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.

Please call.  Fifteen seconds is all it takes.

This will remain at the top of this blog until the issue is resolved.

Andrew Breitbart passed away this morning in Los Angeles.

Larry Solov at BigJourno writes:

We have lost a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a dear friend, a patriot and a happy warrior.

Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love.

Breitbart gave the conservative alternative media something it needed; a full-time, tireless, fearless crusader, a rebel without a pause.

Liberals hated him, because he and his group of fellow media Visigoths played their game, only better; BigJourno and Big Hollylwood were like the Huffington Post, only not vapid and obsequious to their subjects. Andrew and his protegees did John Stewart and Steven Cobert one better; news, sometimes straight, sometimes satirical, but without the miasma of self-satisfaction in which the lefty shows marinade themselves.

I only met Breitbart once, at a party at Lileks’ place during Right Online last summer:

Lileks, Chad The Elder, Breitbart, Margaret Martin, David Strom, Laura Hemler, Laura's friend Cindy Olson, and the Giant Swede, last summer.

My biggest impression, other than the fact that he’d been pretty much mobbed, with admirers and, er, detractors during the entire event (he was the star of both Right Online and the sad, dyspeptic “Nutroots Nation”, also in town that weekend) was that, as much as he was into, as big a counter-media-culture empire as he’d built, as potent an instrument as he controlled, the greatest adventure of his life was raising his son, whom he very visibly couldn’t wait to get home to see, and whose fourth birthday party was going to be the real highlight of the week.

And it’s for his family I pray, and to them I send my sympathy and condolences.

For the rest of us?

Solov quotes Breitbart in the foward to his latest book:

Three years ago, I was mostly a behind-the-scenes guy who linked to stuff on a very popular website. I always wondered what it would be like to enter the public realm to fight for what I believe in. I’ve lost friends, perhaps dozens. But I’ve gained hundreds, thousands—who knows?—of allies. At the end of the day, I can look at myself in the mirror, and I sleep very well at night.

Breitbart discovered – on a grand scale – what a lot of us bloggers did almost a decade ago; that showing up, that deciding to make a difference, could be the beginning of something great.   For many of us, it has been.  And here’s hoping his example creates a thousand more like him.

Solov:

Andrew is at rest, yet the happy warrior lives on, in each of us.

And that’s the key.  To be a warrior – but a happy one.  A gentleman.  A full, completely realized, multifaceted human being, not a frothing acidic polibot.

He’ll be much missed.  But he’s created thousands of memorials, and God willing there’ll be ten thousand more today and tomorrow.

In every engineering company in America, stuck on a bulletin board or taped to someone’s cube, is this cartoon:

Everyone who’s worked in engineering or any kind of analysis has seen this sort of reasoning on projects; you start with parameters, end with a conclusion – and the details will get filled in later, once the stakeholders conquer than whole “Miraculous” thing.

It totally applies today.

——–

The Governor announced his new stadium plan today.

And if you, like me, have been adamant about not spending any public money on enriching Zygi Wilf – well, it’s mostly bad:

The officials were quick to announce the plan does not include any new taxes and includes a hefty contribution from the team.

Dayton said Rosen described the package as “the best deal available that’s possible.”

Dayton said the Legislature and the city must decide whether the state wants to be involved with professional football.

“I believe it does,” Dayton said.

Dayton said he will communicate with the Minneapolis City Council about the package shortly.

Under the “term sheet” announced today, the costs are divided 56 percent public, 44 percent private to put the facility up.

The problem?

For starters, as Gary Gross has been reporting for some weeks now, the public portion of the plan not only relies heavily on electronic gambling proceeds.  The plan presumes that revenue from these sources is going to boom – but it’s been drastically down in the past decade, over 20%.  The plan is to take all the new revenue and hand it over to the Vikes.

And that’s just on the state side.  The other public pillar of the plan involves the City of Minneapolis.

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak explained the sales tax structure and urged approval of the package.

But Doug Belden and Dennis Lien didn’t explain it.  It involves diverting the city’s convention center tax – and the City Council has already said no, no, a thousand times no, well, a thousand times.  Rybak is talking, as they say in Latin, de anus.

(Which may be one of very few cases where phrasing something in Latin is actually more gauche than the Englsh original, “out his butt”).

And like the cartoon above, this deal requires several miracles to occur.

The Minneapolis City Council needs a 180 degree change of heart on the “sales tax structure” that Mayor Rybak glossed over.

The charitable gambling market needs to counter its recent history, and not only expand, but hit a major boom.

And, by the bye, the Tribes need to not send squadrons of DFL assassin ninjas out to exact revenge for further eroding their monopoly on gaming in the state.  Which you know, if you follow the interactions between the tribes and the government at all, is about as likely as Ryan Winkler winning an arm-wrestling match with Jared Allen.

This “Deal” is no deal. It is vapor.  It counts on a miracle occurring.

And the City of Minneapolis, the Tribes, and the laws of economics have all outlawed miracles.

UPDATE:  A Capitol Hill wag wrote me: “it would be interesting to track the history of revenue projections from electronic pull tabs. seems rather variable, as in it seems to grow to fit whatever dayton wants to use it for. funny that estimates for gop initiatives never do that.”

I’m sure MPR’s “Poligraph” will get right on that.

The Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance sends us this reminder:
“You’ve sure been posting a lot of calls for people to call people, Mitch”.

Yep.  That’s grassroots politics.  You get your people to show up – on the phone lines and in the mail bags while the sausage is being made, and then again at the polls when it’s time to give your politicians their thumbs up or thumbs down.

So let’s do this.

Remind the Governor that he ran as a “pro-Second Amendment” guy two years ago.  And not just as some chucklehead hunter; no, he sold himself as a self-defense shooter.

And tactfully remind him that his ‘law enforcement” sources are uniformly filled to capacity with sh*t are in error about the whole “legalizing murder” bit, and that we all know it.

We’re here.  We’re shooters.  We’ve swung elections before; we’re why Rod Grams went to DC, and why the GOP took the House ten years ago.

And we’re not going away.

And we prove that by, well, not going away.  By being his worst f*****g nightmare, on the phones today, and at the polls this fall.

You just knew the DFL had this one planned either way.

If the budget forecast had come in in the red, there would have been caterwauling about how the state needed to raise taxes to make the state’s economy stronger.  The incongruity would have escaped the media.

Of course, it came in in the black; about a third of a billion.

And the regional DFL-prop media was quick to pee in the Legislature’s Wheaties; “It’s All Spoken For!”, they were quick to append to the news.

Dayton’s Management and Budget commissioner was quick with the Administraiton’s spin:

Management and Budget Commissioner Jim Schowalter said the $323 million surplus is already spent. By law, $5 million will go to refill the state’s budget reserve. The rest will start paying back the schools. At this rate, Schowalter said it could be quite some time before the state breaks even.

“It’s going to be a while before we have a positive forecast balance even if we have good news rolling forward for years to come,” he said.

That’s going to be the DFL’s line about the surplus: “it’s not really a surplus!  We owe!”

And when it comes up around he water cooler, every Republican, every conservative, every Real Minnesotan should have two responses:

• “Duh.  No kidding?  The DFL spent us into a deep, deep hole between 2006 and 2010, larding up the budget with entitlements that were bound to leave us with a deep hole once the economy went south – and it eventually always goes south, at least for a while.  And when it did, the DFL just asked for more – like, six billion over previous budgets!  Have you learned your lesson yet?”
• “Remember how all the DFL’s talking heads were saying “it’s going to take a lot of work to get out of this deficit?”  Well, welcome to “lot of work”.  Just like when your family falls behind on bills and spends some time playing catch-up; your tax refund and bonus from work go into paying old bills, rather than fun stuff.  Suck it up, little camper.  This is the “hard work”.  Put up or shut up”.

And one thing that is as predictable as the Alliance for a Better Minnesota lying about something; the Dems will call for whatever “surplus” there is to be added to permanent entitlement spending.  And “paid back” to the schools.

Because in the world of the Democrat, or “Republicans” like Arne Carlson, “surplus” is just another word for “money to spend spend spend!”

And if there’s one thing Minnesotans showed us in 2010, it’s that they’re tired of that piece of business as usual.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Asian businesses along University Avenue, seeing their livelihood destroyed by Light Rail, came up with a marketing plan for their neighborhood. They’ll call it “Little Mekong” after the famous river in Southeast Asia that runs through many of the residents homelands: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and China.

Makes perfect sense to me.  “Frogtown” predates the Asian influence in the neighborhood by a solid 100 years.  They have pretty much redefined the area.  More power to ’em, I say!

Not everybody likes the plan.

“Irna Landrum, executive director of the Summit-University Planning Council, said it makes sense to have a strong identity around each of the light rail stations. But she said Frogtown already has one.

“I’m not immediately convinced it has to be this big cultural branding. People know where Frogtown is. You know there’s a lot of natural curiosity for people who don’t live in these communities about what these strong community names mean,” Landrum said.”

I’m not sure that the curiosity about “Frogtown” goes much beyond “why is it called Frogtown?”, and I live here.  (Answer;  Maybe it was frogs in the long-gone swamps.  Maybe it was the French settlers.  We may never know).

No matter.  As it was, it shall be evermore!

Doakes:

The Summit-University Planning Council got left out and they’re miffed. I wonder why they were left out?

Could it be because they are most city planner types who support light rail and urban renewal, living on grants and government handouts while spreading their gaze over such a large and diverse area as University Avenue and Summit Avenue that they can’t get anything useful done?

So local business people step up and do it themselves.

And get criticized for it.

Welcome to St. Paul.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

That’s part of it.

The other part?  Community councils in Saint Paul have tended to draw the kind of people who love to exert petty, passive-aggressive power over others.  The Summit-University council seems to do little but fuss and phumpher over things like names and numbers in zoning formulas, and while they create little of value, they certainly destroy much.