"Conservatism is alive and well in Missouri and Minnesota," Santorum said when he took the stage at his victory party in St. Charles, Mo., calling his wins "a victory for the voices of our party, conservatives and tea party people, who are out there every day in the vineyards. I don't stand here to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. I stand here to be the conservative alternative to Barack Obama."Meanwhile Mitt Romney's feet of clay became ever more apparent as he took broad criticism from conservatives for his inane comments on the minimum wage.
Romney, who was talked about as the Republican Party's inevitable nominee after his wins in Florida and Nevada last week, had his worst night of the 2012 presidential campaign. For the first time, he did not finish in first or second place in a Republican primary or caucus. In Minnesota, ABC News projects that Ron Paul will take second place, while Romney and Newt Gingrich battle for third.
Mitt Romney's position on the minimum wage has some on the right sounding the alarm about his candidacy--and it could expose a dangerous fault line between Romney and some of the Republican Party's most reliable backers.Well, Mitt, as Walter E. Williams showed in his seminal 1984 work, The State Against Blacks, as you increase the costs to employ people it becomes harder and harder for potential employers to employ them. It simply costs more than what it is worth. The people that end up most adversely affected by increasing the costs of unskilled labor are the unskilled laborers themselves. The problem is, it's 2012, twenty-eight years after Williams' book came out, and we still have to explain this stuff to the man who wants to lead the conservative party.
Romney said last week that he supports regular increases in the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation, a position he took as a candidate for president in 2008. Six years before that, as a candidate for Massachusetts governor, Romney supported linking automatic increases in the state's minimum wage to inflation. "I haven't changed my thoughts on that," he told reporters.
Meanwhile, Romney appeared to be solid for second place in Colorado, but was fighting for his life to hang on to third in the Minnesota primary.
Said NBCs David Gregory: "It's inconceivable!"
Zero delegates from Missouri, Net 1 delegate from Colorado. Net 4 delegates from Minnesota (fewer than 50,000 votes cast).
ReplyDeleteSounds like some of my recent wins. Crack open the Welch's!!!! From concentrate, though.
And Mitt picked up at least six delegates of the 2,286 delegates available in the primary race. That brings his total to... 107. The eventual winner will need 1,144 delegates. That means Mitt has 107 down and.... 1,037 to go. A juggernaut, a man with a ground swell of broad based, enthusiastic republican support? That's what the elites have been pitching. I think it is more an effort to make a wish a reality, but we get to take part in the process. It is not up to the elites in the GOP and the David Gregorys of the world.
ReplyDeleteRomney has not been selected as our candidate. Not yet. Not be a long shot.
Said Romney "This was a good night for Rick Santorum".
Yes, Mitt, yes it was.
Another "unexpected" both for liberals and conservative pundits. Heh! Gov. Palin absolutely right that the primary process is honing the candidates and pointing to the best ones.
ReplyDeleteThe whole effort to close the nomination process before it really began irks me considerable. Glad to see Rick Santorum when these primaries. Guess the Trump endorsement didn't have much reach beyond Nevada.
ReplyDeleteOkay then, let's get on to business!
The whole effort to close the nomination process before it really began irks me considerable.
ReplyDeleteThe whole process, with the enormous money requirements upfront, is just as irksome to me and has kept out a lot of good people. What's more, although the Left doesn't have to do it this time around because they have an incumbent, it is beginning to favor the Left more and more every time because they have a deep pool of volunteers coast-to-coast from colleges and unions and the Left isn't all that concerned with paying their bills. Just ask the people still owed money by Al Gore and John Kerry. They ran up tabs at local restaurants, printers, office supply stores, etc., and forgot about many of them as they moved to the next primary telling the small business people to just consider it a campaign contribution and be thankful for the photo-ops at your place. Last time around, Fred Thompson--a more viable candidate than John McCain in my opinion, was kept from getting serious consideration by this farce of a process. This time, Sarah Palin didn't even get her chance to be rejected by voters--if the pundits were right. From what I understand, Sarah wasn't teasing the base by being indecisive "Will I run or won't I?" She was meeting with the money bundlers and other people you have to deal with in order to make a serious run and getting tentative commitments that later fell through. She wasn't going to make a run unless she had the money and organization in place to make it through the entire primary season. People don't understand that before you run, you have to set up your organization in all 50 States to get out your petitions (and get the requisite signatures) to get on the ballot in the first place. Then you have to rent offices and get your people ready for the upcoming elections. If you don't have a campaign chest to see it through, you wind up fizzling out like Fred did after three or four primaries. And if regular Democratic voters (Hillary's expected base) are voting for McCain to get him the nod, you wind up with early losses for Fred and the funding drying up. And Obama getting the early delegate edge and unearned legitimacy.
This time around, Sarah would have drawn away funding commitments for Bachmann, Santorum, Perry, and Cain. Probably. And she had to base her decision not to run on that as well.
No. I don't have any solutions. But I do have a suggestion to the Federal Election Commission that administers that public money for the general election. If you have one candidate that is skirting the fund and building a $Billion+ war chest, give the candidate that is playing by the historical rules and restrictions that candidate's share of the fund.
Easy Peasy.
Is Santorum the man, then? Is that where my happy beams should be directed?
ReplyDeleteI rely on you two for the sane perspective on all this, as I am so far away in Looney Land.
All I normally have to go on is Ann Coulter, and I understand she's being a little, shall we say, erratic this time out...
Santorum might better be described as the default man. Or the glove or bare hand. Sure, we will work with Mittens if it comes to that. And that will restrain our errant middle digits [digitus medius--no, not the web-based media] when he starts to shout "I can work with them!!!!" and "If 35 million deaths are linked to sugar, I guess we have to do SOMETHING!!!" Instead of calling "Bullshit!" to ideology-driven "science."
ReplyDeleteAs Leno said, It's halftime in America. And China has the ball and we're down 16 Trillion to 0. I will add--Maybe that should be an "O" to make it more clear.
Santorum looks solid. He's no savior, but we are not the party that longs for a messiah. We need a solid conservative who can make a case to the American people that the road we are on leads to ruination. Then we need him to fight to make the changes necessary. It's a tall order for anyone. Santorum can make that case, and will fight for the changes needed.
ReplyDeleteNewt Gingrich is a brilliant man and a capable politician. He did what was thought impossible, he rested the House from the Democrats, who had held it for forty years.. that's forty years of wandering in the desert. Then he balanced the budget and passed welfare reform until a guy who played "Cooter" in The Dukes of Hazzard got his panties in a wad over getting beat by Gingrich in a Georgia race for a House seat, leading the dimwit to file ethics charges, which the DNC machine ground away on till Mr. Gingrich resigned his seat, subsequently to be exonerated by the IRS investigation (Terrance has a good recap on this over at Terrance this is Stupid Stuff).
The major downside to both of these gentleman is that it is said they can't win, but the people that say that are the same ones that supported McCain in 2008. The reason to vote for Romney is as Darrell says, he is not Obama, but we can and should do better than that. This nomination process should allow us to choose a candidate we can support. The party elites in the GOP don't really want to hear from us "Just get your asses in line." Well, the people that caused a republican landslide in the 2010 elections are the same ones that do not want Romney to represent them, and they will be heard.
To make clear, Gingrich resigned as House Speaker and from Congress one day after being elected to an 11th term on November 4, 1998. As for his re-election as Speaker in late 1996, his fellow Republican sold him out to the Democrats in order to get a look at all the confidential documents the Democrats were holding--certain juicy parts were "leaked" in the preceeding weeks. As a condition of releasing the information, the Democrats demanded not only that the House “reprimand” Gingrich but that he pay $300,000 toward the cost of the investigation. The Republicans agreed to get a look. After reading everything the Democrats had, the Republicans saw that they have gotten snookered--the case was as flimsy as Newt was saying. And because of the agreement, that's why the House voted to reprimand Gingrich (the first time ever for a Speaker). And Newt, not a rich man, had to cough up the bucks. He was, however, re-elected Speaker, 215-214 with Newt not voting and five fellow Republicans voting "Present."
ReplyDeleteWhich makes Romney's efforts to cast aspersions on Gingrich on the basis of this fiasco all the more difficult to look past.
ReplyDeleteIndeed it does.
ReplyDelete