Not surprisingly, Mitt Romney’s Super PAC is now going after Rick Santorum. Romney’s team has no choice, as Romney’s support is plummeting, yet all the negativity surrounding Romney’s attack ads is taking its toll on Romney as well. He’s a lame candidate, and his only strategy seems to be tearing apart even lamer candidates. His support among independents is tanking, and his “severely conservative” speech is making him a laughing stock with conservatives.
As for Santorum, he’s vulnerable to attack for many reasons. In a general election he’ll have to answer for his extreme positions on social issues, but he’s also the poster child for Republican mistakes during the Bush years when they spent like crazy trying to keep their majority.
Yet even with all these vulnerabilities, the Romney ad comes across as a series of cheap shots. Sure, Santorum voted to increase the debt limit, but everyone was voting that way, including practically all Republicans when Bush was president.
I still have no idea how this is going to play out, but whoever emerges from this savage primary season will be very damaged heading into a general election.
Mitt Romney has had a bad week, and his “maybe” answer regarding his willingness to release tax returns for prior years like his father did many years ago will likely go down as one of those iconic campaign moments that help define a candidate.
It was obvious to me for the past month that this would be a real issue. The tax code has been manipulated for years by lobbyists, and wealthy financiers like Romney get huge breaks, including the indefensible carried interest.
Romney is particularly vulnerable on this issue as he’s proposing to lower tax rates on the wealthy even more. Now he has compounded the problem with his muddled answers.
The ad above was created quickly after his disastrous debate performance. Right now the polls suggest he’ll lose the South Carolina primary to Newt Gingrich.
I have a feeling this story is going to get a lot of coverage again if and when Mitt Romney locks up the GOP nomination. Watch the video as Rachel Maddow revisits the story of Mitt Romney and the unfortunate incident when he placed his dog on the roof of his station wagon for a 12-hour road trip. At one point the dog became so scared or irritated that he defecated on the roof of the car. The story is pretty gross.
There are web sites sprouting up around the web (see Spreading Romney) and Newt Gingrich is also bringing this up in a web ad.
Small things like this can have a big impact on a campaign. With the Internet, you can see dog lovers making this a big issue. It doesn’t help that Romney already comes across as a stiff robot.
Ann Romney (L) introduces her husband, Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, at a campaign stop in Bethlehem, New Hampshire December 22, 2011. REUTERS/Brian Snyder (UNITED STATES – Tags: POLITICS)
The folks at BusinessInsider.com point out that Mitt Romney’s biggest problem might be his tax returns. So far he has refused to release his tax returns and he reiterated that position in a recent interview with Chuck Todd.
Romney’s campaign team has clearly decided that the political risk of releasing the returns outweighs the potential problems of not doing so. No one knows for sure what the documents would say, but by the candidate’s own admission, the bulk of Romney’s retirement income from Bain has been from capital gains, which are subject to 15% tax rate.
That means that for the past 10 years, Romney has likely been paying a lower tax rate than most middle class voters. If this is the case, that information could be devastating to Romney’s presidential bid.
The issue of tax fairness is huge right now, and Romney might become the poster-child for that problem. Warren Buffet has famously come out strong on this, saying that it’s not fair that he pays a lower effective tax rate on his income than his secretary.
I think this is a huge problem for Romney. If he makes it to the general election, the Obama campaign and the Democratic PACs are going to hammer him on not releasing his tax returns. If that issue catches fire and he ultimately releases them, then the story is huge.
But it’s huge regardless of when he releases them. He might want to just get it out of the way and have a response ready.
A super PAC supporting Mitt Romney has unleashed this ad against Newt Gingrich in Iowa. The focus on Newt’s “baggage” seems to be resonating.
Meanwhile, the PPP poll now has Gingrich in a free fall in Iowa, as he has slipped to third place.
Newt Gingrich’s campaign is rapidly imploding, and Ron Paul has now taken the lead in Iowa. He’s at 23% to 20% for Mitt Romney, 14% for Gingrich, 10% each for Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry, 4% for Jon Huntsman, and 2% for Gary Johnson.
Gingrich won’t even spend time in Iowa, so I can’t imagine how he’s going to hold on against candidates who are betting their campaigns on the caucuses.
If this trend continues, you’ll see Santorum, Perry or Bachmann possibly get into the top three, so this race is still very fluid. Romney benefits from having the anti-Romney vote split up. The Iowa vote often breaks late, so anything can happen here.
I didn’t watch the debate, but the clip above shows Newt Gingrich swatting away Mitt Romney’s attack the Newt is a career politician, whereas Mitt is a businessman.
Romney has generally done well in the debates, and yet he still couldn’t break through. Now that he’s slipping and Newt is surging, he picked the wrong time to finally have a bad debate performance.
Yesterday, I saw a clip of Mitt Romney ripping Newt Gingrich for being a flip-flopper. Of course it was only a matter of time before one of his opponents used Romney’s own words against him. The Jon Huntsman campaign produced this ad.
It’s hard to think of a major candidate in modern history who comes across as more opportunistic than Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich has plenty of problems and he’ll be a disaster for the GOP, but his flips and flops come more from his flaky mind and his constant desire to come up with creative proposals to puff up his ego. With Mitt, it’s all calculated, and then he makes things worse by lying about it.
Republican presidential candidate former Gov. Mitt Romney. UPI/Roger L. Wollenberg
The scathing attacks on Mitt Romney from prominent conservatives are intensifying. While the GOP establishment rallies around Mitt as they survey the confederacy of dunces that make up the Republican field of candidates, conservative writers are stating the obvious – that Mitt Romney is basically a fraud who will say anything to get elected.
George Will unloaded on Romney last week, expressing disdain for Romney’s multiple positions on practically every issue dear to conservatives.
Mitt Romney is not the George W. Bush of 2012 — he is the Harriet Miers of 2012, only conservative because a few conservative grand pooh-bahs tell us Mitt Romney is conservative and for no other reason.
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Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. And his general election campaign will be an utter disaster for conservatives as he takes the GOP down with him and burns up what it means to be a conservative in the process.
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Mitt Romney will be the nominee because the other candidates, right now, are a pretty pathetic lot.
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You’d think that given the economy, jobs, and the present angst about the direction of the country that the GOP would have an easy path to victory. You would be wrong.
You forget the electoral college. The vote is coming down to a handful of states and Barack Obama still maintains the advantage of incumbency and not terribly terrible polling in those swing states.
Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is a man devoid of any principles other than getting himself elected. As much as the American public does not like Barack Obama, they loath a man so fueled with ambition that he will say or do anything to get himself elected. Mitt Romney is that man.
I’ve been reading the 200 pages of single spaced opposition research from the John McCain campaign on Mitt Romney. There is no issue I can find on which Mitt Romney has not taken both sides. He is neither liberal nor conservative. He is simply unprincipled. The man has no core beliefs other than in himself. You want him to be tough? He’ll be tough. You want him to be sensitive? He’ll be sensitive. You want him to be for killing the unborn? He’ll go all in on abortion rights until he wants to run for an office where it is not in his advantage.
I don’t blame conservatives for rejecting Romney. I think the conservative movement has lost its mind with the unbending, extreme positions we’re seeing all around the country, and I do believe that some level of pragmatism has to be considered, but Romney is a joke.
