On Super Tuesday Campaign Shorts

Super Tuesday 2012 is upon us – the day awarding more delegates than have been awarded to date. Being an Ohioan, the day after will be a great day to celebrate the circus leaving town. After all, they will return for fall campaign to flood Ohio with ads. Oh well – here are a variety of campaign notes in the shorts.

Since politics belongs to the people who vote, would the GOP race be different if more people were voting?

Mitt Romney will do better today than many anticipate.Here in Ohio, Rick Santorum’s 7-9% lead from last week has vanished. With his name missing from a significant number of ballots in this state, I wonder about the polls accurately assessing the vote; therefore, I say Romney gets the most votes and delegates.

A Gingrich win in Georgia will be insignificant.

The longer the GOP primary continues, the further the candidates move to the right with hopes of attaining the gold ring. Because presidential candidates win elections by capturing the center, it will be interesting to see how the eventual nominee backtracks with hopes of capturing the center.

Here are two interesting polls:

Politico’s Battleground Poll (plus each party’s analysis)
Purple Poll: February 2012

Santorum’s streak of focusing on social issues has and will continue to work in Romney’s favor.

As candidates, especially Mitt Romney, keep saying the same thing, using the same speech, the same lines, the same answers to different questions …. zzzzzzz

Gov. Romney is so robotic, that most of his stumbles occur when he goes off script.

Here’s an interesting line from a local campaign flyer promoting a slate: … they are not the incumbent candidates, nor have they held paid political office before. If any of them wins, do they realize that both aspect of that statement will do longer be true?

From William Galston, Brookings Institute (Entire column)

It is societies such as ours, badly divided and obsessed with the present, that most need communal ties. But they are the least likely to produce them. … Indeed, in these circumstances, only a steady appeal to common sense and common decency has any hope … But it’s still an open question whether our leaders have the fortitude to make, and our citizens the disposition to hear, such an appeal.

From columnist David Brooks (entire column)

Without real opposition, the wingers go from strength to strength. Under their influence, we’ve had a primary campaign that isn’t really an argument about issues. It’s a series of heresy trials in which each of the candidates accuse the others of tribal impurity. Two kinds of candidates emerge from this process: first, those who are forceful but outside the mainstream; second, those who started out mainstream but look weak and unprincipled because they have spent so much time genuflecting before those who despise them.

As the GOP refers to President Obama as an elitist, what if each of them had more college degrees? I appreciate these words from columnist Kathleen Parker. (entire column)

Santorum elected to pander to the idea that ignorance beats an education that might lead one to become an elite. His words, in addition to being false, were, dare we say, rather snobbish. How else to characterize speaking to people as though they aren’t capable of recognizing truth — or that their children aren’t smart enough to go to college and, grasping the flaws of liberalism, stay true to the conservative values with which they were raised?

Interesting Reads

• Is the GOP Tears Itself Apart?
• Maureen Dowd on the GOP Being Outdating Itself
• David Brooks on the GOP Position
• William Galston’s mentioned above
• Kathleen Parker’s mentioned above
• Dana Milbank: A Moderate’s Lament
• Olympia Snowe: Why I left the Senate