$100 Million Already Spent And Mitt Romney Is As Popular Among Republicans As Bob Dole Was

Sarah Palin, Pollyanna, vaguely remembers President Ford and knows all about Obama's "failed socialist policies." She told Neil Cavulto that "There will be that zip-a-dee-doo-dah after the nominee is chosen. I guarantee there will be that enthusiasm. But to be brutally honest, with all due respect to governor Romney, who is obviously the frontrunner... he's not garnering a lot of that enthusiasm right now." She admits she voted for "the cheerful one-- Newt Gingrich" in the Alaska presidential preferential poll.

The latest AP delegate math shows Romney with 212 votes, Santorum with 84, Gingrich with 72, and Ron Paul with 22. That's more than all the other goons together. So why are Republicans so glum? John Podhoretz was relieved Romney wasn't humiliated on Tuesday night. He sees Willard "on a seemingly inexorable path to the nomination, the only GOP candidate with a clear path to a majority of delegates. But he is not winning rock-ribbed Republican hearts at exactly the time he needs to be." But he's not doing the famous little jig that Hitler did in front of the Eiffel Tower when German troops captured Paris.

In fact, he took several steps backward after his win in Michigan last week. Momentum from that victory should have won him Tennessee and made an Ohio victory a foregone conclusion. But he lost Tennessee last night by a far larger margin than anyone expected, and he only crawled into the winner’s circle in Ohio.

It’s time to recalculate the enduring dynamic of this endless GOP race. People have been saying for months that it’s a race between Mitt and the Not-Romneys, but the results last night suggest that term (which I invented in a Post column in October) needs to be amended.

It would be truer to say Mitt has only succeeded when he’s made himself a Not-- first the Not-Bachmann, then the Not-Perry, then the Not-Cain, then the Not-Newt and, where he’s made his case stick, the Not-Santorum.

Romney’s argument is that the others can’t win, that their views are not congruent with the mainstream-- and he has spent an enormous amount of money on negative ads to talk Republican voters into the idea.

I think he’s right: They can’t. But it’s a hard fact that Romney hasn’t succeeded in convincing more than a third of the GOP electorate that they should surrender their deep doubts about him and support him anyway because he’s the only one who can beat Barack Obama.

Rick Santorum has found a way to connect with voters who are discomfited by Romney. Some of it has to do with Romney’s ideological impurity on health care. And some of it-- especially among very conservative evangelical voters-- surely has to do with his Mormon faith.

Exit polls suggest Santorum is winning overwhelmingly among conservatives who want a candidate like them. Even though Santorum is a Catholic and they’re Protestants, he’s certainly a lot more like them than Romney, who comes from a minority faith tradition.

What can Romney do? He won’t quit his faith. He’s already set his position on health care in stone-- he likes what he did in Massachusetts and no matter the similarities to ObamaCare, he’ll repeal the federal mandate.

He’s just going to have to barrel ahead. Next Tuesday is likely to be a bad day for him, with evangelical-heavy Kansas, Alabama and Mississippi more like the Southern states Santorum and Newt Gingrich have won.

He’ll likely get on track as the larger states start to come in play later in March and April.

But whatever victories he scored last night, he’s bruised and bloodied.

Romney can win the nomination as the Not-Santorum. But if that’s how he does it, if he doesn’t succeed in uniting the party on a positive note, he will be seriously weakened going into the general election.

Looks that way doesn't it? And Romney is almost as popular among Republicans as... Bob Dole was. On Rachel Maddow's blog yesterday, Steve Benen had a great chart showing how many votes each primary candidate got in Ohio yesterday. Obama, who was in an uncontested primary that you probably didn't even know about, won... I mean he beat all the Republicans running in their highly publicized, contentious primary.


Meanwhile, as of the last report Romney's toxic PAC, Restore America's Future, had raised $36,797,202 from a small handful of multimillionaires and billionaires eager to take over the country completely. Romney had used $30,757,067 of that to destroy the reputations and political careers of Gingrich, Perry, and Santorum... and to put the right-wing base into a major funk. The biggest bundler to the PAC was Bain ($2,000,000) and $1,000,000 (or more) bundlers or donors include Julian Robertson's Tiger Management, Eli Publishing (a Mormon front operation), Edward Conard, Paul Singer's Elliott Associates, F8 LLC (another Mormon front operation from Provo), Melaleuca, Oxbow, Paulson & Co., Perry Homes, Robert Mercer's Renaissance Technologies, Rooney Holdings and a myriad of Marriotts (again, Mormons making a concerted bid to seize the government). It's a who's who in the finances behind contemporary American fascism.

And on top of what the killer PAC has taken in, Romney has sucked up another $62,706,797 ($55,042,207 of which he's deployed destroying his Republican opponents). So that's over $100 million so far-- even before the general election begins! 70.1% of Romney's donors are males and the amount he's raised from grassroots donations (under $500) is inconsequential-- less than a million dollars in all compared, for example, to the $28,000,000 that came from donors writing checks for at least $2,500. His half dozen biggest donors-- that's to him, not to the PAC-- are the half dozen most corrupting influences, outside of Big Oil, in American political life-- the 6 biggest Wall Street banks:


If there has ever been a rationale for overturning Citizens United it is the way the one percent (and Mormon cult) are financing their jihad to takeover of the United States. A few weeks ago, the NY Times editorial board blasted the whole premise of a democracy for sale again.

The presidential primary season is being brought to you by a handful of multimillionaires and companies who have propped up the candidates with enormous donations to their “super PACs.” Just two dozen or so individuals, couples and companies have given more than 80 percent of the money collected by super PACs, or $54 million, according to disclosure forms released on Monday.

...The people writing these outsize checks are committed to defeating President Obama, but their interests don’t stop there. Many are involved in businesses or ideological causes that have clear policy agendas with the federal government. Their huge influence on individual candidates demonstrates the potential for corruption inherent in the super PAC era. Among the biggest givers:

Harold Simmons, a billionaire corporate raider, has given $1 million to Mr. Gingrich’s political action committee, $1.1 million to Rick Perry’s PAC, $100,000 to Mitt Romney’s PAC, and $10 million to American Crossroads, the super PAC advised by Karl Rove that is supporting many Republican candidates. Mr. Simmons’s companies make metals, paints and chemicals, among other things, and have gotten into trouble over lead and uranium emissions from previous decades. He also runs a radioactive waste dump in Texas that has clashed with environmental regulators over its proximity to a nearby aquifer. He controls Waste Control Specialists, which has contracts to clean up federal hazardous waste sites, including emissions from other companies he controls.

...Foster Friess, who gave $1 million to Rick Santorum’s Red White and Blue PAC, is a mutual fund manager who recently declared that aspirin used to be an effective contraceptive when women put it between their knees. He is a former president of the Council for National Policy, a secretive club of some of the country’s most powerful conservatives, which opposes unions, same-sex marriage and government regulation.

In addition, six-figure checks were given to Mr. Romney by seven executives at hedge funds or investment firms. Leaders of this industry are interested in fewer regulations and a low tax rate for their type of income.