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By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON, April 28 (Reuters) - After months of casting Republican Mitt Romney as someone who often changes positions for political convenience, President Barack Obama's campaign is calling Romney a far-right conservative - a contradictory set of messages that essentially invites voters to decide what they don't like about Romney.And Romney, who has built his campaign around declaring Obama a failure - particularly on the economy - began sounding a more positive note this week, offering hints about his vision for governing if he defeats the Democratic president in the Nov. 6 election.

The subtle changes in tactics by both candidates in recent days are benchmarks for the fall campaign. They symbolize the multiple angles of attack each man plans to use to try to define his rival and appeal to the 20 percent or so of U.S. voters who describe themselves as independent - and who will decide what both sides agree is likely to be a very close election.

And as a new wave of biting video ads from each side made clear this week, this will be a campaign in hyper drive. The election is more than six months away, but with many polls showing Obama and Romney in a virtual tie, voters already are seeing the type of sharp attack ads that typically dominate the final weeks of a presidential campaign.

Just before the first anniversary of the Obama-ordered raid in Pakistan that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the president's campaign released a provocative ad that signaled it would not be shy about making political use of bin Laden's death - or questioning whether Romney would have made the same call.

The Web video, narrated by former president Bill Clinton, takes a direct swipe at Romney by using four-year-old quotes in which Romney questioned whether chasing bin Laden in Pakistan was worth the time and expense.

"The commander-in-chief gets one chance to make the right decision," the ad says. "Which path would Mitt Romney have taken?"

Meanwhile American Crossroads, a Republican group that supports Romney, released a video ad that took aim at Obama's "cool" image, casting the president as a jet-setting celebrity at a time when many Americans are struggling under his economic policies.

"After four years of a celebrity president," the ad asks, "is your life any better?"

'MULTIPLE FRONTS'

After finally knocking out a relatively weak field of conservative challengers, Romney has run into the full force of Obama's campaign.

During the primary season Democrats targeted Romney repeatedly, mostly ignoring his Republican opponents, and tried to label him as a wealthy former private equity executive with a history of being a flip-flopping moderate as the governor of Massachusetts.

But after a campaign in which Romney sought to appeal to conservative Republicans by espousing strict views on limiting immigration, opposing abortion and opposing most government efforts to ease student debt, Obama's campaign is casting Romney as a candidate who has embraced right-wing, extremist views.

Obama told Rolling Stone magazine that he did not believe Romney would be able to disavow the conservative positions he took during the primaries.

"I don't think that their nominee is going to be able to suddenly say, 'Everything I've said for the last six months, I didn't mean,'" the president said.

Democratic strategist Steve Elmendorf rejected the notion that Team Obama should choose between labeling Romney as either a hard-core conservative or a finger-in-the-wind politician.

"They're going to attack him on multiple fronts," Elmendorf said. "This will not be a positive campaign."

But Republican strategist Dave Carney, who advised Texas Governor Rick Perry's 2012 short-lived presidential campaign, sees a Democratic campaign that is "flailing around."

"You can't be a flip-flopper one minute and a hard-core conservative the next," he said.


'LAWN SPRINKLERS'

Romney aides say Obama's tactics are aimed at diverting attention from annual $1 trillion government deficits and an unemployment rate that remains above 8 percent.

"The Obama campaign is like one of those gyrating, intermittent lawn sprinklers, spewing out attacks in seemingly random directions, hoping to get somebody wet," said Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades.

The challenger continues to load his speeches with attacks on Obama's handling of the U.S. economy and say that the president wants government to have an unacceptably large role in Americans' daily lives.

But now Romney is softening his tone so he doesn't come across so negatively, emphasizing what his priorities would be as president.

During his victory speech after the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday, Romney made a point of saying he would try to bring Americans together in a way Obama has not.

"Today the hill before us is a little steep but we have always been a nation of big steppers," he said. "Many Americans have given up on this president but they haven't ever thought about giving up. Not on themselves. Not on each other. And not on America."

Romney still has much explaining to do before his vision for governing becomes clear. He has vowed deep spending cuts in the federal budget, for example, but has not outlined which programs he would cut.


THE BUSH FACTOR

During a week in which Obama campaigned before cheering crowds of university students and stared down Republicans in Congress over keeping low rates for student loans, Romney showed some flexibility on student debt, agreeing with Obama's push to extend low rates on student loans.

Republicans acknowledge that to defeat Obama, Romney will need to do more than attack the president on the economy and stress his own record as a corporate executive.

Instead, they say he needs to outline an economic narrative that separates him not just from Obama, but also from the policies of Obama's predecessor, Republican George W. Bush. Obama's campaign has cast Romney's policies as a return to Bush's failed agenda.

This week Romney got advice from a lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal, whose opinion pages typically reflect the thinking of Republican leaders. Among other things, the Journal urged Romney to separate himself from Bush's economic policies to try to inoculate himself from Obama's Bush-Romney linkage.

"Mr. Romney will have to make a case not merely against Mr. Obama's failings," the Journal editorial said, "but also for why he has the better plan to restore prosperity." For more stories on the campaign, click on

(Additional reporting by Sam Youngman; Editing by David Lindsey and Xavier Briand)]]> General xml-rss2.php?itemid=33 Sun, 29 Apr 2012 09:07:33 -0400 xml-rss2.php?itemid=32

WASHINGTON

I t may not be the economy, stupid.

Then again, James Carville’s famous maxim about the 1992 presidential campaign might well be valid in 2012. But it’s quite possible that on Election Day, voters’ most urgent concerns will be driven by overseas events neither President Obama nor his Republican opponent can predict or control.


Analysts, commentators and, yes, columnists will fill the days between now and November with sage assessments of the campaigns. Does Obama have the right strategy? Does Mitt Romney have the right message? Which party has the better ground game?

But it might be more pertinent to ask, for example, what the North Korean news agency meant Monday with its threat to reduce parts of Seoul to ash with a military attack “by unprecedented peculiar means and methods of our own style.”

North Korea’s apocalyptic rhetoric can usually be written off as bluster. But the Stalinist dynasty in charge of the world’s most isolated country has an inexperienced young leader whose first attempt to cover himself in glory was a humiliating failure. Could Kim Jong Eun actually be thinking the unthinkable?

We have to assume the North Korean regime cares most about its survival and thus will not launch a suicidal war. But if Kim and the generals have decided to push the envelope, perhaps with a new nuclear weapons test, the possibility for miscalculation is greater than in the past.

As Obama has made clear, our nation’s geopolitical strategic focus is shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific — where American interests run into those of the other emerging global superpower, China. This is why anyone trying to predict the course of the U.S. election campaign ought to pay attention to the scandal and turmoil that have gripped the Chinese government.

It’s a convoluted story involving money, sex, corruption, betrayal and an alleged homicide. The central fact is that one of China’s most charismatic and powerful politicians — Bo Xilai, until recently the Communist Party boss in Chongqing, an inland metropolis of nearly 30 million people — has been sacked. His wife is accused of murdering a shadowy British businessman who may have helped the couple transfer untold millions of ill-gotten dollars into illegal offshore accounts.

This matters to U.S. voters because the scandal exposes the most serious threat to the Chinese government’s legitimacy just as the hierarchy prepares to name a new president this fall.

As a way of shoring up patriotic support, officials may be tempted to be more aggressive in pushing China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. The United States might feel compelled to push back. Then what?

There are other, more obvious international situations that could have a big impact on the presidential race — beginning, of course, with the war in Afghanistan. Both Obama and Romney lag well behind the public mood, which is for bringing the troops home now.

Meanwhile, there will likely be mounting pressure to do something about the brutal war of repression being

waged by Bashar al-Assad in Syria. It is hard to imagine what that “something” might be; an intervention robust enough to make a difference would have more in common with the all-out Iraq invasion than with the more limited Libya campaign. But an atrocity can change attitudes overnight.

There’s also the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. It may not happen — but if it does, there’s plenty of political danger here for both campaigns.

And if the Carville dictum turns out to be right? Well, stock markets around the world swooned Monday — not because of anything U.S. officials said or did but because events in Europe made investors nervous.

It may be that in 2012 it’s the eurozone crisis, stupid. And there’s nothing Obama or Romney can do about it.

Eugene Robinson writes for The Washington Post and is the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary. His email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

Copyright 2012 The Post-Star. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Posted in Eugene_robinson on Monday, April 23, 2012 10:46 pm

]]> politics xml-rss2.php?itemid=32 Tue, 24 Apr 2012 08:44:16 -0400 xml-rss2.php?itemid=31
Lochner. It's a name familiar to lawyers, but barely known to the general public. Referring to a 1905 Supreme Court case, Lochner v. New York, that struck down a state law capping bakers' weekly hours, the epithet harkens back to an era, stretching roughly from the 1890s through the 1930s, when a conservative Supreme Court struck down liberal economic regulations at the state and federal levels.

Invoking Lochner's specter of aggressive judicial activism has long been the legalese equivalent of brandishing a cross before a vampire. And President Obama, a former constitutional law lecturer at the University of Chicago, knows full well that no justice, spare Clarence Thomas, wants to be grouped with discredited predecessors who read laissez-faire, Social Darwinist policy preferences into the Constitution to thwart the will of the people on issues ranging from minimum wages to child labor.

Perhaps that is why Chief Justice Roberts during last week's oral arguments sought to stamp out any suggestion of Lochner's relevance to the health care cases. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, defending the health care law's individual mandate under heavy fire from the Republican-appointed justices, had just used the L-word to characterize his opponents' argument.

"The key in Lochner is that we were talking about regulation of the states, right, and the states are not limited to enumerated powers," Roberts said. "The federal government is. And it seems to me it's an entirely different question when you ask yourself whether or not there are going to be limits on the federal power, as opposed to limits on the states, which was the issue in Lochner."

In Roberts' framing, a decision to strike down the individual mandate would not be a step toward reviving an infamous era of constitutional history. Rather, it would be a routine policing of the outer bounds of Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce.

Never mind that such policing, as Obama emphasized, has not been used to strike down a sitting president's signature legislative achievement in more than 75 years. Or that those earlier decisions flowed not from federalism concerns, but from a hostility -- sometimes openly stated -- to progressive presidents, Congresses and statehouses.

David Bernstein, a law professor at George Mason University, said that Obama and Roberts reflect the "very different perspectives that the left and the right have on Lochner." Bernstein, who wrote the book "Rehabilitating Lochner," is a libertarian sympathetic to the pre-New Deal Court's active enforcement of economic rights.

For the right, said Bernstein, the case stands for the Supreme Court's illegitimate imposition of its political beliefs -- whether against workers' protections a century ago or in favor of abortion and gay rights today -- upon the states.

"On the left, what was wrong with Lochner was not that the judiciary was being too aggressive," Bernstein said. "The problem was that the courts should stay out of the field of reviewing government's economic regulations."

Both sides can agree, then, that Romneycare, as a state regulation of its health care industry, will stand even if Obamacare falls.

But an unscathed Massachusetts mandate -- and any state laws that might follow in the federal mandate's demise -- would hardly subdue the sense among the Affordable Care Act's supporters that the Roberts Court, with its five Republican appointees, is the most radically conservative Supreme Court since the 1930s.

Obama's reference to Lochner served to limit the scope of his comments on Monday, when he expressed his confidence that "an unelected group of people" would not take the "unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." That statement still set off a firestorm over whether he was denying the Supreme Court's power, accepted since the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, to do just that.

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court in Texas, hearing argument over another provision of the Affordable Care Act, demanded from the Department of Justice a three-page, single-spaced letter "stating specifically and in detail in reference to [the president's Monday] statements what the authority is of the federal courts in this regard in terms of judicial review." Judge Jerry Smith, who issued the highly unusual order, is a Reagan appointee, as are the other two judges on the panel.

The Obama administration, for its part, doubled down on referencing Lochner to shape the constitutional and political narrative while the justices draft their opinions behind closed doors. At a briefing on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney used the term four times.

The Justice Department's letter, due on Thursday at noon to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, is expected to affirm that the Obama administration considers judicial review, in general, an uncontroversial fact of the American constitutional system. But Smith's order also presents the administration with another opportunity to impress upon the federal judiciary that a decision split sharply along partisan lines that rejected an economic regulation after three-quarters of a century of leaving Congress largely to its own devices would play poorly in the public arena.

Before last week's Supreme Court arguments, many expected that consideration would outweigh Chief Justice Roberts' gut distaste for the mandate. His Lochner comments, meant to neutralize the Obama administration's appeals to history and turn the radical into the routine, suggest otherwise.]]> politics xml-rss2.php?itemid=31 Thu, 5 Apr 2012 07:56:00 -0400 xml-rss2.php?itemid=30
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Let’s say you’re moving steadily toward wrapping up the Republican presidential nomination and you allow yourself to begin thinking ahead to the question of a running mate.Your party has a potentially devastating problem with Hispanic voters, so your thoughts naturally drift in that direction. After the contraception wars, it wouldn’t hurt to have a woman at your side. It would be nice if you could have an ambassador to the Tea Party movement to help shore up your credentials with the right. And of course, it’s always helpful to chose someone from a swing state.

In any other year, your musings might lead you to, say, Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, a former prosecutor who checks all of those boxes, has bipartisan support in her home state and enjoys shooting handguns to boot.

But in the world after Sarah Palin and “Game Change,” the chances of Mitt Romney or anyone else choosing a first-term governor lacking a national brand name and experience are greatly diminished. However good a fit she might be on paper, Ms. Martinez probably bears too many surface similarities to Ms. Palin to get a serious look, as The New Republic and others have pointed out.

And the fallout from the McCain campaign’s selection of Ms. Palin for the No. 2 place on the ticket will extend well beyond the chances of any individual. For any Republican who makes it onto the short list of possible vice presidential nominees, the vetting process this year promises to be as thorough and intrusive as the vetting of Ms. Palin was rushed and incomplete.

If presidential campaigns are M.R.I.’s for the soul, as David Axelrod, President Obama’s political strategist, likes to say, vice presidential vetting this year will be a body-cavity search.

“They should expect a complete breach of privacy,” said Michael Berman, a long-time aide to Walter F. Mondale who helped vet Geraldine A. Ferraro as Mr. Mondale’s running mate in 1984.

The McCain campaign’s handling of the Palin selection was hardly the first botched vetting. George S. McGovern only belatedly learned in 1972 that his first choice of running mate, Thomas Eagleton, was taking antipsychotic drugs and had undergone electroshock therapy. The background check into Ms. Ferraro did not extend deeply enough into her husband, John Zaccaro, whose finances and business practices quickly became political problems for Mr. Mondale. In 2004, John Edwards turned out to be an uncooperative running mate for Senator John Kerry (though Mr. Edwards did not descend into scandal until after the campaign).

Even where vetting has not been the issue, the selection process has often been irregular: Dick Cheney ending up as George W. Bush’s choice in 2000 after running the search himself, or Ronald Reagan flirting with putting former President Gerald R. Ford on the ticket with him in 1980.

But in Republican circles, there is a clear focus on avoiding the problems that marked the Palin selection: a rushed process failed to ask basic questions about the prospective running mate, and put short-term electoral concerns ahead of readiness to assume the presidency.

“One of the mistakes we made in the Palin process was one of assumptions,” said Steve Schmidt, one of the McCain aides who guided the process. “We immediately made the assumption that anyone with ‘Governor’ next to her name has a base level of knowledge of history and policy that in a post-Palin world it isn’t necessarily safe to assume.”

Mr. Schmidt said this time around the nominee and his team will need to start the search and vetting much earlier and ask more probing questions intended to gauge the ability of the possible choices to think on their feet, master complex information and provide assurance they could handle the presidency if it came to that. And, he said, the nominee will face pressure to manage a much more rigorous process to prove to the media that the vetting has been thorough.

“What level of rigor is going to be applied to this?” Mr. Schmidt said. “Is the media going to demand, for example, to know who is running the vetting process? What is the criteria for the vetting process? How is the decision going to be made? How transparent will the process be?”

Mr. Romney has said little of substance about possible choices or how he would make the decision.

“I imagine it will be very private if I’m fortunate enough to have that opportunity,” he said in a recent interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “And we have not even begun such a process, as you can imagine. You know, we’re a long way from that moment. But it would be a private process, and anticipating your next question as to who would make, be on my — I’ll tell you, I have no idea.”

But some of the more high-profile possibilities are already under media and partisan scrutiny. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, perhaps the most frequently mentioned potential running mate for the eventual Republican nominee, has already seen his accounts of his family history questioned and has moved up the schedule for publishing his autobiography in an effort to maintain control over his own narrative heading into the summer.

Even Republicans with higher national profiles, including Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, would no doubt be subjected to intensive private vetting and very public media X-rays — a prospect that seemed to weigh on both of them as they chose not to make presidential runs.

No vice presidential search process can match the sheer sustained intensity of a two-year presidential campaign when it comes to the scrutiny given to candidates. But the combination of post-Palin pressures, the high stakes of the general election and the pervasiveness of the political media are likely to set a new standard for running mate vetting this time around. And even that will probably not be enough to avoid some surprises.

“You don’t find everything,” said Mr. Berman. “The only question is, of what consequence is that which you don’t know.”

Follow Richard W. Stevenson on Twitter at @dickstevenson.
]]> politics xml-rss2.php?itemid=30 Sun, 25 Mar 2012 10:17:48 -0400 xml-rss2.php?itemid=29 politics xml-rss2.php?itemid=29 Sun, 18 Mar 2012 13:14:21 -0400 xml-rss2.php?itemid=20 politics xml-rss2.php?itemid=20 Sun, 18 Mar 2012 12:49:00 -0400 xml-rss2.php?itemid=24
Congress' party-line passage of the Affordable Care Act two years ago triggered unceasing speculation over the prospect of a similarly partisan end-game at the Supreme Court. And given the litany of sharply divided conservative victories in the court's most politically-charged cases, casual court watchers would not be unreasonable to expect the five Republican appointees to strike down the Affordable Care Act's individual health insurance mandate and perhaps the entire law with it.

Reasonable expectations, however, can be wrong. The battle this time is likely to be an intra-conservative conflict between the economic libertarianism underlying the mandate's challenge and the traditional principles of judicial restraint that have defined right-wing jurisprudence for more than a half-century.

The Affordable Care Act constitutional saga opens its final chapter on March 26, when the court takes to the bench for six hours of oral arguments over three days. The justices will finally offer scraps of their thinking, through questions and comments to the lawyers before them, to a public hungry for hints of whether Congress exceeded its commerce clause power by requiring virtually all Americans to purchase minimum health care coverage or pay a tax penalty.

Justice Clarence Thomas, whose six years of silence at oral arguments suggest that he's unlikely to pipe up in health care cases, has long made clear his allegiance to the libertarian camp. He has called time and again for a return to a narrow reading of Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce that a deeply conservative court in the mid-1930s used to provoke a constitutional crisis by invalidating much of President Franklin Roosevelt's first slate of New Deal legislation.

But it is far from certain that his four conservative colleagues -- Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel Alito -- will join Thomas to repeat that repudiated era of court history.

Since FDR prevailed over the court in 1937, there has been a mainstream consensus on the left and the right that Congress has the broad power to regulate any conduct that, in the aggregate, substantially affects interstate commerce. At its most expansive, this has meant, as the court decided in 1942's Wickard vs. Filburn, that Congress can forbid a farmer from growing excess wheat for personal consumption.

From the 1950s through the early-1970s, the court took a decidedly left turn on issues including school prayer, civil rights, criminal procedure and abortion rights. Most conservative lawyers who came of age during the second half of the 20th century were therefore more concerned with correcting the "excesses" of the court's liberalism than with using the judiciary to curb Congress's regulatory reach, said Eric Claeys, a professor at George Mason University School of Law.

"It is crucial to remember that Roberts and Alito both went to law school in the 1970s and both did significant service in the Reagan Administration," said Claeys, who last summer wrote "Obamacare and the Limits of Judicial Conservatism" in National Affairs. In Roberts' and Alito's milieu, liberals were the judicial activists. Conservatives practiced restraint.

Justice Scalia championed judicial restraint as a conservative value in his posts as a law professor, government lawyer, and federal judge. Debating a prominent libertarian law professor in 1984, then-Judge Scalia described calls for activism on economic rights as a "moment of truth for many conservatives who have been criticizing the courts in recent years. They must decide whether they really believe, as they have been saying, that the courts are doing too much, or whether they are actually nursing only the less principled grievance that the courts have not been doing what they want."

On the bench, Scalia has had an ambivalent relationship with the commerce clause. He, along with Justice Kennedy, joined the court's conservative majority in the only two instances since 1936 that the court struck down an act of Congress on interstate commerce grounds. In 1995, they voted to invalidate the Gun-Free School Zones Act as insufficiently related to commercial conduct and did the same in 2000 to a portion of the Violence Against Women Act.

Nevertheless, in neither of those cases did Scalia or Kennedy question Congress' power to regulate what he saw as bona fide commercial conduct. Reaffirming the Filburn decision in 2005, they joined with the court's liberals to find that federal laws regulating the national market for illicit drugs permitted Congress to prevent a woman from growing her personal crop of state-legalized medical marijuana.

The 26 states and several private parties challenging the Affordable Care Act concede that health care is a national market, but say that Congress cannot force someone to partake in that market by mandating the purchase of health insurance.

Neal Katyal, the former acting U.S. solicitor general, said iIn an interview with HuffPost that the government responds to this argument by saying that "everyone consumes health care in this country."

"Right now 50 million people don't have insurance, so it means that you and I essentially are paying for them," said Katyal, who defended the law in front of three appeals courts. "Congress said, 'Let's fix that system and make it so that everyone has a certain amount of insurance.'"

Next week's health care cases come from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which did not buy the government's argument. But high-profile conservative judges on two other appeals courts. Sixth Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a former Scalia law clerk, was the first among all federal judges to cross party lines to uphold the mandate. D.C. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman, a Reagan-appointed greybeard of the conservative legal movement, did the same.

The challengers' "view that an individual cannot be subject to Commerce Clause regulation absent voluntary, affirmative acts that enter him or her into, or affect, the interstate market expresses a concern for individual liberty that seems more redolent of" the cramped pre-1937 view of economic regulation, wrote Silberman. That reading "has no foundation in the Commerce Clause," he concluded.

Georgetown Law professor Randy Barnett, one of the intellectual architects of the health care law challenge and lawyer for the private plaintiffs, told HuffPost that these decisions "have to do with what [the judges] think the role is as a lower court judge: following Supreme Court precedent." That responsibility, Barnett noted, is "a constraint that the Supreme Court is not as under as much as lower court judges are."

But Barnett, unlike Sutton and Silberman, finds the health insurance mandate entirely unprecedented. And when there is no precedent, there is no need for judicial restraint. "I'm only in favor of judicial restraint insofar as it means following the Constitution, and i don't know anybody who thinks the court should not strike down unconstitutional laws, on the left or right."

If only the calculus were that simple. The court's conservative bloc has had no problem recently striking down or calling into question state and federal laws big and small as violations of the First, Second and 10th Amendments. But invalidating a sitting president's signature legislative victory on commerce clause grounds is freighted with deeply unpleasant institutional memories both for the court and the conservative legal movement. If the individual mandate is as unpopular among Americans as public opinion polls report, then the court can let the democratic process play out and, by exercising restraint, collect political capital for the battles ahead on affirmative action, campaign finance, the Voting Rights Act and perhaps even abortion that really matter to the court's majority.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/18/health-care-reform-supreme-court-obamacare_n_1354804.html]]> politics xml-rss2.php?itemid=24 Sun, 18 Mar 2012 09:13:53 -0400 xml-rss2.php?itemid=23


Not everyone buys this theory, I admit. The doubters include Santorum — who keeps shoving Newt toward the exit — as well as quite a few leading conservatives, including Family Research Council head Tony Perkins and influential blogger Erick Erickson. They want to see a two-man contest between a “Massachusetts moderate” and a dyed-in-the-wool conservative.

I think they should be careful what they wish for. The “throw Newt from the train” people think the math is on their side, but it isn’t.

It’s true that from the primaries and caucuses held so far, we know that the Romney vote is much smaller than the anti-Romney vote. In Ohio, for example, Romney managed a slim victory with 38 percent versus Santorum’s 37 percent. But Gingrich, meanwhile, drew nearly 15 percent. Add those voters to Santorum’s, and Romney would have suffered a shattering defeat.

Santorum and Gingrich are both campaigning on the premise that Romney is not a genuine conservative. Both candidates draw support from self-described “very conservative” Republicans. Since Gingrich — who supposedly had a “Southern strategy” for winning the nomination — couldn’t even beat Santorum in Alabama and Mississippi, it’s clear who would have the better chance against Romney, mano a mano. Ergo, Newt, hasta la vista.

But this logic ignores the subtleties of the delegate math. Sorry to inflict a flurry of numbers, but here goes: To win the nomination, a candidate needs the support of 1,144 convention delegates. According to projections from The Associated Press, at this point Romney has 481 delegates; Santorum has 252; Gingrich has 128; and Ron Paul has 48.

By the AP’s count, 1,356 delegates remain up for grabs in the remaining primaries and caucuses. That’s right, we haven’t even reached the halfway point of this seemingly endless slog to the convention in Tampa.

Both Santorum and Gingrich say their goal is to keep Romney from reaching the magic number of 1,144 before the convention. After the first ballot, they would count on being able to persuade Romney’s delegates to abandon him in favor of a more authentic conservative.

This is a smart strategy, because — as the Romney campaign loves to point out — it is almost inconceivable that Santorum or Gingrich could win the nomination any other way. Santorum would have to win roughly two-thirds of all the delegates at stake in the remaining contests to secure the nomination before the convention. Gingrich would have to win even more. Not gonna happen.

Romney needs to win just half the remaining delegates. But that’s still no cakewalk, even with Romney’s vastly superior resources and organization.

The headline from Tuesday’s contests was that Santorum won in Alabama and Mississippi. But since delegates there and in most other GOP contests are awarded proportionally — and since there were also contests in Hawaii and American Samoa, where Santorum and Gingrich didn’t really compete — Romney ended the night having won 43 delegates, more than any other candidate.

But Santorum won 36 delegates and Gingrich won 24 — meaning that while Romney increased his lead over the others, he fell short of winning half the delegates that were available. If he continues “winning” the delegate race at Tuesday’s pace, he will fail to wrap up the nomination before the convention.

What if Gingrich dropped out? It’s reasonable to assume that much of his support would go to Santorum, but not all of it.

My interpretation of what we’ve learned from exit polling so far is that Santorum’s voters tend to doubt Romney’s steadfastness on social issues, while Gingrich’s supporters tend to doubt that Romney is a true small-government conservative. That’s an oversimplification, but I think it’s basically correct.

Gingrich voters who put less emphasis on social issues — or who doubt Santorum’s commitment to small-government principles — might well turn to Romney instead. Given the Romney campaign’s deep pockets, Santorum would face a blistering barrage of negative ads in every state. Legitimate questions about Santorum’s electability would be raised nonstop.

The Romney campaign is built for this kind of multi-theater battle. Santorum’s comparatively underfunded campaign is not. The most favorable field of battle for the anti-Romney insurgency would be a contested convention — and the most plausible way of getting there is for Gingrich to stay in the race and help keep Romney’s delegate count short of 1,144.

Eugene Robinson writes for The Washington Post and is the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary. His email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.]]> politics xml-rss2.php?itemid=23 Sun, 18 Mar 2012 08:29:30 -0400 xml-rss2.php?itemid=22 politics xml-rss2.php?itemid=22 Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:27:47 -0400 xml-rss2.php?itemid=19 politics xml-rss2.php?itemid=19 Tue, 13 Mar 2012 09:50:00 -0400