It’s been a lousy six months in the life of the Minnesota GOP.

Like an awful lot of Minnesota Republicans, I participate to try to work toward government policy that is fiscally sound and respects individual liberty – not because I personally feel I can bring any insights into the efficient operation of the party apparatus itself.  For the record, I offer no such insights; I stay on top of my household budget via the grace of God, a decent job and YNAB.  A business?  Never tried it.  Doubt it’d work.

That’s why we – and by “we”, I mean “the party at large”, as opposed to “Mitch Berg and others”, since as a precinct convener in 2009 I had as much impact on the election of the party chair then as I do now with no party office whatsoever – elect someone to run the party.  But to the extent I supported anyone, I did it in large part based on the things that a state party chair is supposed to do:  Raise money and run a business.

Tony Sutton is quite a fund-raiser.  And he has run a business or two.  Beyond that, it was all greek to me.

Anyway, the MNGOP is a mess, and a bunch of very motivated people have spent the last six months trying to un-bumfuzzle the whole thing.  Henco Commissioner Jeff Johnson led a group of people – all of whom were by no means huge fans of Tony Sutton – and have released their initial report.

A report from the Minnesota Republican Party on its troubled finances delivered a frank admission of “misreporting… questionable decision-making… and lack of accountability.”

The good news, according Jeff Johnson, chair of party’s financial oversight committee, is “for me the fact that we didn’t find any evidence that people were stealing money was reassuring.”

Which doesn’t mean there aren’t big questions to be answered:

Among the revelations were payments of $18,000 to an investigator for research on the legalization of marijuana. According to the report, the investigator, Tim Goar, also helped with media relations, but “Goar claims to have very few written reports and did not think he had saved any of his work. He says he had… only a verbal agreement with [Ryan] Griffin,” the party’s executive director. The report adds: “We were unable to successfully contact Griffin.”

Griffin’s name, and his apparent disappearing act, comes up several times. “Some of Ryan Griffin’s expense reports lacked documentation…. We were unable to successfully contact Griffin,” according to the report.

Griffin was paid $14,000 over his regular party salary for “legal services” and “legal advice.” But, the report noted again, “We were unable to locate any documentation detailing the services provided and were unable to successfully contact Griffin for more information regarding this issue.”

While there are those who will say “Oh, yeah?  I thought you said there was no stealing?  Huh? Huh? Huh?” I think the responsible response is that Johnson’s group are not criminal investigators; they are accountants.  They accounted for what they could, and raised the rest as questions to be answered in the next step.

This next bit will no doubt set the conspiracy-mongers to “puree”:

The report revealed that spinning off corporate entities was a common practice for the party. The party’s Midwest Leadership Conference in October was run under the auspices of MLC, Inc., which owes more than $26,000, primarily to the DoubleTree Hotel.

This is a fairly common practice in business; spin off separate entities to isolate the accounting (and, in a pinch, the debt).  Is it ethical when the money’s not there to pay for it?  That’s a valid question.

Johnson claims the expenses that led to the party’s $1.3 million debt offered “no big surprises because all the items we had known about” before the review. Still, some of the numbers are eye-popping — like $180,000 paid to a communications firm for a re-branding project, with more than $50,000 yet unpaid.

But the party’s review was designed to deliver “just the facts, not the judgment whether something was wise or not wise,” said Johnson.

At any rate, the party seems to have managed to trim (according to one account ) half a million off its debt; with the rest, it’s heading in the right direction.  It’s bad, but probably salvageable:

While the report was less than comforting in assessing the party’s shortcomings, Johnson voiced some optimism. “The simple fact is that most of these issues can be addressed by changes in our structure,” he said.

As we’ve noted in this space, not everyone is convinced.  Hell, I don’t have the knowledge, in and of myself, to be authoritatively convinced or not.  Just like three years ago.

Still, it’s my hunch we’re getting to the bottom of it.  My hunch and $2 will get you a cup of coffee, of course, but there you go.

Still…:

The report will not satisfy everyone, Johnson acknowledged. “There’s a small group of folks that want a full forensic audit,” he said, but the party can’t afford that.

I don’t know what a “full forensic audit” costs – but a cursory examination shows it’s a lot of money.  And “Forensic Audits” focus on finding fraud (sort of – indeed, the definition of the term itself seems to be under some debate), it might – might, maybe – be overkill for what the MNGOP needs, even if it could afford another 5-6 figure professional consulting bill right now.

And the GOP’s State Central Committee – the “Board of Directors”, as it were – made that call at its meeting last December, in a majority vote of its elected members.  And it’s their decision, right or wrong.  Not yours.  Not mine.

But here’s an idea (and it’s not mine, not by a long shot): All of you who want a forensic audit?  Raise the money, and pay for it!  Come up with the money it’d take to forensically audit 3-5 years worth of books for an organization the size of the MNGOP (and from what I read, you’d do well to get that for less than $50,000) and commit it to the job!

Actions speak louder than words!

That, or get in there and find actual evidence that Johnson’s investigation falls short in some key way.

I’m interested – very – in getting the GOP’s shop cleaned up.  Complete conservative dominance in Minnesota is the only thing that will prevent this state from turning into a cold Greece with boring food.  I’m not interested in paying  a lot of money donated by a lot of ma and pa donors in order to put a pelt on someone’s wall unless there’s at least a whiff of smoke.  Six months ago, it seemed pretty plausible. Today?  I’ll take some convincing.

Bring the smoke, the money, or the State Central votes.

I just haven’t seen it yet.

Question:  What’s the best way for a Republican to get an op-ed printed in the Strib?

Answer: Throw a rhetorical urine-soaked balloon on the GOP.

I can’t say anything about Joe Repya that others haven’t said better; notwithstanding the fact that he’s spent the last three years telling anyone whose ear he could bend but mine that “every time Mitch Berg opens his mouth, someone leaves the GOP” after a falling-out with the editorial staff at True North (proving that he has me confused with someone with actual power), Repya’s a great living American who’s served in three wars and contributed immensely to his country and his political worldview.

Would any of that get him a plum spot on the op-ed page in the Strib?

Perhaps.  But he is reading out the GOP.  And that gets anyone kicked to the front of the queue:

For the Republican Party of Minnesota (MNGOP), 2011 may have ended with a thud, but 2012 is shaping up to be a very bad year indeed. Will the MNGOP survive the one-two-three punch it has taken since the beginning of the year? Some within the party leadership are unsure.

“Some…” people should form a fifth literary perspective; like First Person Omnisicent, only using unnamed-yet-omniscient Third Persons as the actual agents of the perspective.  ‘Some People”, listed without any other context, can support just about any stance imaginable.

Within the party leadership?  I’m sure “some” are feeling pretty pessimistic now.  “Some” are also feeling hopeful.  “Some” more still are no doubt just hoping to carry on.

And it’s irrelevant.  We’ll come back to that.

First, the party of fiscal responsibility found out that its trusted and twice-elected party chairman, Tony Sutton, resigned after over-spending nearly $2 million the party did not have.

We talked about this last week; the “Tu Quoque Ad Hominem”; “Oh, look!  You claim you stand for fiscal responsibility, but you’re behind on your rent!”.  It’s the shortest of all short-bus insults.  Leaving aside that institutions, like people, learn more from their mistakes than from their successes, it’s also a fact that no institution’s principles ever live up to the transgressions of its individual members.  As if Dave Thompson and King Banaian and Mary Franson’s work in the Legislature is undercut by bookkeeping problems in a body whose only connection with them is an endorsement from a district committee.

No matter.

We’ll come back to that.

The party, it appears, had no checks or balances on its leader. Since MNGOP is flat broke it has not been able to conduct a forensic audit to see if any inappropriate spending took place.

That news is in fact six months old. As watchdog (or as DFL lackey Jon Tevlin calls him, “watchdog”) Jeff Johnson’s put it, the forensic audit would have cost a ton of money, and led to the same results they have now.

On Dec. 31, 2011, the party faithful elected a new chairman, Pat Shortridge, hoping, it seems, that he could work some of his Enron lobbyist magic and bail the party out of its financial mess.

I’m wondering – what’s Repya’s point, here?  Shortridge lobbied for Enron.  Is he saying that any association with Enron, at any level, in any capacity, makes one dishonest?  Everyone?

That seems a little stretchy.

The party had been under Federal Election Commission (FEC) scrutiny since 2006, when Sutton was the party treasurer from 2005 to 2009. The FEC finally leveled a heavy fine of $170,000 for the period of 2006-2008. The party now faces even more FEC review and possible fines.

Now, for whatever reason, Repya likes to tie me to the former management at the GOP.  It’s a bit of an overreach; in 2008-2009, the highest office I’d ever held in the GOP was precinct convener.  I didn’t know a whole lot about the inner workings of the Minnesota GOP.  I didn’t even know where the office (three miles from my house) was, to be honest.  I did know that I’d gotten to know Michael Brodkorb as a blogger, and got him on the air as a NARN co-host, and counted him as a friend, at least in a vocational sense.  And I don’t cave on my friend.  I’ve never run a business that employed more people than me, I do well to keep my own budget in line (thank God for Quicken and YNAB); I was almost as unsophisticated at how politics is done (and still am).  So I wasn’t especially equipped to criticize Sutton’s management as Treasurer, or Chair.

Truth be told, I’ve never wanted to care much about the inner workings of the MNGOP.  All I really care about is getting conservatives elected to office and affecting policy.   Parties are the vehicle to doing that – hence, I try to get and stay involved – but energy spent fighting inside the party is energy not available to destroy the DFL at the polls.

I’ve taken some flak for that.

And just this week, the landlord of the party’s St. Paul headquarters filed court papers to have the GOP evicted for failure to pay rent.

Which is true.

Or was.  It’s old news now.  The new management at the MNGOP is doing what hundreds of thousands of other people have had to do when circumstances or their own irresponsibility have left them behind on their bills; worked out a deal.

As if all this were not bad enough, with a second punch the party of personal responsibility and family values was rocked by a sex scandal involving former party deputy chairman Michael Brodkorb and his state Senate employer, then-Majority Leader Amy Koch.

Repya seems to be borrowing his lines from Two Putt Tommy.

Are the party’s principles diminished because there are some who don’t live up to them?

It was a sordid little episode (not least due to the media’s 24/7 attention – which they’d never have paid to Democrats in similar, or worse, positions (I’m talking about you, Barney Frank, John Edwards, Tony Weiner and Bill Clinton. Move on!  Just mooooooooooove on!

Yet it’s the third punch that has many within the strong national defense party wondering if there is any chance for MNGOP to survive the upcoming election in November. In a stealthy, below-the-radar maneuver, most of MNGOP has been taken over by the Ron Paul movement…When asked whether they would support Mitt Romney if he wins the nomination, many Paul supporters said no, unless he selects U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ron Paul’s son, as his vice presidential running mate.

It’s true. And lots of Gingrich and Santorum supporters said the same thing.  And it remains to the rest of us to convince them, if we can, since the Paul crowd is all full of whiz and vinegar and doing their end-zone happy dance these days.

But they did, in fact, out-organize “the rest of us” – including an awful lot of us who agree with 80% of what they say, albeit not about Ron Paul – just like we said they’d have to do when they were bellyaching about not being carried to the podium on the establishment’s shoulders in 2008.  They learned something.

That more than anything has the establishment MNGOP in a dither. Rightly or wrongly, they see many of the young, undisciplined and politically naïve Ron Paul movement members as anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-national defense and pro-legalization of drugs.

Just as Repya (and the Democrat pundits, and not a few others) mix up the party’s larger principles with the actions of its agents and administrators, they also confuse the party’s operations with the party’s messages.  The MNGOP – the people who work in the office at 525 Park, until they can find someplace cheaper, anyway – don’t really do policy.  That’s the job of the candidates.  Oh, in theory the party is supposed to make sure its candidates can follow its platform – but that document is as large as the Talmud, and contradicts itself in so many ways that few have even read it (and I’m going to be pushing this next two years to adopt the ten-point statement of principles from a few years back).

Which is a niggling little point that addresses a larger issue; I don’t suspect that the Paul crowd’s policy initiatives are the issue (barring the odd anti-semitic whacko that might slip through – and we know there are a few of them) that’d tar the party’s image and electability.  No, it’s the idea that that the entire leadership at the GOP could get tossed hither and yon and everyone would have to start over with the rebuilding process.

Repya:

If, as in 2008, Ron Paul fails to endorse the party’s nominee and his minions go home, the national GOP will be hard pressed to beat President Obama.

Well, there’s the good news.  Paul is probably not going to do that.  He’s retiring – but he wants to leave his movement to his son, Rand.  And Rand is working within the party, and is working to bring his dad’s views into the mainstream, an effort many of us appreciate.  Paul’s not going to mess that up; he’s most likely going to be a team player, this year.

Fingers crossed, naturally.

I don’t have a crystal ball to see how all this will end.

Nor, it seems, does he have any news to offer that dozens of other bloggers haven’t been pounding on for months and months.

But that’s not why the Strib printed this op ed.

But from where I’m sitting it does not look good for MNGOP, which won the state House and Senate in 2010 and whose lawmakers are all up for re-election.

And whose legislative caucuses – who actually won the 2010 elections (the MNGOP’s slate got swept), and which is feeling fairly confident outstate – have nothing to do (Koch notwithstanding) with any of the MNGOP’s flailing.

The DFL smells blood in the water and sees an opportunity to regain both legislative chambers. We are very possibly witnessing the death of MNGOP as we know it. If so, it will have died from within, not from outside causes.

And on one level – so what?  The MNGOP runs conventions, prints stuff, raises funds and occasionally does some messaging.  It’s only really heavily involved elections for governor, Senate and the constitutional offices, and only Senate is up this year, and I don’t think any of the Senate campaigns has ever counted on much help from the MNGOP.   The MNGOP has to rebuild.  It’s a fact.  They’ve got two years to do it (Senate race aside).  They’re working on it.

And on another level?  Who cares, even more.  The principles by which Republicans try to run and win elections – limited government, lower taxes, national and local security, upholding the family, individual liberty – live on no matter what happens to the party, and even no matter how those principles might get betrayed by its managers or legislators.  There should be accountability – and there has been.

Most of us know that.

And I’m going to guess that the Strib would never carry an op-ed saying anything of the sort.

Is the MNGOP in a sorry state?  Of course it is!  While I believe the new management is well on the way to bringing the GOP back to the right path, the party is on a fiscal diet that conservatism in Minnesota doesn’t need, facing the fiscal wealth of the unions and Alita Messinger, and with the Strib working as an unpaid PR flak for the DFL.  It’s a bad situation.

Let’s not pretend that any of this is news, though.  The only thing that’s newsworthy is that a Republican is telling it to the Strib.

They loooove that.

UPDATE: Although, mirabile dictu, they carried a letter to the editor that did!

The Fourth CD is one of the more challenging districts in which to be a Republican.

And this is a challenging year to be a Republican, at least if you’re expecting financial support from the state party (hint: there’s not going to be any).   The districts – congressional, state senate/house and county – are bracing for a year of no money from the state.

So the Fourth CD GOP, at its convention on the 21st, did the sensible thing; jacked up the admission price for delegates, and started charging for guests.  They also canvassed aggressively for additional donations.

One upside of this?  Usually the party raise $5,000 or so at its convention (part of which – $2K or so, if I recall correctly – has to go to cover the cost of rending the hall).

This year?  More like $11,000.

That’s good news!  The district’s coffers can get replenished!  The district’s candidates can look forward to some help!

What could possibly go wrong with that theory?

More later today (or, let’s be honest, maybe tomorrow…).

One of the most unsettling things you hear from Ron Paul supporters – some of them, anyway – is that if you don’t vote for Paul, you’re basically voting for someone just the same as Barack Obama.

As if Mitt Romney will carry on exactly as Obama has.

In the world of the purist – and many of the Paul supporters are exactly the same purists I shook my head at as I left the Libertarian Party – incrementalism, no matter how far and how fast it moves, is never enough.  It’s all, or it’s nothing; nothing less matters to way too many of them.   The fact that Tim Pawlenty was way way way more conservative than Arne Carlson or Dave Durenberger counts for nothing, since he wasn’t as conservative as the one we should have had.  The fact that Norm Coleman was a moderate is all that counts; not that he was the most conservative mayor Saint Paul had had in decades, and that he replaced a Senator who was much worse, and but for a wave of fraud or incompetence, could still be much better than who he replaced, rather than better than the one who replaced him.  

Mr. D, like me, notes that he agrees with Ron Paul probably 80% of the time – but is also a little concerned about their sense of absolutism as well as their rather incomplete sense of history:

Perhaps it’s just me, but my sense is that while the takeover now underway may be a tactical triumph, it holds the seeds of an epic failure. The GOP of the recent past was not the province of Arne Carlson or David Durenberger; those gentlemen of a different era have long been free to be the operational Democrats they always were. For all the problems of the party organization, it’s worth remembering that the GOP of the recent past is as much John Kline and Michele Bachmann as it is Tim Pawlenty and Norm Coleman and Ron Carey.

And there’s the rub; I’ve seen more than a few prominent Paul supporters say, with straight faces, that Bachmann and Kline aren’t sufficiently pure for a Paul supporter.

It will be very important that the Paul supporters understand that it will take everyone, even those they might ordinarily disdain, for there to be electoral success in the fall. Right now, there’s a lot of anger out there. That needs to change. Leadership of a political party means more than taking control and dictating terms. Leadership means building. And the first step will be to make sure those who were defeated are not disdained.

It also means you’ve done something no Big-L Libertarian has ever done; you have to learn “Politics”, which means, more or less, the art of compromise.

And to a purist, that’s a four-letter word.

I spent most of Saturday at the Fourth CD GOP convention.

The Ron Paul crowd swept into almost all of the leadership and delegate positions in the Fourth CD on Saturday; only Mike Boguszewski remains from the old executive committee.

The Paul crowd replaced everyone else, myself included, with their slate of candidates – for whom they voted with almost vapor-lock-tight discipline (and no, no sour grapes; I am not “District Secretary” material, and wanted to move over to Vice Chair for Media and Commiunications; I finished closer to the money than anyone who wasn’t on the “slate”, which I took as a mild compliment).

Now, I’ve met a lot of the district’s Ron Paul supporters.  They are, in a lot of ways, the type of people everyone’s been trying to attract to 4th CD GOP politics for years; young, idealistic, motivated.   Unlike 2008, most of delegates that had been forwarded from the House/Senate district conventions showed up for their third straight session of sitting in their delegate chairs until their butts went numb.

And that’s all to the good.

Less good?  Some of their leadership was motivated by fairly palpable anger over the “way they were treated in 2008”, when quite a few GOP activists gamed the system to keep the first wave of Paul supporters out of power.  To their political credit, they spent their four years organizing, and did a good job of it.

Less to their credit?  While anger is a good motivator, “anger at the inner workings of a political party” has, I’m going to guess, a short shelf life.   And at least in the Fourth CD, the anger was manifested by ballot.  The twitter stream during the convention indicated that at other districts, Paul supporters booed Dan Severson and Pete Hegseth, whose main transgression was “not being Kurt Bills”, the Paul crowd’s candidate for Senate, or refusing to stand to support John Kline at the 2nd District convention when he was re-endorsed.

Still, it made for an interesting day.  Rumors on the floor had it that there’d been negotiations going on to keep Jim Carson – who did an excellent job leading what was bound to be a long rebuilding effort, after having led Roger Chamberlain’s upset victory for the Senate two years ago – in place as district chair.  For one reason or another – rumors on the floor varied, but most of them seemed to come back to “we’re still pissed off about 2008” – the negotiations broke down and the Paul crowd voted their straight slate and replaced Carson with former one-term Roseville mayor John Kyslyczyn.

So now, with the exception of Boguszewski, we have an entirely new Fourth CD; in much of the district, the leadership is new from the “BPOU” (MNGOP talk for the lowest level of the organization, which might be a House district, a Senate district or a County) level on up.

So what do we have, other than the hardest-to-spell leadership team in all of Minnesota politics (Kyslyczyn / Boguszweski)?  It’d tempting to say “a big slate of leaders who’ve never won a political race outside the party”, but then outside of Kyslyczyn’s term as mayor and Carson’s management of Chamberlain, the old and new teams are both tied at zero, so we can call that a wash so far.

My big concern, now as then?  While the crowd of Paul supporters at the convention Saturday carefully replaced their “Ron Paul” posters and stickers with “Kurt Bills” goodies, and voted to endorse Tony Hernandez by a 190-5-5 margin (after running a skillful campaign to win support from most of the establishment and Paul crowds), I have yet to hear a lot of support for, or even especially much awareness of, races farther down ticket or, more importantly, for candidates who get endorsed even if they’re not on the Paul slate.

Now, I know that there are a lot of good, committed people among the Paul crowd who are committed to using their positions in the GOP to work for the party, not just a candidate or two.

But I get a different impression from some of their leadership.  Ronald Reagan once said that if someone agrees with you 70% of the time, it doesn’t make them 30% your enemy.

And from some of the Paul crowd’s leadership, I do get the impression that, whether motivated by single-candidate zeal or roiling anger over 2008 or one of the mind-boggling number of byzantine interpersonal pissing matches that seems to motivate so much of CD4 GOP politics no matter who the nominee or the cause celebre or what the defining issue is, the Paul crowd’s leadership, in the district and beyond, sees “70% friends” as “30% enemies”.

About a month ago, I issued a challenge to the Paul supporters in the 4th CD.  Some Paul supporters complimented me on the piece.  Some took umbrage.  At least one of the Paul crowd’s “leadership” took out after me pretty aggressively over the article, denouncing me as Not A Libertarian At All in that Maoist-y way people adopt when they’re higher on political zeal than common sense.

But now he, and all of you in the Paul crowd, are the establishment, and I don’t have to mince words like some sort of party officer anymore.

Ron Paul’s not going to get nominated.  There is not a chance in hell he’s going to even get past the first ballot.  You fought the fight – successfully, here in Minnesota – but in August your national delegates will announce their votes, and the whole effort will wash down history’s drainpipe, and Paul will retire from Congress, and life’ll move on.

But there’s an opportunity to make a statement that’d be even bigger, at least here in Minnesota.

I’ll restate my challenge; exert some of that newfound power and influence down ticket from Paul and Bills; you have a golden opportunity to use your numbers and energy and organization to push Tony Hernandez to an upset victory over Betty McCollum.  There hasn’t been a better  opportunity to do that since the late Dennis Newinski got within six points back in 2000; between redistricting, anger in Stillwater over McCollum’s opposition to the new Stillwater Bridge, Obama’s anti-coattails, and the fact that most of Saint Paul is much worse off now than it was four years ago, this will be as good a chance as we get until 2020.

The chance, in short, is to do the unthinkable; to flip the unflippable Fourth.

Of course, for all your district-flipping numbers, you can’t do it alone.  Obviously, either could the former leadership.

It’ll be a brutally tough job to do even if we do all pull together.

And I know most of your hearts are in the right place.  But, Paul supporters, I’d like you to honestly ask yourself; does your leadership see the rest of the GOP as a bunch of 30% enemies?

Because if they do…I was going to say, “that road leads to Palookaville”. But 4th CD Republican politics has only rarely been anything but Palookaville for as long as anyone can remember.

Now there would be some change we could believe in.

I’ve written about it a slew of times; I grew up in a Democrat household.  I became a conservative in college (perhaps the only person in recent western civilization to have been converted to conservatism by an English professor).  I left the GOP in 1995, disgusted by the GOP caving in on the 1994 Cxrime Bill and other Clinton-era fripperies. I became a big-L LIbertarian.

I stayed in the party for four years.  I left because I realized that while the LIbertarian Party believed in an absolutely purest form of what I believed in, I also figured out that if what I believed in fell in a forest and an infinitesmal minority heard it, it’d never matter.

So I went back to the GOP.  I figured I’d sully my pristine principles a little, and have a shot at getting the rest of my principles – as many as possible –  at least a hypotehtical shot of getting passed into law.  I would do my little bit to fight for the conservative, Reaganesque soul of the GOP.   I was one of the little group of libertarian-conservatives, fiscalcons and other conservatives tthat were .

I didn’t get everything I wanted.  But I – we – got a lot; a GOP that fumigated itself of the miasma of Arne Carlson, fought for limiting the size of government and, to an extent that Minnesota had not seen in decades, succeeded; we inviegled Tim Pawlenty to move to the right to stave off a spirited challenge from oour guy, Brian Sullivan; we exacted a No New Taxes pledge from Pawlenty, and largely got him to stick to it, even when he was outnumbered two chambers to zero.

Not a bad decade, all in all.  Perfect?  No – but way better than it would have been otherwise.

The Minnesota GOP is in the middle of…well,l not an “epic battle for its soul”, really.  A tug of war, really – between the people who’ve been running the party since about 2002, whoever they are, and the “Ron Paul crowd”.  It’s a tug of war with some fairly exposed emotions; in 2008, many “establishment” Republicans fought very hard to exclude the Paul contingent from the conventions, from BPOU level all the way up to the state convo.  And on their site, not a few Paul supporters (sometimes called, with varying degrees of affection, “Paulbots” due to the personality cult-like attitude of some Paul supporters, including some pretty notable ones) advanced some ideas that traditional conservatives found anathemic; Libertarians are a lot more “live and let live” on social issues like abortion and gay marriage than traditional conservatives.  There was bound to be some conflict – and there was.

The Paul crowd has bounced back this year and made a huge impact on the MNGOP, taking most of the delegate and many of the executive seats in the Congressional District conventions.  And it’s causing all sorts of people to ask questions.

One of them is “Average Andy”, a guy I met on Twitter, a tweep and blogger with a background not too far different than mine, at least up until 1998ish or so.  Andy, asks:

I have a serious question for my Republican friends… I have been given the riot act from countless Republicans about my views on Presidential candidates. I’ve been told that I MUST vote Republican for a whole host of reasons. I may not like the candidate, but the Democrat will always be worse. I’ve never been much of a pragmatist in elections, and these conversations drive me as crazy as my vote drives these Republicans crazy, if not more.

On the one hand – by all means vote your conscience.

On the other hand, that’s one of the problems that many of the Republilcan activists are genuinely, and legitimately, upset about; the idea the that party many of us worked very, very hard for is being taken over, for now, by people who will – as Andy admits he himself did – vote for a third party candidate if “his” Republican doesn’t get nominated, and who can say “there’s no difference between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama” with a straight face,

It’s just not true.  Romney is a northeastern conservative, which means he’s pro-business, pro-law-and-order, and more comfortable with big governnment than a lot of us Western Conservatives.  And the knock-down drag-primary has helped push him to the right, to surmount the challenges from more conservative candidates, and to try to win over people who really wanted Santorum, Gingrich, Cain, Perry – even Ron Paul.

That’s all to the good.

Now – not a few Paul supporters (and yes, Santorum and Gingrich supporters, all of whom should know better) have claimed they’ll sit out the presidential election (or vote for some fringe-right third-party, which is the same thing), if not the whole race.  They think – wrongly – that a Romney administration will be the same as an Obama one.

More on that later.

But Andy – who avers that he followed up his support for Paul in the 2008 race by voting Constitution Party – does in fact show the flip side of that coin.

Despite the way my fellow Ron Paul supporters were treated in 2008, I repeated the process in 2010 in order to be a part of selecting a candidate for Governor. I didn’t know the candidates well, as I tend not to follow state politics nearly as closely as I follow national politics. However, I had made a lot of connections two years prior in the process and befriended a lot of people who were out in 2008 to support Ron Paul…To a man, they were all behind Tom Emmer, and I threw my support behind Emmer. Despite the fact that he lost, I have no regrets.

And the fact is that for all of the concern about among traditional Republicans that Paul supporters were single-candidate one-trick ponies, many of the mainstays of the Emmer campaign, and many people who have and are invaluable to the GOP today, are people who came to party politics in 2008 via Paul, and 2009 via the Tea Party.

2012 rolled around and I got into the mix again. I was unhappy with my experience four years prior, and was tempted to forget the whole thing, but ultimately decided to give my fellow Republicans another shot. I had made many connections in 2008, and met a lot of people. Most of which were friendly toward me and seemed happy to have me in the process. However, when my support for Ron Paul would come up in conversation, defensive walls would immediately go up. There were, and are, strong stereotypes of Ron Paul supporters, many of which are unfair – based on a very small minority of fellow Paul supporters.

Andy’s right – see my previous graf – and also a bit dismissive of some of the concerns some of the “establishment” have.

An awful lot of Paul supporters don’t thnk there’s a significant difference between “establishment” Republicans and Democrats.

Not a few fairly significant Paul supporters in the MNGOP also advance some views that “regular” Republicans find noxious; I’ve run into Holocaust deniers and some fairly noxious anti-Semites.  Of course they’re not the majority of the movement – but there are enough of them, and they are prominent enough, that it gets people a little standoffish.

A few significant Paul supporters – one in particular – have been carrying out witch hunts attacking Republicans they don’t consider acceptably and unquestioningly adoring enough  of Ron Paul and every single point of his platform.  OK, them I can handle myself – but you might wanna have a word with ’em.  Because there are a lot of you – but not enough to win any offices by yourself.

More commonly?   Many who’ve been involved with the party have tallked with many in the current wave of Paul supporters at the BPOU level, and found many – by no means all – of them to be focused almost exclusively on the Presidential election.  Which is fine – it’s important, and it’s one of the things you do when you’re involved in the party endorsement process.  But we’ve noticed less interest and concern in the activities that are the blocking and tackling of Congressional District politics – getting Republicans elected to Congress – to say nothing of the BPOU level (doing the door-knocking and phone-calling and grunt work that gets State Legislators and Senators elected).  It’s why I wrote my “Open Letter To Ron Paul supporters in CD4” a few weeks back; on the off chance that Ron Paul doesn’t get the nomination, it’d be great to see that wave of enthusiasm turn out to support whomever gets nominated to run for Senate, for Congress, and for the State Legislature – by doing what a political party does, even if one doesn’t have absolute control over it.  By supporting people that you don’t agree with 1000%, based on the ideal that someone you agree with 70% of the time is not your 30% enemy, but your 70% ally.

The reaction to that post, by the way, was just about the most interesting of any post I’ve ever written.  I got a lot of compliments – from traditional Republicans and not a few Paul supporters – and a little bit of hate mail as well.

Some Paul supporters objected to my use of the word “Paulbot”.  Enh.  I didn’t invent the term.  There was no offense intended, but life’s tough, and politics ain’t beanbag, and wear a freaking helmet.  The Dems will call you much, much worse (once they stop seeing you as wedges to undercut the GOP, like their revenge for that whole “Green Party” thing, anyway).

Others took offense that I’d presume they won’t turn out to help downticket races.  Well, good.  The whole article was a challenge.  I’d be more than happy to have the entire inference disproved in spades.  I’ll apologize, in public and on the air, at Tony Hernandez’ victory party.  Or Carlos Conway’s.  Hell, both.

To put it more bluntly; I’ll look forward to seeing the “establishment’s” conventional wisdom about the Paul contingent proven wrong.  Indeed, I’ll do my level best to help them do it.

If you, GOPer, want me to go back to staying out of your way, and voting Constitution Party for President, I will be happy to do so. If you want me to stay involved in the process, and put in the work to make my voice heard in 2014 when we’re looking for a candidate to unseat Mark Dayton, I will be happy to do so. What I am not happy to do is to get involved, but echo your voice. If my role in the GOP is to be a yes-man, check in with you on which candidates to support and what work to do for your precious party, count me out!

Excellent!  And given that Paul supporters have taken wide control of much of the BPOU and CD apparatus around the state, you’re probably in a good position to call some of those shots.  But be that as it may, I’m more than willing to hash out the differences face to face, rather than through parliamentary skullduggery (which I opposed, then and now).

In return?  Please stop pretending that any candidate that isn’t 100% yours is in no way different from the evil we’re all hypothetically fighting against – at least not without showing how that’s true, and being open to the idea that it’s to some degree or another false.  There are a lot of us in the GOP are small-l libertarians who don’t care for Ron Paul, but have high hopes for his son.  Have some respect for the good work that came before you – because plenty did, in fact, come before you.

And learn to get along with some cognitive dissonance.  When I came back to the GOP as a libertarian conservative, I ran into not a few single-issue pro-life voters who coudln’t understand why I wanted to pass concealed carry reform or stop subsidizing stadiums.  They took convincing.  They, in turn, and to work to convince me on a few things.  Everyone learned.

Deal?

The GOP – especially in the 4th and 5th CDs – needs a ton of help; having the Paul contingent turn some of that energy toward winning that race would bury a lot of hatchets.

So Santorum is out.

I caucused for Santorum two months ago – mostly, as I noted at the time, to try to use my one little vote to drive the presumptive front-runner, Romney, to the right.  I’ve got nothing against Santorum, but he’s not my ideal candidate.

Neither were any of the other candidates we’ve been through over this past few months – Huntsman, Johnson, Cain, Perry, Pawlenty, Bachmann, Paul, Gingrich, Santorum or Romney.  None of them were perfect, by the litmus tests that drive the all-important “Mitch Berg” vote; every one of them had something that kept me from jumping onto the bandwagon.

But let’s be clear – every single one of them would have been a better President than Barack Obama.  Even if they had a stroke.

My various Newt and Paul supporter friends have been bending my hear with talk of “principle” when it comes to picking the nominee – libertarian princples embodied by Paul, conservative principles re Gingrich, all juxtaposed with Romney’s purported lack of them.

Notwithstanding the idea that a committed Mormon lacks “princples”, I have to say I agree with both of ’em; princples are a good thing and, at some level, if you really have princples, they are non-negotiable.

But the one ultimate non-negotiable principle – at least as re my politics as opposed to my theology, and yes, I draw a wide black line between the two – is “doing what’s right for America”.

And so even though Mitt Romney isn’t the perfect conservative, he’s better than Obama.  Not just a little better, but much much much better.  Go ahead, Ronulans – make my day, argue with me about whether they are or are not the same thing.  They are not.

And so I’m going to pull like hell for the imperfect guy we (apparently) got, and reserve a special circle in rhetorical hell for those who say they’ll sit this election out because “their guy” didn’t get the nod.

Making America worth saving is the real principle here.

To: Ron Paul Supporters, especially in the 4th Congresisonal District
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Your Shot At Making A Real Difference

All,

Some of you know me.  I’m Mitch Berg.  And long before I had a blog, and even longer before I hosted a talk show, and longer-still before I got heavily involved in “establishment” party politics, I was a Libertarian, with a big “L”:.  I even ran for office as a big-“L” Libertarian  – and won a moral, if not literal, victory.

I support liberty.  I also support being in a position to actually affect policy, rather than being an eternal protest-voter.  All of your chanting and zeal witthin the GOP are of no value – zero, nada, zilch – if you don’t have the ability to actually affect policy in the world outside the party.  And while having your guy win the presidency would do that, you also need to push candidates with your worldview into the US House and Senate, Governors and state constitutional offices, state Legislators and Senators, the county commission, city hall, the school board – the stuff you actually have to win if you want the government to, y’know, audit the Fed and stuff.

Which is why I endorsed Paul – Rand Paul, that is – last winter.  Libertarian purism, like any kind of purism, is a fun self-indulgence – and like any self-indulgence, it will have no affect on society around you.

So I have no beef with libertarianism.  I don’t even have so much a beef with Ron Paul, either.  I approve of many of the issues he runs on.  The stuff he wrote 30 years ago is a big problem – don’t kid yourself.  But I want to support him, or at least what he stands for.

The problem, I’m sorry to say, is many of you, his supporters.  Part of it is that so many of you do in fact propose using the power of the executive branch in a way not a lot different than liberals propose using the judicial branch – as a cudgel.

But the bigger part is that, for too many of you, Ron Paul is a personality cult.  I’ve run into too many Paul supporters who support Paul, but can barely articulate what he stands for; indeed, I do a better job of speaking for what Paul believes than they do.

Worse?  Just like four years ago, you flooded GOP precinct caucuses, and are in the process of flooding the BPOU Conventions, and trying to push your delegates on to the CD, State and (you hope) National conventions.  And that’s fine; that’s how the process works.

What’s “worse” is that, like four years ago, so very very very very very many of you will never be seen again after your next round of conventions.  You’ll show up, do your bit for Ron Paul – but not the GOP – and disappear, likely not to be seen again.  There are some exceptions – but they are rare.  Your commitment is to Ron Paul, not to the GOP, even in the context of “Changing the party into a more-libertarian institution in the long term” – with which I’d be completely on board.

And so those of us who have committed to the party – some of you call us “the establishment”, which makes me laugh, since I’ve been a libertarian insurgent in the party for 12 years now, and being “the establishment” means “campaign after campaign of door-knocking, phone-calling and lit-dropping – do feel a bit of resentment, like when you cook a big dinner and some stranger eats the whole thing and doesn’t even say thanks.

Anyway, I’m not here to bag on all you Ronulans.  I’m here, actually, to propose a win-win solution; you get to push liberty, the GOP gets to make inroads in the arena of actually changing policy in a meaningful way.

We have a big opportunity in the Fourth Congressional District.  I’ll take a moment to remind you what the Fourth CD is, since a disturbing number of you Paul supporters have little concept of politics down-ticket from the Presidency.  It’s Betty McCollum’s Congressional District:

It’s been controlled by big-government stooges from the DFL for over sixty years now.

But the latest round of redistricting made it a lot more competitive.  It used to be pretty much Saint Paul – a 70-30 statist-DFL district.  But redistricting added in a bunch of the more-conservative, more liberty-friendly East Metro, including thousands of people who moved to Lake Elmo, Woodbury, Stillwater and Afton to get away from the DFL and the rot they bring.

Now, Tony Hernandez is currently the candidate running for the GOP nomination in the 4th CD.  I’ve interviewed him a couple of times – and the language he uses is the kind of thing that should make you Paul supporters (and me) happy to support him.  Big on liberty, shrinking government – most of the Ron Paul elevator pitch is in there.   Before redistricting, he might have been looking at a 65-35 campaign, if he was lucky.

Now?  The odds are not nearly so quixotic.  With a little luck and a ton of work, it’s doable.

So here’s the deal, Paul supporters; if all of you turn out between now and the election with as much enthusiasm and whiz and vinegar in support of Tony Hernandez – who likely will get nominated, as opposed to Paul – and work your asses off alongside all us “establishment” Republicans?  We might just pull off a miracle.

No, bigger than that.

And not just a miracle in terms of sending Betty McCollum back to work as a receptionist at Alliance for a Better Minnesota; not just a miracle in upending sixty years of statist big-government representation in the 4th CD.

It’ll be a miracle in terms that matter much more, both to you Paul supporters and to the GOP; you’ll have done some real, palpable good in bringing your beliefs to bear in a way that can actually affect policy.

If you’re interested in helping out?  I’ll see you at the conventions.  We’ll have a great time. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and we’ll have fun doing it.

If you’re not? If you’re one of those dolts who believes that by staying home on election day because your candidate didn’t get nominated you actually “send a message” anyone will care about?  It’s not true, by the way – politics, especially at the grassroots level, reflects the will of those who show up.  Not just once, mind you, but every month, every election.  Anyway – yeah, I’ll be working against you.  Totally.

Whaddya say?

That is all.

I went to my first Fourth Congressional District GOP meeting since the redistricting last night.

We got two bits of news:

1. We’re down to one candidate to replace Betty McCollum.  With the withdrawal of Dan Flood, Tony Hernandez is the guy with the hat in the ring.  There’s about a month for someone to jump in.
2. With the addition of all that new territory between the old Fourth and the Saint Croix – Stillwater, Woodbury, Dellwood, Lake Elmo and Afton – most of which skew at least slightly GOP, the Fourth has gone from a 65-35 DFL district (sometimes more like 70-30) to a 60-40 DFL district.

So there’s two bits of good news there.

The Good Candidate: I’ve known Tony Hernandez for a couple of years.  He ran against Dick Cohen in SD…er, 64, right?  Anyway, in 2010, Hernandez ran against Cohen’s sinecure.  And like all Republicans in the city, he got trounced.  But – he was the only Republican in the whole city to get a precinct inside twenty points, and when you’re a Saint Paul Republican, you look for whatever scrap of good news you can find.  When we heard the announcements last night that it was down to Tony, the committee-person next to me said “Hernandez is going to have to work“.   That, naturally, goes without saying.  It’s going to take a superhuman effort.

Fortunately…

The Numbers Are A Tad Less Superhuman: 60-40 is daunting indeed.  But it’s a lot less daunting than 70-30.  The latter is more than 2:1, which in political terms might as well be 50:1.  Betting on 3:2 odds is a whole different critter.

I mean, it’s still  a long shot.  But the Fourth now has the same numbers as the Eighth had two years ago.

Back after Cravaack won, I noted the keys to his victory; lots of hard work, sure – the guy logged a jillion miles, and he’s still doing it.  But hard work without focus is just wasted energy.  Cravaack had good staff – and he ran his district campaign like a military operation, with a chain of command breaking up the district and the work to be done into chunks which an individual (with a day job and a family who was also working their ass off to volunteer) could manage.  And they managed it.

I joked at the time that what the GOP needed was eight former Navy Chief Petty Officers (Army master sergeants, Marine gunnies or Air Force technical sergeants, naturally, would work too), one in each CD – not so much to run, but to manage the campaigns.

And so I was excited to see Flood – a retired Navy senior chief – throwing his hat in the ring.  It’s always fun when your quips come to life.

But Flood’s back out (although it’d be great to have a good CPO working on the campaign, if for no other reason than he could no doubt get things ship-shape, as it were), and unless someone else jumps in and exhibits some fund-raising and organizing mojo very fast, Martinez could be the guy.

And he’s gonna have to work.  And so will all the rest of us.

And that work looks a lot less hopeless now than it did two years ago.

Because while a 60:40 margin is a pretty comfortable one for a good politician…

Betty McCollum is not a good politician.  She is a ventriloquist’s dummy for the various Metro special interests.  She isn’t a representative; she a stenographer and lever-puller for the MFT/AFSCME/MAPE/SEIU/Common Cause and the rest of the DFL’s rouge gallery.  She doesn’t have any beliefs she’s not instructed to have.  She’s overmatched in a debate with her own reflection.  Hearing her talk is like listening to someone reading a list of chanting points and ignoring the punctuation (“The central corridor will bring a lot of new jobs and those are infrastructure jobs and we also support the right to choose and we get behind working families and don’t you know working families need help and that’s why President Obama supports targeted tax cuts and healthcare is a right…” isn’t a direct quote, but if you’ve heard McCollum speak, admit it, you’re laughing now, aren’t you?)

So there you go, Fourth District.  The impossible just got a lot more do-able.

The GOP primary becomes a Möbius strip.

Give conventional wisdom its due – sometimes it’s right.  The political meme entering tonight cast the GOP contest with Mitt Romney as the tenuous front-runner, Rick Santorum as the undisciplined and underfunded challenger, Newt Gingrich as the long-shot and Ron Paul as the wacky neighbor next door.  10 states and 400+ delegates later?

It’s exactly the same.

So what can we take away as Super Tuesday becomes Groggy Wednesday Morning?

• The Song Remains the Same:  Nothing seemingly can break the GOP deadlock as Romney remains a front-runner who has to outspend his competition 6-to-1 in order to eek out a victory and loses when “only” outspending his rivals by smaller margins.  Not that Santorum or Gingrich ought to be bragging.  The Icarus primary of the Not-Romneys has seen both candidate’s wings melt under the media spotlight and while Santorum looks to have at least 3 wins and a “draw” in his Ohio loss, he did nothing on Tuesday to claim the mantle of front-runner.  Ohio’s margin might make it harder for Romney to raise money, but his purse strings stretch far further than Santorum or Gingrich despite an uptick post Feb 7th.
• Hare Apparent:  Newt Gingrich might consider himself the “tortoise” of the primary race, but as we pass the 550 mark in delegates, all the candidates need to start running like bunnies.  Say what you will of Romney’s inability to close out the nomination, his delegate accumulation has been far more tortoise-like, making it almost statistically impossible for Santorum to win enough delegates (to say nothing of Newt).  And what exactly is going to change that?
• Southbound & Down:  The primary calender might – might – change things.  From March 10th to the 17th, the race goes into territory that should be less friendly to Romney.  Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi and Missouri all vote in that 7 day timespan and represent perhaps Rick Santorum’s last best gasp to alter the trajectory of the campaign.  The problem is that Gingrich remains in the race and is pursuing a southern strategy while Romney is carpetbombing airwaves and mailboxes.  With a still-divided field, Romney doesn’t need to win most of these states.  Instead, he can focus his resources on one or two and hope that Hawaii, voting during this period as well, will keep him racking up just enough delegates and primary wins to look the part of a front-runner.  That element of the contest looks the most likely.  Why?
• Dear God, Let It End:  The media & the punditry have become bored.  And frankly, more than a few voters too.  After 20 debates (with one more, in theory, on March 19th) and countless hours of navel-gazing political spin, there simply isn’t much left to say about any of the remaining candidates.  Barring a completely undiscovered past comment or present gaffe, there isn’t anything likely to arise to change most voters impressions of the field.  And if nothing changes, Mitt Romney becomes the GOP nominee probably around April 24th as 231 delegates will be up for grabs in winner-take-all East coast states.  Not even Gingrich throwing his pledged delegates behind Santorum now necessarily stops that.  So, at least in the minds of the punditry, why wait another month-and-a-half to declare a winner?
• The Animatronics Need Further Testing:  Romney’s robotic Boston speech tonight represented the former Governor at his awkward, halting worst.  Romney stays on message, like a T-1000 with a target in its sights, but still hasn’t had that “I now know why humans cry” moment in relating to the electorate.  Romney will never be able to fully relate to average voters, but then again his general election opponent isn’t exactly a beer and waffles man himself (despite attempts at photo ops to the contrary).  Romney can’t afford to have many more George Bush Sr. “price of milk” moments (although that moment was strongly overhyped as a sign that Bush was out of touch).  And if the price of a stronger nominee is several more months of media boredom – snooze away.

Can you feel the Romnentum?  Me neither.

Following his wins in Michigan, Arizona, Maine & Wyoming, Mitt Romney has at least regained the aura of a front-runner and silenced the punditry’s Opium dreams of a contested convention, for now.  But with Tuesday the grandest night of the GOP presidential contest calendar (466 delegates are up for grabs; kinda…let’s not talk about unpledged caucuses for a moment), the chance for the race to be changed awaits voters in 10 states.

• Ohio (primary):  The center stage of this delegate-rich Mardi Gras night, Ohio is seen not just as the fulcrum on which the outcome of the race pivots, but also the competing narratives of the two major candidates.  The meme of Mitt Romney’s aloofness from white working class voters has been certainly been strengthened by the candidate’s repeated gaffes on his wealth, yet Romney and Santorum tied among voters without secondary education.  Santorum’s choosing of Michigan as his challenging ground was due entirely to the supposed demographic resemblance to the blue-collar communities that Santorum successfully rallied to win his congressional and Senate seats.  Fitting neatly into the Rust Belt, Ohio should be attractive Santorum territory.  And by RCP averages, it is as Santorum leads there by 8.3%.  But who needs Ohio more?  Karl Rove argues that Santorum needs the state to even survive politically while Romney can afford at least a narrow loss.  That may be true from a delegate standpoint (all of Santorum’s wins have been from unpledged delegate states), but determining who truly needs the headlines of a Ohio victory is easier to see by looking around at the rest of the March 6th primary states.
• Oklahoma (primary):  The raging wheat must sure smell sweat to Santorum who holds a 43%-22% lead over Gingrich in the state as Romney only manages 18%.  Santorum’s team has identified Oklahoma as one of his “must win” states in addition to Ohio and…
• Tennessee (primary):  Santorum is poised for a crushing victory here, holding an RCP average of 19.5% over Romney.  In both cases, even if Santorum’s numbers drop, he’s still positioned to win comfortably and dent the meme that he can only win caucus states.  Does Santorum run the risk of looking too much like a regional candidate (don’t be surprised for the media to suddenly declare Oklahoma a classic “southern” state)?  Perhaps, if he can’t win another state on Super Tuesday.
• Alaska, North Dakota & Idaho (caucuses):  Well, so much for that Santorum concern.  All three are likely to fall into Santorum’s camp, despite Romney rolling out the lion’s share of party endorsements in North Dakota (because that worked so well in Minnesota).  There isn’t reliable polling on any of these three states, and even if there was, caucus polling is one step short of political alchemy.  The only real concern Santorum should have is whether the media will treat victories in these states as significant.  Santorum’s poised to win the most states on Super Tuesday, but not necessarily the most delegates.  Which becomes the headline Wednesday morning?  Because Romney isn’t going home empty-handed.
• Virginia (primary):  Yes, Virginia, there is a primary on Super Tuesday.  It lives in the hearts of all Republican activists, because frankly, there isn’t much of a contest.  It’s Romney versus Paul, and since Paul has about as much of a chance of winning a state as attacking Romney in a debate, Romney’s winning in a walk.  Unfortunately for Mitt, that’s exactly how the press will treat his win.
• Massachusetts (primary):  A contest in Romney’s actual home state isn’t going to be as close as Michigan.  As of the last poll, Romney holds 63% of the vote.  If his night doesn’t go well, fully except Team Romney to crow about the margin – and that the media won’t care.
• Vermont (primary):  At last, a vote Romney is expected to win that isn’t either A) missing one or more of his opponents or B) a state that he’s declared residency in at some point.  Unfortunately, that state is Vermont and even more unfortunately, Romney only holds a 7% lead.  That was at the height of Santorumania and Rick isn’t making a serious bid here, meaning Romney is likely to win by more.
• Georgia (primary):  Somewhat oddly, the biggest delegate prize of the night (76 in all) has among the least amount of attention of the larger Super Tuesday states.  That’s of course because most pundits have assumed that Newt Gingrich will win despite his RCP average of 9% (created by two polls that show him with double-digit leads against two that show a neck-and-neck race).  The night could very well end with Gingrich holding the second-most pledged delegates while being discussed as an afterthought.  Gingrich has hinged his campaign on a southern strategy, despite his relative lack of southern cultural cues.  Newt won’t driven out of the race if he only wins Georgia, believing that victories in upcoming Alabama and Mississippi are not only possible, but will change the trajectory of the race.  Instead, he’ll likely cost Santorum several states he could have won post Tuesday, muddling the non-Romney waters.

So who needs Ohio more?  The answer would seem to be Romney.  Losing 6 of 10 states on Super Tuesday isn’t the performance of a front-runner.  Losing 7 of 10, including a major November bellweather, isn’t even the campaign of a significant challenger.

Barack Obama thinks women are idiots.

Time will tell if he’s got a point.

Here’s the deal:  Obama’s poll numbers aren’t good.  Oh, the media is doing its best to spin it (with measures that seem desperate and slapdash), but the economy is still miserable (especially if you’re not too big to fail), the unemployment rate is “Down” to where the Administration said it wouldn’t go above if we passed Porkulus, and that’s through the grace of the fact that no Mullah in Iran has yet walked to the shore at the Strait of Hormuz and skipped a rock across the water, sending tankers scurrying for cover and pushing oil over $200 a barrel.  Yet.  And even so, this is the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression – largely because of Obama’s policies.

People have been cooling on “The One” pretty much since inauguration day.

And The One needs to get that enthusiasm going again.

And so what better to take peoples’ minds off their miseries and rile the (female) troops?

“Republicans want to take away your contraceptives!”

Notwithstanding the fact that, as Romney noted in December when George Stephanopoulos incongruously broached the subject in a debate, the subject has never come up in GOP circles.  Period.  It’s a non-issue to the GOP.

No matter.  The media is in lock-step behind the Administration’s meme that the GOP wants to outlaw contraception.  The theatrical “walk-out” of Democrats from Darrel Issa’s hearings was a classic bit of Goebbelsian theatre; while the useful idiots in the media (in this case, the gleefully dim Amanda Terkel at Huffpo) called the hearings “about contraception” they were in fact hearings on the constitutionality of mandating that religious groups offer contraception against their beliefs.

Catch that?  The Democrats don’t even need to hijack Republicans’ meetings themselves.  The mainstream media will do it for them, after the fact.

At any rate, that’s Obama’s message to female voters:  “Never mind the economy; never mind the unemployment rate; never mind the fiscal catastrophe waiting for you, your kids, and their kids; and above all, don’t believe your lying ears when the GOP mentions that they’ve never said word one about taking anyone’s contraceptives away.  Look!  Boogeyman!”

Women, in Barack Obama’s world, are not just dim little dolts; they seem to think that women are intellectual slaves to their reproductive systems.

There apparently are a lot of Republicans out there who aren’t ready to accept Mitt Romney as “inevitable” just yet.  Santorum won Minnesota, and won pretty big.

The PiPress:

Santorum’s victory in Minnesota, combined with a win in the nonbinding Missouri primary and another win in Colorado’s caucuses, is almost certain to prolong the Republican nominating contest and make the former Pennsylvania senator, not Gingrich, the conservative alternative to the more moderate Romney.

Speaking in Missouri, Santorum said the votes there and in Minnesota “were heard loud and louder all across this country.”

The Minnesota results marked a reversal for Gingrich, who had been Romney’s strongest challenger.

Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley told the Pioneer Press his candidate’s strong showing makes him the biggest threat on Romney’s right.

Conservatism’s not rolling over and playing dead.

If Romney wants this nomination – or spare himself and the party quite a few Maalox moments on the way – he’s gotta step up his conservative game.

Chopping Obamacare would be a great start.

I agree with what Mitt Romney (I think – maybe it was Huntsman) said in one of the opening GOP candidate debates; any of the people on the stage, then and now would do a better job of rebuilding this country than Barack Obama.

Including Romney.

I’m not thrilled with Romney; I think the Gingrich camp’s attacks have verged on the hysterical, and swerved way too far into Alinsky for my taste; Romney certainly did the same in return.  And I’ll allow that there’s some context to his very “moderate” record in Massachusetts; a legislature that verged on Maoist, a state that was so far to the left that John Huntsman would have looked like Gengis Khan.  Still, that’s what we have to go by – that, and his impressive business and executive record.

And Ron Paul?  I used to be a Big-L Libertarian.   And Ron Paul certainly has uncovered the wellspring of inner libertarians – big and small “L” – that I always knew was out there.  I’d love it if Ron Paul were both a viable candidate and a credible choice for President.  I sincerely hope Rand Paul becomes both in the next four to eight years.

But tonight I’m going to caucus for Rick Santorum.  Not because I think he’s necessarily the best candidate – his record on spending and economic issues is adequate-to-good; he’s most famous as a social con, and his credentials there are truly impeccable, but it’s not my turf.

But I’m doing it mainly because if Mitt Romney really is “inevitable”, at least he’s going to know at least one GOP activist – and every one I can convince to follow suit – isn’t handing over his support merely because Mitt’s got a “GOP” behind his name.

Promise to repeal Obamacare?  Start listing cabinet departments that’ll be cut?  In addition to the parts of the Romney platform that do make conservative sense (and there are parts)?  We can talk business.

But for now?  Romney’s not inevitable with me.  Not yet.

Gallupp rreleased its final digest of presidential approval numbers.

And throughout 2011, the news was bad for Obama.  His net approval was only above 50% in ten states plus DC, according to Gallup:

In 10 states plus the District of Columbia, a majority of residents approved of the job Barack Obama was doing as president last year, according to aggregated data from 2011. His greatest support came from District of Columbia, Maryland, and Hawaii residents, while Utah and Idaho residents gave him his lowest levels of support — below 30%.

Here are the state-by-state numbers.

Now, let’s remember it’s still early in the year, and that the Democrat noise machine and media (pardon the redundancy) willl eke out some more points for The One, and that this is an aggregate approval number, not a candidate-vs-candidate number.

And memes like “No president has ever (gotten some number or another) and still won the election” tend to be true until they’re not.

But if you accept the meme that no President with popularity below 50% has ever won re-election, and you apply that number state-by-state, it looks rought for The One, according to Conn Carroll at the WashEx:

Carroll (with emphasis added):

Gallup released their annual state-by-state presidential approval numbers yesterday, and the results should have 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue very worried. If President Obama carries only those states where he had a net positive approval rating in 2011 (e.g. Michigan where he is up 48 percent to 44 percent), Obama would lose the 2012 election to the Republican nominee 323 electoral votes to 215.

Again, that’s just popularity numbers based on the old “50%” meme.  Maybe it sticks,  maybe it doesn’t.

But bit by bit, I think this election might be doable – if we Real Americans don’t shoot ourselves in the foot.

This particular chanting point has been making the rounds this week – a “Public Policy Polling” (PPP) survey appears to show that Mark Dayton is dreamily popular, and the people just can’t stand the GOP-run legislature.

It’s made the rounds of most of the mainstream media, the leftyblogs, and the lowest of the bunch, the  City Pages.  I figured I’d pick on Dave Mindeman at mnpACTttp and his take on it because unlike way too many Twin Cities leftybloggers, he’s articulate, recites the chanting point pretty much verbatim, and is otherwise not an idiot.

Mark Dayton’s numbers have improved since PPP last polled Minnesota in May and he’s one of the most popular Governors in the country.

Now, the numbers would seem to bear that statement out.  Let’s unpack them before we move on.

In observing PPP polls over the past couple of cycles, their results seem to consistently fall a little to the left of how Minnesota reality eventually shakes out.  Not in an egregions-to-the-point-of-fraud kind of way, like the Humphrey Institute or Strib Minnesota polls, but it’s noticeable.

I also think – and this is a theory, not something I’m stating as fact, but a decade of observation has led a lot of us on the right to wonder if there’s something to it – that liberals are much more prone to answer polls, especially in between election cycles.

Let’s ignore both of those for the moment.  Let’s talk about the surface indicators for this polling:

A little belated birthday present for Mark. Dayton has an approval rating of 53%, while disapproval is at 34% — a 19% spread.

The numbers have led Mindeman – and most other lefties – to a misleading conclusion.  Not wrong – I’m not telling people not to trust their lying eyes – but there’s more in those numbers than meets the eye.  Mindeman and the rest of the lefties are ignoring a key bit of American political behavior.

The poll covers the time between the shutdown and the present – when Dayton really didn’t do anything.  For that matter, he really didn’t do anything during the last session, or the shutdown.  He’s been for the most part a non-entity.  And if you don’t do anything – either positive or negative – then your numbers are going to be juuuuust fine.  Or at least fairly steady.

(Opposite case in point – Tim Pawlenty, who fought a two-court DFL advantage in 2009 and 2010 with aggression and passion.  He did not sit in his office drinking Kombucha or, given his hockey-playing pedigree, PBR, and his poll numbers showed it.  They were “lived-in”.  Who was a better governor?  Depends, now, doesn’t it?)

During the session, and the shutdown, it was the Legislature that did all the heavy lifting.  Dayton sat in his office, released the occasional demand, and until his final, fatal tour around the state, where he realized that getting behind his own plan would be political suicide, really did nothing.  And after that tour, when he folded his cards, he did so quietly, minimizing if not the GOP’s victory at least his own defeat.

In other words, he’s played defense.  He’s sat back and let the other guys take the hit.  The media, naturally, abet this behavior.

And in a state as polarized as Minnesota is, when you actually do things, you will take the hit – especially given our DFL-owned-and-operated media, whose interest in fluffing Dayton is obvious and constant.

And the Legisature has done things – affirmative things during the session and the shutdown, many of which pissed off Democrats and a few of which irritated the more conservative, and also not-so-affirmative things that have been all over the news lately.  Of course, sitting back and being passive-aggressive, like Dayton, was not an option for the Legislative branch; they were sent to Saint Paul on a mission, and the mission wasn’t going to get done without some serious action, and given the number of GOP freshmen who said they didn’t care if they only served a term, some fallout was to be expected.  It was inevitable.

But there’s more.

Dayton may get himself an easier legislature to work with next year. Democrats lead the generic legislative ballot in the state by a 48-39 margin. If that holds through November they should win back a whole lot of the seats they lost in 2010. It’s not that legislative Democrats are popular- only 31% of voters have a favorable opinion of them to 49% with a negative one. But legislative Republicans have horrible numbers. Their favorability rating is 23% with 62% of voters viewing them negatively. That honeymoon wore off real fast.

And here Mindeman and the rest of the metro chattering class fall into the seductive charms of drawing using high-level data to draw high-level conclusions on low-level questions.  Mindeman – and the entire regional left – have scoped the data wrong. I suggest.  The fact is that “generic” never manages to get endorsed to run for the Legislature.

The Legislature will take popularity hits – they, as a body, did all the work.

The Legislature, as a body, will always lag a do-nothing governor under those circumstances.  Just like Congress does.

But aggregate polls of the entire Legislature – those mythical “generic” legislators – are meaningless, just like aggregate polls of Congress.  People may want to vote the bastards in general out, but people tend, generally, to support their own bastard.  There are exceptions – they voted a lot of incumbent “bastards” out in 2006 and 2010 – but as a very general rule, unless you have a wave election, incumbency has its virtues.  This election may be many things – it may return both chambers of Congress to the GOP – but I don’t think anyone’s predicting a wave yet.

Tack on the fact that PPP polls trend left, that poll respondents this early in the cycle trend left, that the PPP poll was of registered voters (who always trend left), and the fact that the poll is meaningless, and the additional fact that redistricting – provided that it reflects actual demographic shifts rather than the DFL’s rhetoric – should favor the GOP, and I’m a lot less worried about this poll than the DFL, media (ptr) and the chattering classes want you to be.

And despite those numbers the GOP legislature continues to play ultra partisan games.

Well, yeah, Dave.  They know the numbers are meaningless.  So does the DFL.

Since everyone else is launching pressure groups and PACs, I figure it’s high time I did the same.

Just in time for the Minnesota Caucuses, I’m announcing my new PAC, “Eventual Romney Supporters For Santorum Or Paul”.

To be a member of (or contributor to) ERSFSOP, you need to do the following:

• Recognize the true goal for conservatives in the general election – to replace Barack Obama with someone who will shrink government and get it out of the way of economic recovery.
• Recognize, in addition, that most important facet of the endorsement process; pulling like mad for candidates that reflect your values, and do so with a voice so loud and powerful that whomever wins the nomination needs to pay attention, even if it’s not yours.

And so the ERSFSOP charter basically says this:

I, a conservative base voter, recognize the primary need to to get Barack Obama out of office in favor of virtually any conservative-enough Republican, and recognize that Romney is probably still on the inside track to the nomination.  I also am uncomfortable with the depth of Romney’s commitment to conservative economic princpiples.  And so until Candidate Romney makes his commitment to conservative economic policy – especially repeal of Obamacare and drastic cuts to spending and the size of government – an integral part of his campaign, I will be caucusing for Santorum, or Ron Paul, or even plugging my nose and caucusing for the born-again Alinky-ite, Gingrich.  And so until you commit to the policies we support, your path to the nomination has a speed bump.   

Your choice, Governor Romney; a 55 gallon drum of Maalox, or a clear path to the convention.

Your move.

Any takers?

At times like this, I like to remember William F. Buckley’s formula for picking candidates; picking the one that matched the title of this post.

Now, “most conservative” clause gets overlooked.  And I’m sorry to say, I’m less and less convinced Newt Gingrich is “conservative” as much as he is “opportunistic”; that he’s as “conservative” as Bill Clinton was “progressive”; in other words, whatever it takes to get elected.  And after Gingrich’s shameless descent into Alinsyite smear-jobbing his past month, I’m not convinced I could support the guy and sleep at night.

But for now, let’s focus on the “who can win” bit.

Romney led Obama by 47 percent to 42 percent in the Florida survey, while Obama topped Gingrich by 9 points, 49 percent to 40 percent. Among independents, Obama led Romney 44 percent to 38 percent and opened up a 56 percent to 29 percent advantage over Gingrich. Gingrich grabbed 12 percent of registered Democrats, while Romney secured 18 percent of registered Democrats.

“Newt Gingrich is weak among Florida independents and likely Democratic voters compared to Romney,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston. “If Florida is one of six key states that swings the national election, independents in Florida hold that key, and this poll suggests that Newt won’t be able to secure Florida for his party.”

In the popularity contest, Gingrich again did not fare well. He holds a 29 percent favorable and 58 percent unfavorable rating statewide among all likely voters. By contrast, Romney had a 44 percent favorable and 37 percent unfavorable rating. Romney’s popularity was lower among independents: 37 percent favorable and 36 percent unfavorable, while Gingrich’s popularity among independents imploded to 19 percent favorable with 70 percent unfavorable.

Even if I took Gingrich’s “conservatism” at face value – and I largely do not, not anymore – that, if true (and borne out by mo betta polling) really calls the question for me.

The question isn’t “who’s better at goading the media”; that’s not the President’s Press Secretary’s job.

The question isn’t “who can game the political mechanics better” – that’s what gave us Barack Obama.

The question is “Who is both conservative enough and who beat Obama?”

I have my serious, serious doubts.

And if Gingrich can’t convince me of both, he can forget it.

I’m going to pick the most conservative candidate who can win.

And I don’ think Gingrich is either.

To: Certain Mitt Romney Supporters
From: Mitch Berg, Reagan Disciple
Re:  Your “Ready, Fire, Aim” exhortation.

All,

I”m Mitch Berg.  You may remember me; I was busy caucusing for your guy Romney four years ago.  Let me refresh your memory; that was the cycle when a fair number of you geniuses insisted John McCain was the only viable option to run against Hillary Obama, and that we should not, could not, nominate a naif like Mitt Romney to run for office.

And eight years before that, I was the guy pushing for Steve Forbes, when you all insisted that George W. Bush was the conservative who could win.  And 12 years before that, when I said Jack Kemp might make a much, much better custodian of the Reagan Revolution than George H. W. Bush – you got your way then, too.

Remember me yet?

Of course not.  You’re the “establishment”.   You rarely remember the dirty ugly lessons of four or eight years back.  To many of you think “spin” equals fact.

And that’s fine – because you win your fair share of elections.  You’ve got the money, the oomph, the organization, the experience in power.  That counts for something.

And with that, I suppose you’re entitled to think of your agenda as “inevitable” in the party.  The problem is, some of us peasants – the people who are allied to principle first, party second (not that they need be exclusive or in conflict) – keep getting uppity and in the way.  It happened in 2006, when a knot of “establishment” figures in the Sixth CD GOP here in Minnesota got their undies in a toxic knot because Michele Bachmann flooded the various precinct caucuses with her supporters, making the local “establishment” – including many of you – claim that Bachmann “stole the nomination” when, in fact, she just did democracy and politics better than you did.

Ditto in 2008.  Maybe the influx of Ron Paul supporters split the conservative vote so finely that Mitt Romney never had a chance, and your guy Mac coasted to the nomination.  Maybe not – and it doesn’t matter much now, since between dual influences of the Ronulans and the Tea Party, the GOP finally, blessedly moved to the right.  Far enough to turn the conservative of 2008 into the moderate of 2012.

And all of that grassroots activity has made some of you – you know who you are -profoundly uncomfortable.  All us  unwashed Tea Partiers make you nervous, like John Quincy Adams supporters beholding Andrew Jackson’s entourage moving into the White House.  I’m fine with that, too.

But the reaction some of you are having to the “insurgency” (read: people doing the  democracy thing) in the GOP is telling us some things that I really would rather not be hearing nine months before an election.

Hugh Hewitt, who is a great friend of the radio show I do with Ed Morrissey, said it loudest on his national talk show – “If Ron Paul gets nominated, I’ll vote for Obama”.

Let’s come back to that in a moment here.

When I interviewed Michael Reagan last summer at the Midwest Leadership Conference, he made a great – and lamentably overlooked – point; his father, Ronald Reagan, didn’t win because he was the purest conservative.  He didn’t win because he had the most forward-looking economic vision.  He didn’t win because he promised to end the Cold War with unconditional victory.  And he didn’t win, in those days when people were still wondering what went into that seventeen minute gap in the Watergate tapes, because he was a pure establishment Republican.

He won because he convinced a whooooole lot of people who’d never have ordinarily voted for him, moderates and paleocons and RINOs and unemployed/patriotic Democrats, even – in the primaries and then in the general election – that he and his ideas were right.

Now, I don’t care if you say you’d stay home or even vote Obama if Ron Paul wins the nomination.  I don’t care in the same sense that “I don’t care if Scarlett Johannson has a chive in her teeth during our first date”, because it’s almost purely academic.  Neither is likely to ever happen.

But when you – the Establishment, with your Harvard degrees and your party apparatus and national media outlets – tell the 10-15% of the people who are coming out to GOP primaries, many for the first time, and the much larger percentage of younger voters and potential activists, “your guy, and by extension the principles for which he stands, and by further extension those for which you stand, are so risible that I’ll vote for the enemy first”, what’s that telling them?

It’s telling them that they and their beliefs, by dint of their association with a candidate who (holy hannah!) has a flaw in his past, are a bigger enemy than the President who is, by all of our mutual admissions, destroying this country.

We’re not talking about people who wrote racist rants thirty years ago; many of the people you are talking to weren’t born when Ron Paul wrote his racist screeds.  We’re not talking about people who believe the Iranians have just grievances with us; in many case, you’re talking to people who’ve put their lives on the line to defend this country (Rep. Paul has a disproportionate share of the military vote), and have been getting bombed and shot at by Iranian proxies (and probably actual Iranians).

Your attachment to the establishment – to the process, the machinery, the access, your tee time with Karl Rove, whatever – leads you to demonize a candidate with no chance of getting nominated and, more importantly, alienate a huge mass of voters that would be much better served, and in the long run would serve the party much better, with a little convincing, even if it doesn’t work right away.  People who are, in many respects, the future of conservatism and the GOP.

Ask yourself – What Would Reagan Do?

Let’s go back to the top and re-think this, shall we?

That is all.

To: Newt Gingrich’s Supporters
From: Mitch Berg, guy who really wants to like and support Newt, but juuuust can’t yet.
Re: No, the postscript in my “From” line really says it all.

All,

Loathe as I am to cite Hugh Hewitt, he did  have an excellent point for all of you Gingrich supporters last night on his show.  I’m going to turn that point into a question.

I’ll get to that in a moment.

William F. Buckley’s rule for picking a candidate was simple; pick the most conservative candidate that can win.  I follow this – after doing what I can to make the candidate who can win more conservative (see Tim Pawlenty, 2002).

Now, let’s leave aside the troubling episodes in Newt’s career – older ones, like his creakingly convoluted personal life (and I’m disregarding everything Marianne said in her loathsome interview, by the way, and only going by stuff Gingrich has admitted to, or which is in court records), middle-term ones like his trading butterfly kisses with Nancy Pelosi, and painfully recent ones like his tossing all of capitalism under the bus and his adoption of Saul Alinkski’s tactics to try and eke out a lead in South Carolina (which is the very definition of politics in its worst form over principle); let’s even leave aside the fact that Newt is in many ways a conservative (fingers crossed) mirror of his would-be nemesis, Barack Obama – albeit with more actual real-world government experience.  Forget all that.

Remember Buckley; pick “the most conservative candidate that can get elected”.

As Hugh notes, Newt has 100 percent name recognition, and 60% negative perception.

Why should I support him?

Don’t talk principles.  Don’t talk history.  Don’t talk 1994.  Don’t talk policy.  Talk numbers.  Convince me.

That is all.

To:  Ron Paul supporters
From: Mitch Berg, Former Big-L Libertarian, current small-l libertarian
Re:  Your candidate

All,

I love a David and Goliath fight as much as anyone, and much more than most.  So the idea that a candidate could come in out of nowhere, electorally speaking, and tip the GOP establishment up on its ear is something I just looooove.  Seriously.

And not only do I totally get the principles Ron Paul is espousing – liberty, shrinking government, etc – I have run for office behind them.

I don’t support Ron Paul, personally, as a candidate, for many of the same reasons I bailed out of the Big-L Libertarian Party fourteen years ago; while I agree with its core principles and high-level beliefs, there is little about your candidate, like my old party, that makes me think he’s ready for prime time when it comes to trying to run a nation of 300 million people.

But this isn’t about Ron Paul or his principles, or the wrinkles in his past that many of you would have us ignore.  This is about you.

Four years ago, you – or an earlier generation of “you” – bum-rushed the caucuses, with the intention of taking over the Minnesota GOP (as in other states).  And of the ones that got elected to go to the House District conventions, some actually showed up.  And of the ones that got elected to go to the Congressional District convention, some showed up.  And of those few left who got elected to go to the state convention, fewer still showed up.

In short, when the time for writing resolutions and declaiming about “Doctor Paul” passed, and the time to try to do the hard, boring stuff started, you – the vast, vast majority of you – sat it out.  And that’s notwithstanding the number of you that opted to sit out the election.

It’s easy – and your right – to say “If you don’t nominate my candidate, I’m going to sit this election out”.  But this isn’t about the election – this is about the party of which Ron Paul is a member; the one to whose caucuses Paul and his organizers are going to send you in your thousands in two weeks.

Getting an agenda passed takes more than just noise, intransigence, and near-religious fervor.  It takes persistence, a willingness to work within a party system (if only to co-opt it – and that’s not only not a bad thing, that’s actually how politics works!), the cultivated ability to sit in party functions and keep your ass from falling asleep long enough not only to get candidates who believe in what you do endorsed, but to keep the party in line with your principles as well.  And as someone who just spent a year as a minor elected party functionary on a libertarian-conservative agenda, let me tell you – that’s the hard part.

So, Ron Paul supporters, please answer the question:  are you ready to try to stick around, learn a few things, and try not only work with (and co-opt!) the party in which your candidate is running, and to which his son is committed?

Or are you going to collapse into epic disappointment again?

Because if it’s the former, I’d love to talk with y’all.

That is all.

To:  Rick Santorum supporters
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Your Case

All,

Any of you Santorum people, please fill me in:  other than…:

• He’s pro-life
• He’s anti-gay marriage
• He’s got an R by his name
• He drives libs insane

…what precisely is the case for your guy?

Don’t get me wrong – I support all these things, to one degree or another.

But what’s the case for nominating Santorum?

That is all.

If there’s been one constant in this ever-changing Republican presidential primary season, it’s that every candidate has looked like Icarus at one point or another, melting under the heat of media and voter scrutiny.

We remain roughly a month-and-a-half away from Super Tuesday, the date where traditionally the primaries have been resolved – if not in literally allocating enough delegates to produce a winner, than at least enough to leave the outcome less than in doubt.  9 states vote until then, and while the race will probably shift numerous times over the course of these upcoming dates, let’s take a look at where things stand now:

• Jan 31st – Florida (primary):  Despite Gingrich’s roundhouse kick to the meme of Romney’s inevitability, and a new poll showing him surging into the lead in Florida, Newt may have already lost the state.  Why?  A supposed third of likely Florida Republican primary voters have already cast their absentee ballots in a state where Romney continues to lead by an RCP average of 18.5% (and he’s been beating the absentee war drum for months).  Considering Romney turned a 10% lead into a 12% defeat within about four days, suggesting another Lazarus comeback for Gingrich isn’t out of the question, but requires Newt to significantly win the remaining pool of likely voters – and drive turnout up.  Perhaps biggest factor influencing decisions about Florida – the fact that the state’s delegates are winner-take-all.  Even a Iowaesque margin means one candidate takes home 50 delegates (cut nearly in half by the RNC due to Florida crashing the primary schedule) and everyone else gets squat.  Some of the field might be better served getting ready for the rest of the Republican primary schedule which includes…
• Feb 4 – Nevada (caucus):  There’s a presumption that Nevada is prime Romney territory due to his 2008 victory, fueled by the state’s nearly 8% Mormon population (they comprised 25% of the caucus turnout in 2008).  And certainly in what little polling has been done (no new poll in a month), Romney has maintained a lead throughout, even at the height of Newtmania in December.  But the circumstances that lead Romney to win a number of caucus states four years ago have certainly changed.  With his role having been transformed from conservative outsider to moderate establishment, Romney now finds himself on the other side of the anti-establishment movement that he benefited from in 2008.  Nevada’s population might still help him win the state, but a caucus-filled February could hit Romney hard.
• Feb 7 – Colorado (caucus), Minnesota (caucus), Missouri (primary):  Guess what all three states have in common?  None of them are actually allocating delegates on Feb 7th.  But damned if they won’t at least appear to matter as the momentum of the entire primary process might be up for grabs by this date.  Feb 7th might also be Rick Santorum’s last attempt to remain in the contest.  With Gingrich not on the Missouri ballot and caucuses far more fertile ground for a socially conservative message, Santorum needs to win one or two of these states to be seen as viable.  Paul could be making his last stand as anything more than a spolier as well, and likely will do quite well in Minnesota as he did in 2008 when he got nearly 16% of the vote.  While Romney carried both Colorado and Minnesota in 2008 (by large margins), again he was viewed as the conservative alternative.  If Romney only wins Missouri or loses the Show-Me State, talk of his collapse won’t be far behind.
• Feb 11 – Maine (caucus):  Maine was virtually ignored four years ago by all the candidates (save Paul) and Romney still walked away with a 30-point victory.  Expectations would have Romney winning the state again due to proximity to New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the moderation of the state’s Republicans, and the poor organizing efforts by competing campaigns.  Because of that, probably the only way Maine’s results will have any impact on the race is if Romney loses.  The small media market might be tempting for the rest of the field to try and create an upset on the cheap.
• Feb 28 – Arizona (primary), Michigan (primary):  17 days between primaries?  What will the 24-hour news channels do with themselves?  Probably forecast a split decision on Feb 28th, with Romney winning his former “home state” of Michigan and Gingrich or Santorum (assuming the latter is still in the race at this point) winning Arizona.  What little polling exists hasn’t been illuminating.  Three polls over the last three months have produced three different leaders.  Romney’s early January lead with 41% was amid his Iowa “win” and expected victory in New Hampshire.  Both states are larger media markets but the long delay between states will mean that aggressive retail campaigning might pay off.
• March 3 – Washington (caucus):  The last state before Super Tuesday on March 6th could provide a little last-minute momentum for a candidate before 11 states (and 466 delegates) are decided.  2008 isn’t exactly much of a guide here – McCain squeezed out a victory here due to a fractured field with only 12,000 people showing up to vote.  By local comparison, nearly 63,000 Minnesota Republicans voted in on caucus night in 2008.  Turnout like 2008 likely means someone other than Romney wins – and that the result will be ignored by the media.  This could be a state that Ron Paul actually wins.  He performed well four years ago, has a strong organization in Washington and some establishment support (to the extent you can call it that).

“Everyone appears to be waiting for a shoe to drop to change the dynamic of the campaign…”  – SITD 24 hours ago.

And since then?  Imelda Marcos’ closet has spilled out all over the GOP primary.  To recap 24 of the busiest hours of the 2012 primary thus far:

• Newt-onian Physics:  In one day, the Real Clear Politics average of South Carolina polls has shifted from a 10% Romney lead to a rounding error 1.2%.  We haven’t seen volatility like this since the stock market in the fall of 2008.  And the polls have move quickly because the fundamental elements that the entire 2012 Republican race have thus far been based on seem to be shifting as well.  Starting with…
• Children of the Corn:  Rick Santorum won Iowa.  By 34 votes.  We think.  Iowa’s GOP now admits we’ll never know who won the caucus since too many precinct results are missing.  Iowa Democrats shouldn’t exactly express schadenfreude over the error, since a similar result happened to them in 1988.  While the result (officially called a “tie” by the Iowa GOP) would seemingly boost Santorum, setting the stage for three different winner of the first three primary/caucus states, the practical influence of the outcome has been more to hurt Romney than help Rick Roll into SC.  At once, the narrative of the race thus far has been changed.  Regardless of Saturday’s outcome, Romney no longer can claim to have run the table, denting his greatest asset – the assumption of inevitability.
• Thrust and Perry:  Today could have been Santorum’s best of the campaign- news outlets might have led with both his belated Iowa victory and his formal endorsement by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson.  Instead, the media is using the Iowa results mostly to discredit Romney and the Hawkeye Cauci while trumpeting Rick Perry’s 11th hour decision to drop out and back Gingrich.  Perry’s blessing doesn’t carry much raw electoral weight – he was polling between 2-4% the last 48 hours of tracking polls – but helps tremendously towards Gingrich’s efforts to rally conservatives behind him as the “anti-Romney.”  And perhaps most importantly for Newt, it robs the headlines from…
• The Ex-Files:  Marianne Gingrich’s timing was almost perfect – if she wanted to destroy her former husband’s political comeback (and she still might). Taken from a 48-72 hour-old context, her blistering ABC interview might have been the nail in the coffin of the former Speaker’s attempt to win South Carolina and stall Romney’s momentum.  Instead, her comments have disappeared down the news cycle memory hole as the narrative media outlets are going with is yet another amazing political Lazarus impression by Newt.  Will Marianne’s comments come up at the debate tonight?  Possibly.  Will her comments resurface if Gingrich wins SC?  Definitely.  But for now, Team Newt looks to have a few more days to figure out how to response to his ex’s charges that he wanted an “open marriage.”
• Fringe Fest:  Tonight’s debate is the cherry on this news sundae, prompting questions as to who will be the evening’s target.  Will Gingrich find himself in the crosshairs again or will Romney continued to be hit hard since the week’s earlier debate marked the start of his polling bleed-out?  What’s less debatable is that both Paul and Santorum will find themselves on the edge of the debate, likely literally as cameras prep for a two-shot for a forthcoming two-man race.  Considering neither is going to win SC, whose victory hurts them more – Romney or Gingrich?  The likely answer is actually Gingrich.  If Newt pulls out a comeback in Carolina, the chattering class will begin to apply pressure on the rest of the field to clear the path for the desired mano-a-mano debates.  Since Paul is more in the race to build a movement than a nomination, Santorum needs to stop Newt from winning South Carolina to maintain the mantle as the only “non-Romney” to have won a state.  Meaning don’t be surprised if Santorum comes out guns-a-blazing against the former Speaker.

Michael Barone notes that some signs point to a bad year for incumbents – but mostly Democrat ones.

The theory is that vastly more Democrat incumbents have gotten under 70 in opposed primaries than Republicans; the gap gets wider when you leave out a few obvious cases (people running in hyper-safe districts, people running against ethics or moral issues.

The point?

These results suggest that the anti-Democratic wind is stronger than the anti-incumbent wind. Nearly half of Democratic incumbents with opposition ran under 70 percent, while only about one-third of Republican incumbents with opposition ran under 70 percent. More than half of Democratic incumbents had no primary opposition—there’s no telling how many would have run under the 70 percent mark if they had, but it’s possible quite a few of them would have. If all incumbents had had primary opposition, and the number running under 70 percent had been the same proportion as among those who did have primary opponents, some 38 Democrats would have run under 70 percent as compared to 19 Republicans.

The media is telling you it’s an “anti-incumbent year”.  They’re right – but if this theory starts to bear fruit in the coming months, they’ll strenuously leave out Barone’s half of the thesis.