A Terrible Night For The Republican Party, And America As A Whole
Let me preface this by saying I saw Rick Santorum’s “Game On” victory speech after the Iowa caucus returns showed him in a surprising tie with Mitt Romney atop the final standings, and it was quite good. Romney ultimately won the caucus by eight votes, but under the circumstances it’s immaterial who actually won. Iowa’s delegates will be proportionally allocated and there aren’t many of them in the first place.
Santorum’s the winner in Iowa. Romney, less so.
The losers? We’re the losers. The whole country, but particularly Republicans and conservatives specifically.
We now have a winnowing of the Republican field, as Rick Perry spent what looks like well over $300 per vote in Iowa and has decided he’ll go back to Texas and reassess his campaign. Nobody ever reassesses a campaign and decides to keep at it. And this morning Michele Bachmann has cancelled her South Carolina schedule and will hold a press conference to get out of the race.
So seven GOP candidates now becomes five. And that five includes John Huntsman, who’s wasting his time running for president, and a Newt Gingrich who looks mortally wounded at this point barring further developments.
And why?
Because 120,000 Iowans said so.
Apparently the turnout for the Iowa caucuses was less than 20 percent. It was half the turnout in the 2010 Republican gubernatorial primary.
This is arguably the most consequential American election since 1860. The very existence of America as a constitutional Republic is at stake. Every Republican knows this. And yet Iowa, which prides itself on being first out of the gate in the presidential primary process, can’t turn out more than 20 percent of its GOP electorate for something so important?
Worse, the 20 percent who did show up gave us Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. This, apparently, is what’s left of the GOP field.
Erick Erickson at Redstate made a good point this morning in pointing out an opportunity which now exists…
For starters, the media would have you believe that the 123,000 people who turned out for the Hawkeye Caucii was a record. This is simply not true except superficially. If you take out the non-Republicans who came into the caucuses last night for Ron Paul, the Republican turn out was less than 2008 — even considering the ratio of independents to Republicans who turned out in 2008.
At its best, this turn out does not signal core enthusiasm with the field as it is presently constituted and perhaps signals that an alternative could still jump in. Considering “winner takes all” races do not come until April, someone coming out now could campaign and build momentum to the winner takes all states.
Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin, Jim Demint – pick up the phone.
Is that a viable possibility? Could someone get in this late and win the nomination? Maybe. It’s a long shot, but maybe.
Ron Paul’s people will tell you he won Iowa. They can do that, as they are unbound by reality. They’ve always been so. Ron Paul didn’t win last night, he lost. The supposed surge of Democrats and Independents who would propel him to a first-place finish didn’t happen. Not only did Paul finish four points out of first, he finished behind Rick Santorum. Paul’s only chance to win was to finish ahead of whatever Non-Romney Du Jour existed on election day, and because he didn’t he failed to expand his base – without which his campaign has no chance at victory.
Newt Gingrich didn’t win Iowa, or even come close to doing it. He’s now playing second-fiddle to Santorum as the current Not Romney candidate, and his precipitous drop from runaway winner to distant fourth place in less than a month means he’s on life support. Gingrich at this point can’t run the positive, issue-oriented campaign he planned to run; that’s no longer possible when 45 percent of all the money spent on TV in Iowa was spent to attack him. Unfortunately for Gingrich, running a slash-and-burn campaign to get revenge on Romney is less of a possibility now than it was for financial reasons; he’s out of money and all that’s left for him to do is appearances on Fox News and CNN and local TV in New Hampshire and South Carolina wherein he’s going to gripe about what a jackass Romney is. And that’s not the way you want to do it – when you’re on TV you want to be the nice guy who never says anything ugly about anybody, and then your TV spots do the dirty work for you.
Which is the way Romney handles it. He never has any blood on his hands, and yet his Super PAC burns his political opponents at the stake.
Newt can’t fight fire with fire, and because of that all he can do at this point is play spoiler against Romney. And while it might be incredibly personally satisfying for him to do so, he won’t be benefiting his own campaign to do so; he’ll be playing the heavy for somebody else.
Namely, Santorum, whom Gingrich praised for running a positive campaign last night.
Of course, Santorum will now get the typical Not Romney beatdown Gingrich, Bachmann, Perry and Herman Cain got from Romney’s Super PAC goons and the mainstream media. He’s already received a taste, thanks to CBS News interpreting remarks he made and a flub in his speech as a racist statement over the weekend and Alan Colmes calling him insane for bringing home the body of his dead son so the rest of his kids could see him.
There will be a lot more where that came from. It turns out that Santorum’s 19-year old nephew penned a short piece at the Daily Caller explaining that his uncle is “another big-government politician who supports the status quo to run our country” – the kid is a Ron Paul supporter, naturally – and the Huffington Post is now attempting to reprise a hit piece they’d previously done about a mental health facility in Virginia on whose board Santorum formerly sat where allegations of sexual abuse have been made.
But to go with the inane and ridiculous, there will be substantive critiques made of Santorum.
This is, after all, a former senator who was beaten by an astonishing 59-41 margin in 2006, one of the worst repudiations of an incumbent in the history of the U.S. Senate. And that wasn’t some correction of a left-wing state ridding itself of an unwanted conservative; Pennsylvania elects Republicans often enough that mere ideology isn’t sufficient to explain it. No, Santorum’s ignominious defeat at Bob Casey’s hands has a more troubling genesis.
What cost Santorum his Senate seat in 2006 was a twofold failure. He first succumbed to voter anger at his abject failure to restrain federal spending. Santorum was a member of the GOP leadership team in the Senate which agreed to what was then considered out-of-control growth in federal spending (which only got worse once he was gone, though that is cold comfort), to such an extent that he was a “yes” vote for some $4 trillion in debt limit expansions. But worse, Santorum endorsed Arlen Specter in the 2004 GOP senate primary over Pat Toomey, and conservatives in that state screamed bloody murder at that betrayal of conservatism – and paid it back by sitting on their hands when Election Day came two years later.
A former senator abandoned by conservatives for cause just six years ago is now the only viable conservative candidate for president? We are to accept this as our best option? The mind boggles.
Which leaves us with Mitt Romney, who will claim his eight-vote victory as evidence of his inevitability as the GOP nominee. Romney claims virtually everything as evidence of his inevitability, which is galling to the 75 percent of the Republican electorate who don’t support him after six years of his running for president. That hubris will inevitably lead to nemesis, but since a consolidation of the conservative base behind a candidate with enough money, name recognition and narrative to actually win hasn’t happened and doesn’t seem likely now it’s increasingly likely Romney won’t get his comeuppance until the general election rolls around.
Romney is a bad frontrunner. His record is not conservative. His appeal isn’t conservative. He’s stiff and lacks charisma. He comes off as a blueblood, country-club Republican born with a silver spoon up his rear end. He’s a polished speaker who says nothing memorable. And he refuses to present an agenda the Republican base can get excited about – because he doesn’t think he has to.
In short, he’s the 2012 version of John McCain, who demands the loyalty of Republican voters on the basis of “where else are you gonna go?” Little surprise that McCain is endorsing Romney today.
Romney’s people point to polls which say he’s the GOP candidate who can beat Obama. He’s also the GOP candidate Obama’s goons are laying in wait for.
Does anybody really think this all-class-warfare-all-the-time campaign Obama is preparing to wage isn’t tailor-made for Romney as the opponent? It wasn’t idiocy on Obama’s part to embrace the reprobates of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It was a Hail Mary pass, for sure, but with Romney as the opponent Obama will actually reap the benefit of it.
Romney, after all, won’t release his tax returns. Romney is the venture capitalist who bought companies and shook employees out onto the street. Romney is Wall Street, which is hated as much as Washington is. Romney is the 1 percent.
Will that work? Probably not. I’ve said all along that my dog could beat Obama. But then again my dog has more populist appeal than Romney does. And if Romney fails to make a credible appeal to Main Street, small-government conservatives and get them energized behind him, it’s entirely possible that it will work.
Establishment moderates have an abysmal record as Republican nominees for president. When they do manage to win they fail in the White House. And Romney has done nothing to position himself as anything else.
This is the most consequential election in our lives, and at this point it doesn’t look like the Republican Party is remotely close to stepping forward. It looks more today like Barack Obama will get four more years to wreck this country than at any time in this election cycle.
And that is unacceptable.
UPDATE: Apparently Perry is going to stay in and make a last stand in South Carolina. He might as well, though his odds are slim. He’d do well to heed Erickson’s advice…
If Rick Perry drops out of the race it will be the ultimate failure of the tea party movement to see the race come down to two or three big government conservatives. Romney and Santorum both hide behind compassionate conservatism to expand the state to suit their purposes. Only Rick Perry has run a campaign to make Washington “as inconsequential to our lives as possible.”
If I were Perry, I’d wake up tomorrow, say I refuse to surrender the Republican Party into the hands of big government conservatives after all the gains the tea party has made, and then announce I’m firing all my political staffers and communications staffers and ask South Carolina to help me reboot to victory. Make it an Alamo stand and, if like at the Alamo Perry goes down, perhaps there’ll at least be a rallying cry for small government conservatism left over.
That’s just me. Perry’s policy people have been phenomenal. The comms staff and political staff so badly bungled this that Rick Perry just suffered the first political loss of his career.
As awful as Iowa was, we’re talking about 120,000 votes total. That’s a city council race in a decent-sized burg. What Perry should have said last night when asked about his performance was “It’s IOWA, for crying out loud. Almost half these people voted for a guy whose own constituents blew him up by 18 points in his last election and another guy who thinks 9-11 was an inside job. You’re gonna judge me based on what a few of these hayseeds think?”
Interesting, but, supposedly, Rick Perry tweeted, this morning, that he’s on in South Carolina. FNC can’t verify it, but it isn’t impossible that he’s decided to forego New Hampshire and head straight for South Carolina. Let’s hope that’s the case, at any rate.
it wasn’t just Perry who tweeted, several of his staff tweet before and after he did.
Gingrich is still the odds on favorite in South Carolina and Florida. Santorum doesn’t even register in any other states. It will be Romney and Gingrich as we enter February.
Perry’s decision to come back was the worst thing that could happen to Rick Santorum. Perry is going to try to blast him to smithereens, and it will be interesting to see what happens to Santorum once he gets the treatment that Romney gave to Newt in Iowa. South Carolina is going to be a bloodbath, but Newt is going to get an early start at ripping Romney in New Hampshire. Get ready for a lot of media hand-wringing about negative ads and a lot of whining about the 11th Commandment (which is total BS, by the way — look at Reagan’s attacks on Ford and Bush).
An important fact has been overlooked by this article… It was the Delegates that support Ron Paul that were also elected! Other articles can be quoted as calling the “Iowa caucus” as nothing more than a straw poll. It’s the Delegates that count!
If Romney is the nominee the we will have to figure out how to live under Obama for another four years. I, and many other conservatives, compromised our integrity in 2008 to vote for McCain. I will never do that again! If the country implodes and goes straight to hell at least I know no one can take my integrity because I will stay home for the first time ever or I will vote third party. Never again will I vote for liberal lite because the rebublicans cannot field anything better then what they did this election cycle.
You nailed it! Which is why 75 % of the other Repblican voters reject Romney.
Really? Wow thats very “American” of you. I will hold my nose and vote for Satan if need be. Don’t be a whinner; if your guy is not the Republican candidate you take your ball and go home? Thanks for helping Barry! He is extremely vulnerable! Don’t any of you get that? No one with 8% un-employment and Barry’s far left record gets re-elected. Stop the circular firing squad mentality people! We can nominate Gumby if we want and he wins! Stop acting like beaten dogs! McCain has left a very bad taste in your mouths but you must keep eating anyway or we all go down the tube. Don’t you get it? Priority number one is to remove Barry from office. THEN use congress to repeal O-care. If Gumby is President at least he will be flexible. Don’t give up! Don’t quit! Quitters never win! Don’t be that guy! Sheesh…………..! Third pary candidate? Your kidding me right?
Whoa, Scott, take a breath, I think you’re letting your Perry commitment cloud your usual sharp analytical thinking. Santorum is a lifetime 88 on the ACU’s legislative scorecard; he’s a reliable conservative and has maintained that in his campaign rhetoric. He has his warts — too easily acquiescing with Bush spending plans in the mid 2000s and supporting Specter out of friendship. Then again, Reagan raised taxes as California governor and then with TEFRA as president, acquiesced to expanding abortion as governor and with spending increases as president. Nobody is the perfect conservative, but I’ll take 8.8 out of 10 times (especially compared to lifetime ACU score 4 Obama). His worst wart was losing to Casey, who ran as a conservative but has voted as a liberal, which is something Obama can’t do after enthusiastically unmasking himself
Romney (recall how he actually was positioned as the “conservative” alternative to McCain four years ago?) may appear to have less commitment to conservatism but he’s going to govern conservatively more often than not. And there’s not going to be any backlash against him for his wealth and position: according to Gallup’s latest poll, given three options as to which is “the biggest threat to the country in the future,” 64% said “big government” vs. just 26% for “big business” and 8% for “big labor.” The numbers were exactly the same for independents, and even Democrats were more likely to worry about big government (48%) than big business (44%). It’s hard to see how Obama builds a majority coalition by bashing business and championing big government, and all Romney has to do is stress smaller government credentials (which Santorum, whose only real “big government” positioning is on defense, border control, and on social issues, the opposite of Paul — can do better and more credibly) and he wins.
No president has ever won reelection with Obama’s economic numbers. Romney is, at this point, better than 50/50 to win. It’s harder to tell about Santorum because only now is he gaining major attention, but he’s probably at least 50/50 against the most vulnerable incumbent since Carter. These results are not a “disaster” by any means. The real meaning of these caucuses is to present Republicans with a strategic choice — go with a likely winner but sacrifice conservative reliability, or go with a clear conservative but more of a question mark to win, even if much is in his favor. Swing for the fences or get a base hit to advance conservatism? We report, you decide.
Perry might still do it, but if Santorum with far less organization does no worse than run with him in NH, it’s all over for him. And that’s not the disaster for the right that you have erroneously concluded.
These results are almost meaningless. All they do is select delegates to county caucuses, where the picking of state convention delegates oocurs, then at the state convention picking of naitonal delegates doesn’t happen until June. By then, pledged national convention delegates alone from other states for a candidate almost certainly will exceed a majority.
The problem with Santorum isn’t that he isn’t a good conservative, it’s that he has no chance of winning in New Hampshire, South Carolina or Florida. He could get every Bachman voter and he still wouldn’t register in any of those states. He barely shows up in the polls. This is likely another example of a candidate doing well in Iowa and peaking there.
Romney’s victory in Iowa, a state he shouldn’t have won, is a victory for the moderate faction of the GOP. John McCain has now endorsed Romney who should be able to force John Huntman out of the race in New Hampshire. Santorum is probably the weakest of the conservative challengers to Romney and he now has the momentum coming out of Iowa. Romney couldn’t have orchestrated what happened in Iowa any better. Gingrich and Perry will keep each other from making a successful stand in South Carolina, openning the door for another Romney victory. Romney has a clear path to the GOP nomination. The only question is whether Paul or some other conservative will go the third party route.
If you look at the polling for South Carolina, it’s very difficult to forecast a Romney victory there.
The Tea Party, never representing a majority, has peaked. Romney is a bore, but he is all we have and Republicans need to get used to it. The sad truth is that, rhetoric aside, Americans like big government–they just don’t want to pay for it. The choice is between a real Socialist and a big government country club one percenter who will steal less of your money. It is sad that Romney is our last hope (and a forlorn one at that), but whadayagonna do?
I’m glad Gov. Perry is headed to SC. He should not let the outcome of 1 state out of 50 determine his destiny. Perry is the best choice for the next 8 years of our country.
Okay, so what about Reagan who came in 4th in the Iowa Caucus but later won the election? Your points are incoherent. More like ventIng than actual discussion. As a Ron supporter I’ll settle for anything other than conformity. 5th place, last, 3rd party I dont care. I hate the establishment’s authoritative arrogance. Therefore I pledge to support Dr. Ron Paul even if the effort accomplishes nothing more than watching condescending pundits such as you sweat.
So get a towel pal.
Ron Paul ain’t Ronald Reagan, cap’n. Ron Paul left the Republican Party because of Ronald Reagan.
You probably didn’t even know that.
Well, I’ve been out on a limb for quite awhile, and am sticking with my original feelings. For better or for worse, I’m sticking with Newt Gingrich. I know he’s got an uphill battle ahead of him, for many reasons; but I don’t believe there’s anyone else on this side of the fence who can not only beat Obama, but totally destroy him in any debate format, that may come up…teleprompter or not. Having said that, I also believe that Obama lacks the cajones, and his ego won’t let him, face Gingrich in debate, no time…no where.
Newt has a lot of baggage; everybody knows that. He also has explanations for most of it; and says he asked forgiveness, for the rest. We’ll never hear his explanations from the media; only the bad stuff. We’ve all made mistakes, and hopefully we’ve learned from them. Newt’s past is nothing more than that. We all can and should seek forgiveness, from time to time.
Think about your own life. Have you never felt a certain way about an issue or event, and supported it……and months, maybe years later, learned more about it, and changed your views? Most of us have; it’s called growing. Newt has been in government for a lot of years, and made a lot of mistakes. I also believe that, at the time he made them, he believed he was doing the right thing.
During those years in office, he also gained, I believe, an education and experience, far beyond anyone currently in the running. He knows the workings of our government, inside and out; and has a terrific command of foreign affairs. He has the tools and knowledge to beat Obama, where I don’t think anyone else can. But, it’s up to us, to give him the chance.
[...] Nooner had this picture on it, coming off the piece MacAoidh wrote about that trade show in Iowa, or whatever the heck it [...]
Spot on comments. “…at this point it doesn’t look like the Republican Party is remotely close to stepping forward. It looks more today like Barack Obama will get four more years to wreck this country than at any time in this election cycle.” This is exactly my conclusion regarding Iowa as well.
In my opinion, Bachmann was the last, best hope to beat Obama. But now it’s official: Republicans are now officially the Grand Old Party of White Guy Candidates. Cain, who was not ready to be president, and Bachmann, who I believe was, were the only ones who could repudiate the liberal narrative…and look at who they–both Republicans and liberals–were eager to lop off at the knees as quickly as possible. I’m convinced that it doesn’t matter who they put up. It’s over. Obama will win reelection because Iowa proved that the Republicans will go on doing exactly what they’ve always done and offer up the same old candidates they’ve always offered. Republicans cannot and refuse to think outside the box…which was absolutely essential if they wanted to beat Obama.
I’m re-registering as a conservative, one, because the election is lost already, and two, because the Republican party is hopelessly, ignorantly mired in the swamp of Inertia.
I like Rick Perry as well, but let’s face it. If he can’t beat out Romney & others, maybe he has more issues with his organization than we know.? I agree with you on both Romney & Paul, but Santorium I do not. I have always liked him since months ago, but until late December felt he would never get a chance. His record, policy details, ability to respond articulately to the liberal press, passion & fight impresses me. I think we have a great chance with Santorum and I think his policies would be the most conservative since Ronald R