Rick Santorum

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Polls, Polls, Polls

 

Don’t know about you but sometimes I get dizzy reading all the polls.  There are so many variables:  how the question was asked, when it was asked, how the sample was selected, etc. etc.  So this little piece from the Daily Kos Morning Digest from March 20 was, I thought worth passing on.

NJ-Sen (PDF): Farleigh Dickinson University has Dem Sen. Bob Menendez leading state Sen. Joe Kyrillos 43-33 in their newest poll, little changed from the 43-31 they saw in January. FDU also tested Menendez against “someone else,” who utterly upends the race and leads 37-30. I have to give props to FDU here, because they actually wrote a very funny press release about this possible contender:

According to poll director Peter Woolley, “Most voters think someone else is a nearly ideal candidate. They say someone else is refreshing, straightforward, honest and represents the true interests of ordinary people.”
Woolley continued, “Someone else is almost always more popular. Someone else is a better dresser. Someone else gets the hot stock tips. Someone else gets promotions and pay raises too. Someone else even wins the lottery.”
Someone else does have a downside. “Someone else seems to have a troubled domestic life,” opined Woolley. “Someone else always leaves dishes in the sink, lets the dog get out, and chips the paint on your brand new car. Someone else is also reputed to have broken up more than a few marriages.”
The poll did not ask about anyone else. “Asking about anyone else would be ridiculous,” said the poll director. “Anyone else may not even be eligible to run.”

Where does David Nir find this stuff?!

So here is some hopeful news, also from the Daily Kos of March 20.

GENERAL ELECTION TRIAL HEATS:

NATIONAL (Rasmussen Tracking):Obama d. Romney (46-45); Obama d. Santorum (48-43) 

NEVADA (Rasmussen): Obama d. Romney (50-44); Obama d. Santorum (52-36)

VIRGINIA (Quinnipiac): Obama d. Romney (50-42); Obama d. Santorum (49-40); Obama d. Paul (49-39); Obama d. Gingrich (54-35)

Can we believe those Nevada and Virginia numbers?  Guess we will have to wait until November to find out.

 

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Mitt’s Best Friend

is Rick Santorum!  Both Roger Simon writing for Politico.com and David Firestone writing in the New York Times Loyal Opposition column strike similar chords today. 

Simon writes in “Mr. Bumble vs. Mr. Scary”

Is it possible to stumble and bumble your way to a presidential nomination?

Certainly. And Mitt Romney is determined to prove it.

…

Still, Romney manages to screw up.

In December, at one of the innumerable Republican debates, Rick Perry accused Romney of having changed his position on something or other. Perry had about as much chance of getting the Republican nomination as getting Texas to secede from the Union and naming him king, but he got Romney’s goat nonetheless.

Romney angrily stuck out his hand and said, “Rick, I’ll tell you what, 10,000 bucks? $10,000 bet?”

Grand, Mitt. Just grand. Remind everybody that $10,000 is chump change to you.

And who can forget Romney telling us that “corporations are people” or that he made “not very much” money in speaking fees in a year in which he made $374,000 in speaking fees. He wasn’t lying. It’s just that $374,000 wasn’t very much to him.

POLITICO’s Reid J. Epstein has assembled a delicious list of all these gaffes that is worth wandering through.

What it shows is a man totally sincere in his isolation from average Americans. Except for his blue jeans — which one comic says that he wears over his suit pants — Romney doesn’t pretend to be average. He is a highly successful businessman, and he is proud of it.

Firestone put it this way in the New York Times

Mr. Romney doesn’t bother to play in the deep end. His speeches now are simply strings of slogans, spliced together at random, criticizing President Obama or his rivals. He never conveys the sense of having really thought hard about an issue and reaching a deliberate decision.

Now to Santorum.  Simon writes

But even with all this, Romney has one great thing going for him: Rick Santorum.

Rick Santorum doesn’t flub. He speaks from his deeply held convictions. Some of which are very scary.

Speaking in Troy, Mich., on Saturday, Santorum said, “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.”

Had Santorum gone on to say that not everyone in America wants to go to college and that there is nothing shameful about manual labor, he may have had a point.

But that’s not all Santorum was saying. He added that he doesn’t want kids to go to college because if they do they are going to be “taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them.”

…

I am not entirely sure what Santorum was venting about or what Satanic ritual he was made to undergo in college — paddling? beer pong? — but it obviously affected him deeply.

So much so that he left college convinced that the First Amendment was not only hooey, but stomach-turning. Literally.

Santorum says that John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech stating there should be an “absolute separation” of church and state in America “makes me throw up and it should make every American.”

Santorum went on: “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.”

The Republicans are finally realizing they are in trouble.  I think that Mitt Romney will get his dream and be the nominee mostly because his best friend Rick is so scary, but he really has to step up is game if he is going to defeat President Obama.  I cringe at a debate between them.

Tonight we have Michigan and Arizona. It should be interesting.

 
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Freedom of Religion and Freedom from Religion

The first Amendment to the Constitution reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion….”  I don’t think that Rick Santorum has read the Constitution recently if ever.  Last night on Hardball  Chris Matthews tried to  referee a shouting match between Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican Party who tried to defend Santorum’s introduction of his religious beliefs into governing policy and David Corn who tried without success to explain why the introduction of religion was wrong.  All three of them missed the point.  The point is that we can have no established religion in this country and while those who govern as President can have personal religious beliefs, they cannot impose them on the country.

Karen Santorum says husband’s presidential run is ‘God’s will’

Kathleen Parker ended her recent column titled “The Trials of Saint Santorum” this way

Everything stems from his allegiance to the Catholic Church’s teachings that every human life has equal value and dignity. The church’s objection to birth control is based on concerns that sex without consequences would lead to men reducing women “to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of (their) own desires,” as well as abuse of power by public authorities and a false sense of autonomy.

Within that framework, everything Santorum says and does makes sense, even if one doesn’t agree. When he says that he doesn’t think the government should fund prenatal testing because it leads to abortion, this is emotional Santorum, father of a disabled child and another who died hours after a premature birth. In both instances, many doctors would have recommended abortion, but Santorum believes that those lives, no matter how challenging, have intrinsic value.

Though Santorum’s views are certainly controversial, his biggest problem isn’t that he is out of step with mainstream America. His biggest problem is that he lacks prudence in picking his battles and his words. The American people are loath to elect a preacher or a prophet to lead them out of the desert of unemployment. And they are justified in worrying how such imprudence might translate in areas of far graver concern than whether Santorum doesn’t personally practice birth control.

Parker’s statement that “the American people are loath to elect a preacher of a prophet” is exactly right.  And he is definitely out of step with mainstream America.  Maureen Dowd was even blunter opening her column with

Rick Santorum has been called a latter-day Savonarola.

That’s far too grand. He’s more like a small-town mullah.

…

Santorum is not merely engaged in a culture war, but “a spiritual war,” as he called it four years ago. “The Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country — the United States of America,” he told students at Ave Maria University in Florida. He added that mainline Protestantism in this country “is in shambles. It is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.”

Satan strikes, a Catholic exorcist told me, when there are “soul wounds.” Santorum, who is considered “too Catholic” even by my über-Catholic brothers, clearly believes that America’s soul wounds include men and women having sex for reasons other than procreation, people involved in same-sex relationships, women using contraception or having prenatal testing, environmentalists who elevate “the Earth above man,” women working outside the home, “anachronistic” public schools, Mormonism (which he said is considered “a dangerous cult” by some Christians), and President Obama (whom he obliquely and oddly compared to Hitler and accused of having “some phony theology”).

Rick Santorum wants us to be a Christian country and beyond that a fundamentalist Catholic one.  How different this is from President John F. Kennedy declaring that the Pope would not run the government.  Mullah Rick needs to read the Constitution. 

Rick Santorum talks to the media after Wednesday's debate. | AP Photo

It is too easy to make fun of him.  This is a dangerous man.  We need to take him seriously.

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Belichick, the Pats, and the 2012 Campaign

I am not a big football fan, but you can’t live in New England without knowing about Bill Belichick, the Patriots coach, and his monosyllabic style.  Here is it captured perfectly by Dan Wasserman.

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The Pats lost yesterday as we know here in Boston, but one of these guys will be the next President.

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Those Wild and Crazy Republicans

So where are we with about 24 hours to go until the South Carolina Republican primary?  Yesterday we learned that 1)  Iowa Republicans can’t find some of the ballots and so they can’t certify the results (or maybe they can – the Chairman can’t decide), but it looks like Rick Santorum beat Mitt Romney.  2)  That Newt wanted to stay married to Marianne while having an on-going affair with Callista.  3) Rick Perry left the race and endorsed Gingrich.  4) Gingrich is leading the the South Carolina polls.  Makes my head spin!

If you are a conservative with what are generally referred to as family values who do you support?  Do you vote for Santorum and let Romney have the nomination or do you hold your nose and vote for Gingrich?  Speaking of noses, don’t let Newt pinch yours!

Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, pinches the nose of Bonnie Ellison, 78, of Easley, S.C. while shaking hands with supporters at Mutt's Barbeque in Easley, S.C. Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012. (AP Photo/The Independent-Mail, Nathan Gray) THE GREENVILLE NEWS OUT, SENECA NEWS OUTRepublican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, pinches the nose of Bonnie Ellison, 78, of Easley, S.C. while shaking hands with supporters at Mutt’s Barbeque in Easley, S.C. Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012. (AP Photo/The Independent-Mail, Nathan Gray)

What is that all about?

Oh, and Mitt has not lived in Washington but has lived on the streets.  This from Politico

But the combination of the tax return issue, reports that his former firm parked assets in Cayman tax shelters and his own rhetorical missteps is beginning to paint him as a plutocrat rather than “someone who’s lived in the real streets of America,” as he described himself at Thursday’s debate.

If Newt wins South Carolina it means that the race will go on to Florida with the remaining four.  But it probably means that South Carolina will not have picked the nominee who will probably be Romney. 

Don’t know about you, but I think this is the best reality show on TV!

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Did Obama win Iowa?

Mitt Romney won the Republican Caucus by 8 votes over Rick Santorum.  They both got just under 25% of the vote followed closely by Ron Paul.  You can read this as 75% of the vote went to other Republicans with the two closest rivals representing extreme positions.  Two interesting comments I heard on the MSNBC coverage last night.  First, former Republican Congressman J.C. Watts noted that he thinks Mitt’s 25% is about what his support is.  Not clear if he was talking about Iowa or generally amoung Republicans.  Second, Rev. Al Sharpton who hoped that Santorum and/or Paul stayed in the race for a while so that Mitt had to keep moving right to get the nomination.

(Daniel Acker for The New York Times)

Robert Creamer writes in the Huffington Post today that the Iowa was bad news for the Republican establishment which just wants to nominate Mitt and be done with it.

To maximize their odds of reclaiming their hold on the White House, the Republican establishment believes they need two things:

• To nominate Mitt Romney;
• To effectively end the Republican nominating process as soon as possible.

Last night’s results from Iowa lower the odds they will get either.

In fact, what we saw in Iowa last night was the Republican base gagging on the presidential candidate the Republican establishment is trying desperately to cram down their throats.

The problem is that Mitt is not good at displaying human qualities.  Brian McGrory wrote in his column in today’s Boston Globe

For not foreseeing his rise from the State House to, potentially, the White House, I shouldn’t, in truth, be so hard on myself. Romney has made a habit of getting in his own way.

First, there was the small matter of that gubernatorial campaign. His very best day was the one right before he declared. On the stump, he was, in a word, terrible – hollow and plastic in speeches and mannerisms. “How are you?’’ he would repeatedly ask, never waiting for a response.

There was one October campaign swing through Boston’s North End with Rudy Giuliani when a burly laborer in a crowded Mike’s Pastry called out “Let me buy you guys a cannoli.’’ Brilliant, I thought. The cameras would capture Romney with ricotta cheese on his strong chin, a man of the people. Then Romney called back, “No thanks, got to run,’’ as he headed for the door. He said it with that nervous smile, which was still frozen on his face when Giuliani said to the guy “Let me buy you the cannoli!’’ The place erupted in cheers.

Mitt and the establishment have other problems.  Like the fact that Rick Santorum was able to peak at the right time and become the anti-Mitt.  Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul will also continue in the race.

All of which leads me to ask whether Obama actually won Iowa.  He had some 25000 people show up to watch a live message, signed up over 7000 new volunteers and has 8 field offices open in Iowa.  He had almost as many people at meaningless caucuses as Romney, Santorum and Paul each got as vote totals.  Sure maybe people aren’t as excited as in 2008 and everyone – even supporters  can name at least one thing he did they don’t like, but I’m with Rev. Al:  Let this go on for a while and let Mitt move to the right.  Then we shall see what the general election will bring.  Even better the Republicans could nominate Santorum.  Howard Fineman said in the Huffington Post late last night: 

The final Iowa results aren’t in but we already know one big winner: President Barack Obama.

The dismal, nasty campaign here was not good for the Republican Party or the country. There was precious little debate on anything other than who literally was Holier than Thou; the dollars spent on attack ads were, vote for vote, enormous. One GOP top finisher is unpopular with the base; another is too far out of the mainstream to be nominated, let alone elected; the third lost his last Senate race, in Pennsylvania, by 17 points, and is far to the right of the country on social issues.

All of which is good news for a president with a 40 percent job approval rating and a desperate need for a weak opponent next November.

The winner in Iowa.

I’ll leave Richard Viguerie with the last word.  In an interview today with the New York Times, Viguerie said

The conservative direct mail pioneer and activist Richard Viguerie predicted that the pack would continue to seek out a more ideologically pure standard-bearer this year than it did in accepting Senator John McCain as the Republican nominee in 2008.

“Romney has just seemed to have gone out of his way to try to get this nomination without giving conservatives anything, and that’s troubling to a lot of conservatives,” he said. “I don’t think they’re going to go away quietly into that long dark nominating fight — I‘d be surprised if the conservatives didn’t mount a serious effort to derail Romney.”

On to New Hampshire!