By the end of last week Romney was worried enough to do some of the contrast-drawing personally. “Senator Santorum and Speaker Gingrich, they are the very Republicans who acted like Democrats,” he said at an event in Atlanta. “And when Republicans act like Democrats, they lose.”This from the man who ran to the left of the Democrat when he ran for Massachusetts Governor. Guess that doesn't count. Romney is in a total meltdown if he is trying to convince conservatives that Gingrich and Santorum act like Democrats. That is beyond ludicrous and shows how out of touch Romney is with the Republican base which is made up of conservatives. Both Gingrich and Santorum were conservatives in the Congress while Romney was a liberal Massachusetts Governor. You just shake your head at the outlandish attacks by Romney. First it was Gingrich in Florida and now he is aiming at Santorum. If he thinks he had blowback from the Gingrich attacks, he hasn't seen anything yet with his attacks on Santorum.
Former Minnesota Governor Pawlenty should be ashamed of himself for joining in the Romney attacks on Santorum with misstatements or as some say lies. I thought he had more integrity than that but I guess he will do and say anything for his benefactor Romney who is going to retire his campaign debts. Is this also how Romney racked up the endorsements? Offering to fund their campaigns or did they dig up dirt on the people who endorsed who most of us considered conservatives? We are sure the answers will come out in the months ahead.
From observing Romney and his attack machine that has been well used along with opposition research, we would say that Romney has the ethics of a gnat in his attempted march to the White House. We thought the Bush 41 attacks on Reagan were bad but Romney has taken it to a new low. Amazing how Bush 41 who was so nasty against Reagan is behind Romney along with Rove. Says a lot about where nasty campaigning in the Republican Party comes.
Someone needs to give Romney a reality check -- conservatives can see right through his claims to have been a conservative because only 10 years ago he ran to the left of the Democrat for Governor in very liberal Massachusetts. It makes one wonder if somewhere during the 2008 campaign Romney began to lose a sense of reality of his record and his memory has gotten worse in 2012 OR he knows he is lying and that is why all the gaffes because he is not a conservative. We believe the latter is the truth. Don't know of any conservatives that would promise pro-choice women that they would maintain the right to choose if elected Governor, appoint liberal judges with nary a word of regret at the time, or pass Romneycare mandating health insurance which is the record of Mitt Romney. But then I have never heard a conservative say they are 'severely conservative' like Romney did yesterday at CPAC.
Now his hired guns are aimed at Santorum who will be dropping stories whether true or not, attacking what he said in the past years leaving out sentences or words, and generally being all around scumbags toward Santorum. The scorched earth policy of Romney/Rove may have worked against Gingrich in Florida but we don't believe it will work on Santorum as he refuses to get down in the Romney gutter with him.
Romney seems to be on a downhill spiral which happens when you are not comfortable trying to be something you are not. This time it is Romney trying to be conservative to get votes. The sooner Romney exits stage left, the sooner the Republican Party can start to heal. Don't know of any candidate who has put such a large fracture in the Republican Party as Romney and his surrogates from the Bush 41 camp. Guess it never got through their heads that Conservatives were not going to sit down and shut up which many of us have been told to do over and over on websites by Romney supporters. Not happening and now we see more of the pundits joining us in our disgust with Romney and his pretending to be conservative along with his scorched earth policy toward fellow Republicans.
Honestly believe that Santorum will weather the scorched earth tactics of Romney because he is a man of integrity and strong religious beliefs to get him through the attacks. Do we believe Santorum will hit back in some form? Absolutely! He will pick and choose his battles which Gingrich should have done instead of going for scorched earth back at Romney who deserved it but it bit Gingrich in the end. Now voters have seen how ungracious Romney can be when he loses and his fist instinct is to send out surrogates to attack his opponent who has gained on him.
Makes me think he is more like Nixon then I would have considered but the more he runs the more we get that impression that the like Nixon, he has an enemies list. We are about to find out how Nixonian he is when he attacks Santorum trying to take him out. Believe the blowback against Romney is going to be huge -- he has already told a group of conservative leaders that he is not stopping his attacks. How many of them are going to defend Romney on anything?
Taking Aim at Santorum
The Romney campaign misfires.
Feb 20, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 22 • By JONATHAN V. LAST
On Saturday, February 4, a national poll from Rasmussen Reports showed Rick Santorum as the only Republican to lead President Obama in a head-to-head matchup. The next morning, a PPP poll showed Santorum suddenly leading Mitt Romney in Minnesota. So the Romney campaign responded with what are becoming its trademark tactics. Having completely ignored Santorum since New Hampshire, on Sunday afternoon the Romney team sent out a press release calling him “a proud defender of earmarks and pork-barrel spending.” The email contained an oppo-dump of news stories and quotes designed to make Santorum look like a latter-day Ted Stevens.
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| DAVE MALAN |
On Monday a PPP poll was released with more good news for Santorum: It showed him with a 13-point lead in Missouri. So the Romney campaign became more aggressive. Before the clock struck 2:00 p.m., the campaign had sent out four more press releases attacking Santorum. The first labeled Santorum’s criticisms of Romneycare “falsehoods.” The second announced that Romney surrogate Tim Pawlenty would be holding a conference call to discuss “Santorum’s long-history of pork-barrel spending.” The third was a summary of the Pawlenty call. (Sample: “[Santorum] has been a champion of earmarks, and to hold himself out now as somebody who is an unquestionable conservative in these matters, just is not supported by the facts.”) The fourth was a reminder that Santorum had endorsed Romney in 2008. Or at least it was an excerpt of Santorum’s endorsement. It elided the language which, back in 2008, made it clear that Santorum was coming to Romney as a conservative-of-last-resort.
Over the following days, the Romney campaign pushed forth these little missives at a brisk clip, some with inane conceits. In one, Romney surrogate Jason Chaffetz criticized Santorum for voting in favor of debt-ceiling increases in the late ’90s and early ’00s—which no one, at that time or since, has argued were ill-conceived. (In 2003 and 2004, for example, with the lone exception of John Ensign, only Senate Democrats opposed the increases—making this an exceedingly unreliable litmus test of conservatism.) Chaffetz also suggested that Pennsylvania voters replaced Santorum with a Democrat in 2006 because he was not reliably conservative. In another, sent out the day after Santorum whipped Romney in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado, the Romney campaign labeled Santorum “a Washington insider” because he said the following: “There’s not a management problem in Washington, D.C., all right?”
Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul claimed that this sentence demonstrated that “Rick Santorum says that there is not a problem with the way the federal government is being led. That is ridiculous and again proves why conservatives can’t trust a Washington insider to fix the problems that Washington insiders created.”
In context the Santorum quote reads somewhat differently. What Santorum actually said was,
There’s not a management problem in Washington, all right. There’s a more foundational problem there that goes to the basic concepts of who we are as a people. And those are deeply moral questions.
In other words, Santorum was arguing that the trouble with Washington isn’t merely managerial, but runs deeper.
And Team Romney wonders why people aren’t excited about his candidacy.
As an organism, the Romney campaign always attacks when threatened, and Santorum’s victories in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado were threatening.
There were no delegates at stake in Missouri, yet Romney wasn’t simply beaten in the exhibition. He was crushed, losing by 30 points. Santorum has no ties to Missouri and the state isn’t an outlier, like Louisiana or West Virginia, with electoral peculiarities. As far as demographics and culture are concerned, it might as well be Ohio. The Romney campaign’s explanation for the loss was that they didn’t campaign in Missouri.
They did work hard in Colorado, though. And more striking than Romney’s 5-point loss to Santorum there was his caucus total. In 2008, 42,218 Coloradans caucused for Romney. This year the number dropped by almost half, to 23,012. Romney made less of an effort in Minnesota, but if anything, the results there were the most problematic: He went from 25,990 caucus supporters in 2008 to 8,222 this time around.
(snip)
More worrisome, though, is what the results—particularly in Minnesota and Colorado—suggest about Romney’s infrastructure. When a campaign can’t keep track of a few thousand core supporters from one election cycle to the next, motivate them, and get them to the polls in a small caucus environment, there are only two explanations: Either the organization is incompetent, or the supporters have had second thoughts.
By the end of last week Romney was worried enough to do some of the contrast-drawing personally. “Senator Santorum and Speaker Gingrich, they are the very Republicans who acted like Democrats,” he said at an event in Atlanta. “And when Republicans act like Democrats, they lose.”
With a surfeit of political transparency and a shortage of self-awareness, the soundbite was a near-perfect distillation of the Romney candidacy.
Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
Excerpt: Read More at the Weekly Standard
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