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March 3rd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
As the establishment candidate, the smart money is still on him to win,
despite his narrow victory in his home state of Michigan this past week. He
is famously smart, steady, stiff and super-rich.
But last weekend, campaigning at the Daytona 500, he conspicuously failed to
relate to the locals when he proclaimed, “I have some friends who are
NASCAR team owners” – only the latest in a similar string of gaffes.
The “man of the people” pose does not come easily to this otherwise
consummate salesman.
The Beatles were right: money can’t buy love, and even the front-runner’s
supporters seem ready to buy bumper stickers that say “Reluctantly
Romney”. They gain comfort from the fact that it is his turn in a party
that has traditionally respected the rules of primogenitor.
Romney is expected to carry at least Vermont, Virginia and Massachusetts on
Super Tuesday.
The problem, of course, is that the base of the Republican Party now resides
in the former states of the Confederacy, and Romney has yet to win a state
in the Deep South, while even the Midwest has also been slow to rally behind
him.
Which brings us to the other corner in the GOP fight, comprised of the rest of
the Republican field – a motley crew competing to be the conservative
alternative to Mitt Romney. Their goal is not just to win the nomination but
to stop Romney from collecting the 1,144 delegates necessary to clinch it
before the Republicans’ Tampa convention in August.
The current standard bearer is the social conservative stalwart former
Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. Polls show him leading in Tennessee and
Oklahoma, while Newt Gingrich has staked his campaign on winning his home
state of Georgia.
Meanwhile, 76-year old libertarian Congressman Ron Paul continues his tortoise
and hare strategy – steadily racking up delegates despite having yet to win
a single state outright.
The biggest prize of the night is Ohio, the Buckeye State, where Rick Santorum
and Mitt Romney are now neck and neck in the polls. No Republican in more
than a century has been elected president without winning Ohio, and it’s
primary is considered a pivotal test of electability.
Santorum has the advantage of representing a neighbouring state in the Senate
for twelve years, confirming upon him near-native understanding of the local
culture and economy. Romney is responding with the weapons he often has at
his disposal – endorsements and a commitment to carpet-bomb the airwaves
with negative attack ads.
And so the lines are drawn – the sober big money establishment versus the
scrappy conservative populist crowd. Romney is the most electable, but
evangelicals and Tea Partiers desperately want somebody else to be the
nominee, even if it is Rick Santorum. They will enjoy the feeling of wind
blowing through their hair as they go off the cliff.
Santorum’s problems are legion but he is a stalwart social conservative, eager
to throw the kind of red meat rhetoric conservative populists love.
In the past week, Santorum has opined that President Obama is a “snob”
for wanting all kids to have an opportunity to get a higher education – an
argument complicated by the fact that Santorum has two graduate degrees
himself. He didn’t do himself any favours when he proclaimed that John F
Kennedy’s 1960 “separation of church and state” speech made him
want to “throw up.”
Add to that recently resuscitated past comments about how “Satan [has
been] attacking the great institutions of America” and “I’m not a
believer in birth control” and you’ve got applause lines for the far
Right that leave the majority of the nation cold and confused, ready if not
eager to run in the other direction.
Santorum has come to symbolise the resurgence of culture wars that most
Americans believed were long resolved, like contraception.
On the opposite side of the Republican spectrum, Romney has come to symbolize
the super-rich, out of touch and somewhat arrogant.
The result is that independent women voters have flocked to President Obama in
recent months, giving him a 53 per cent approval rating, while his
Republican opponents struggle to get half that number. It’s not that the
president is doing so well, it’s that he’s doing well by comparison.
This Super Tuesday will be pivotal but not determinative in terms of who gets
the nomination.
Republican leaders acknowledge in private that this is a usually weak against
a vulnerable incumbent. Whether they want to recognize it or not, it is a
product of polarization: the more the candidates fight for the far-right the
less likely they will be able to pivot back to the center to win the general
election.
Extremes are ultimately their own side’s worst enemy.
John Avlon is senior columnist for Newsweek and The Daily Beast
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