned with today's Democratic Party, wouldn't you say?

The political winds shift. There are still many in the party who are not thrilled with this far-right shift, and we are trying to bring back the center to the Republican Party, which is really where America is.

You've said that you think the Republican Party has a lot of good people. Which Republican leaders can the gay community count on for support of full equal rights?

Well, we've got the Cheneys, which is an interesting situation. When people are directly impacted, we see the dramatic shifts on position. Cindy McCain is a strong advocate for every LGBT issue. Laura Bush, we find out now, has always been a supporter. We are seeing others in the Republican Party coming around. It's a little easier when you are out of office or the spouse of someone in office because of the tremendous pressure from the National Organization for Marriage, who bully and blackmail, targeting only Republicans.

You and I are actually friends on Facebook, and it seems every other day I see a new photo of you with celebrities from Jake Gyllenhaal to Candice Bergen. Do these people know you are a Republican?

You've got to read my book. It's called Fred Who?, and it tells a lot of those stories.

You mention polls that indicate that over 50 percent of Americans are ready for a gay president. The problem for you is that those people are Democrats. Was that a factor addressed by your exploratory committee? If not, should someone be fired?

[Laughs.] That would have to be me: I'm the campaign manager! Times are changing, but you have to look at this current Republican Party. It's very different from the Republican Party when Reagan was elected. So many Republicans have left the party since then, so what is left is what is designed by the very far right. I knew that going in, of course, and I knew that the headline "gay Republican" would be an oxymoron within the Republican Party.

GOProud criticized you as running around the country with a pride flag and not really running as a valid contender. How would you respond? Do you see yourself as a valid contender?

Well, you know, that's a pretty old quote... and we are working together now. They aren't on the Karger train yet, but I talk to them regularly and seek their advice. As we sit here today, [a Karger nomination is] still a long shot, but if I can get in the debate, then I can certainly emerge.

During the initial AIDS crisis, Ronald Reagan's impotent non-response has been largely held as one of the greatest factors in the rapid spread of HIV and AIDS in the U.S., and in fact, thousands and thousands of Americans had died of AIDS-related causes before he even uttered the word "AIDS" for the first time in 1985. Any regrets from working on his 1984 reelection campaign?

Ronald Reagan was president in a very different time. The New York Times refused to ever print the word "AIDS." I'm not defending Reagan. His conduct on that issue was shameful.

On your website, you say you are appealing to Obama supporters. Why not run as an independent?

The way the system is, it's not feasible to run as an independent unless you are Michael Bloomberg or Ross Perot. Part of the reason I'm [running] is to shake up the Republican Party. I have gotten as much, if not more, opposition from the LGBT community as I have from the Republicans. I have had a lot of doors slammed in my face. I am thick-skinned, but it still hurts.

With Super Tuesday behind us, it is now clear that even the Republicans do not like any of the Republican candidates. What is next for this party?

There is this desperation for another candidate. Mitt Romney is just not catching on fire, and it's a problem.

Tell the truth. Do you secretly hope President Obama is reelected?

No. I wish there were better Republican alternatives, but I'm trying to bring the Republican Party back and also to be their conscience. No more Mr. Nice Gay.

Bill Kristol says it's just getting started. Sarah Palin says all bets are off. Other GOP luminaries say that so far, what they've seen has been "a collective yawn." What are they talking about? The GOP race for the 2012 presidential nomination, that's what. And all of these assessments have been handed down from on high in the wake of Super Tuesday's results.

But wasn't Super Tuesday a pretty unequivocal win for Mitt Romney, leaving him as the only candidate with a path to the nomination that doesn't require a series of miraculous events?

Well, sure, if you're going to be all realistic and practical about it, concentrating only on fundamental factors like Romney's swollen war chest and his superior organization and the likelihood of him having success in the backloaded winner-take-all primaries to come and his current delegate count. But if you do like most of the media has done, and stare into the blinding lights of cloudcuckooland and allow yourself to be dazzled by all the SHINY SHINY so that you get a little light-headed and trippy, then maybe you can see that Romney's big wins Tuesday night were actually some sort of devastating setback.

OH, WE GET IT. You want to "keep things in perspective." You read Nate Silver's curtain-raiser on Super Tuesday, where he projected that Romney would likely net 224 delegates, and he won 213, and surely we're not going to start tearing our eyes out over the fact that he underperformed by eleven delegates. Well, did you go on reading? If you had you'd have seen that Silver's "upside scenario" was 267 delegates. So what's Mitt Romney's fatal flaw, that prevented him from succeeding as successfully as he could? Ron Paul stole three delegates in Virginia, after all!

Look. The important thing to realize is that the people who cover politics hate it when the game gets called early. Yes, Romney has the clearest path to the nomination. Rick Santorum, who remains in the next best position to win, would have to either win a staggeringly high portion of the remaining delegates or benefit from some sort of unforeseen Romney mega-mistake that causes the complete collapse of his support in order to get to 1,144 delegates and win the thing outright. But he (as well as Newt Gingrich) have not technically been mathematically eliminated, and coming up soon are contests in Mississippi and Alabama, where Romney is likely to lose. And if we squint at that at just the right angle, maybe Romney is actually in total disarray.

But if we're looking at this with clear eyes, it's actually become apparent that Mitt Romney is no longer running in a contest against Santorum, Gingrich and Paul as his competition. His only opponent now is the faint specter of a deadlocked convention. It's more likely, at this point, that his three co-competitors can deny Romney the 1,144 votes than it is that any one of them can overtake him and win them for themselves.

And that's the story of Super Tuesday. Which is now over! Welcome to much less super part of the primary season.

In other news from the campaign trail, Newt's exhaustion led to an awkward naptime, Mitt's Olympic-sized round of government gold-digging came back to haunt him, Santorum-speculators offered a bright assessment of his political future, President Obama may end up with an enemy delegate at his convention, and we're left to wonder -- are pollsters giving Ron Paul the stink-eye? All of this and more is waiting for you to enter the Speculatron for the week of March 9, 2012.

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Fred Karger is one of the bravest activists that our LGBT community has. He is the first openly gay presidential candidate from a major political party in American history, in the most homophobic presidential race this country has ever seen. He was on the GOP ballot in New Hampshire and Michigan and has received confirmation that his name will appear on the ballot in California, New York, Maryland, North Carolina, and Puerto Rico. Fred was the first to announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, on March 23, 2011. Karger says he'll stick around through the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August. Throughout his career, Karger has worked on nine presidential campaigns and served as a senior consultant on campaigns for Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Gerald Ford. He retired after 27 years and has since become an activist for gay rights, especially through his organization, Californians Against Hate (now Rights Equal Rights), which investigates the campaigns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) against marriage equality in California and Maine, respectively.

When asked what his personal commitment is to LGBT civil rights, Karger stated:

Well, as someone who struggled so much as an adolescent and through my teen years, someone who went to psychiatrists when I was in college to try and switch, because it was the early '70s, it sounded viable; you thought there were options. Fortunately, the three different ones that I went to, which was a trial to see which one I would go to, I asked all three about switching. Fortunately, each said, "Sorry, we can't do that. We can work with you, but it's impossible." So I'm glad I had some very good help and advice back then, when I was 21. Actually, I met somebody named Dan Brewster when I was 21, and he was just this great role model, and I realized that it was OK to be gay. You could be like Dan Brewster. There wasn't even a word "gay" back then; it kind of evolved, like everything else. I had to struggle and live a double life. I didn't tell my parents until I was 41, or my sibling. I really didn't come out publicly or professionally until I was 56 years old. And while I had a healthy gay life, it was very limited, and it was a terrible existence to have that double life. So now I'm into my 60s and have absolutely no hang-ups, obviously, as running for president. I really want to let that message resonate throughout the country, and as it happens, through all the international coverage I've gotten, through the world. If you happen to be gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender or queer, you can do anything you want to do. You can even run for President of the United States.

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For more information on Fred Karger, visit fredkarger.com.

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With nothing but weeks of time to fill between Maine's Caucuses and this week's primaries, we heard unending talk about the importance of the Michigan Primary: It was going to be a pivotal contest. A proving ground. A test that might be make-or-break for both the presumed frontrunner Mitt Romney, and his fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants challenger Rick Santorum.

Let's just tell the truth about it: It was a complete and embarassing flop for just about everyone involved.

Santorum and Romney really proved to be a pair of ridiculous bumblers. For Santorum, who's been making his case in terms of the economy and the need to revive America's manufacturing sector, Michigan should have been a wonderful opportunity to lay the wood to Mitt Romney, whose stance on the auto industry bailouts were criticized by even his key in-state endorsers.

But rather than stick to his guns, Santorum went wildly off-message, allowing his campaign -- through the cro-magnon throwback commentary of his super PAC sugar daddy Foster Friess -- to get stuck on the crank side of the contraception debate. And in his own words, Santorum offered up a silly critique of higher education and an ill-considered slagging of John F. Kennedy that had even his ideological allies' mouths agape. Those big leads he had in Michigan went away, and the fact that he stopped speaking the language of Michiganders was a big reason why.

But Mitt Romney did nothing with the opportunity either. Instead, he picked this week to stage a lengthy demonstration of how out of touch he is with ordinary people. He had Donald Trump interrupt Michgan voters' lives with robocalls. He talked about his wife's prized pair of Cadillacs. He strained to find fellowship with NASCAR fans, telling them that, while he didn't follow the sport closely, he counted many rich team owners among his friends donors. And then he topped that off by ridiculing some of their rain ponchos.

And there was that constant robotic pronouncement that the trees in Michigan were the right height. Because what America needs now is a president who is closely attuned to arboreal standards.

So instead of a quality contest that pitted two candidates at their best, we got a joke of a race that ended with two frontrunners collapsed and gasping at the finish line, lucky that they didn't have any serious competition from a third party.

Romney managed to win his home state by a handful of percentage points and, like we suspected, was crowned the winner by the media, who immediately set about crafting the "Romney's back" narrative as if they were in thrall to the big red checkmark they'd put by his name after the final projection was made. It was left to Santorum surrogate John Brabender to point out that winning the popular vote only got Romney one delegate, and that everyone should pay attention to the action in the congressional districts, where Santorum was faring well.

At the time Brabender started trying to get giddy reporters to start paying attention to reality, it looked like Santorum might even prevail in the delegate count -- which would have put a real kink in everyone's story about Romney's triumph. Ultimately, the result ended up being exactly what everyone deserved -- a 15-15 tie in delegate allocation. That is, until the state party interceded and gave Romney a second delegate for winning the statewide vote, which Santorum had actually earned by getting more than 15 percent of that vote.

In short, everyone involved in the Michigan Primary -- from the candidates to the people who ran the show to the media that covered it -- found some way to avoid covering themselves in glory. And instead of being a pivotal contest (with only 30 delegates at stake, it was ridiculous to sell the primary as any such thing in the first place), it only re-inflamed all of the panicky uncertainty that preceded it. Is Romney going to close the deal? Is there going to be a deadlocked convention? Should somebody beg, threaten or blackmail some new candidate to jump into the race?

This all resets the stakes for Super Tuesday and once again, all of the expectations seem to be completely, willfully out of whack. According to Andy Kroll, New York Representative Peter King is hearing "whispering and mumbling ... among top Republicans" that if Romney doesn't break loose next Tuesday, there's going to be "more of an emphasis on having someone ready" to jump into the race. Meanwhile, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley is totally certain that Romney is going to end the nomination process next week. But there are only 437 delegates at stake Tuesday, all the contests distribute them proportionally, and various candidates are projected to do better than others in certain states. So that won't happen.

But the fact that everyone is either unreasonably confident or unreasonably uncertain about a contest that's designed to be a prolonged battle between the top candidates speaks volumes about the state of the race, the height of the frenzy and the widespread dissatisfaction over the candidates who make up the field. And adding to the hilarity is the fact that at some point in the future, we might look back on all the delirium, dislocation and discontent and wonder why it even happened. The economy is still quite fragile, and if anyone thinks that Obama is a shoo-in at this point, consider this: He hasn't had a hundred fundraisers because they're fun.

Elsewhere this week, Newt Gingrich has made the price of gas his key issue, Ron Paul had new conspiracies to answer for, a Romney mistake gave Santorum an opening, and third-party contenders have started to plot their hopeful path to the fall debates. For all of this and more, please feel free to enter the Speculatron for the week of March 2, 2012.

Fred Karger may be the most intriguing Presidential candidate you have never heard of. As a Glencoe teenager, his favorite pastime was hopping the train to Chicago and crashing posh charity galas; later, in California, long before any performing ambitions, he crashed the Academy Awards three times.

The gay Republican hopeful hails from Chicago's North Shore and aims to use his election campaign to shake up the attitudes toward homosexuality and Republicans.