The bankruptcy of Ener1, a “green energy” firm that got a $118 million stimulus grant, has brought the Obama administration’s commitment to sinking billions of dollars into alternative energy boondoggles back into the spotlight. Unfortunately, President Obama remains committed to continuing down this wasteful path, as his statements about energy in his recent State of the Union Address made clear. While the president spent more time on the topic than any other policy area, he distorted the facts, misrepresented his plans, and ignored his record. Obama announced that “tonight, I’m directing my Administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources.” For those who favor energy production, this sounds great, but a close inspection reveals that this announcement was nothing new — the sale should have been scheduled last year, and the only reason the administration is planning it now is that it is required under the
Newt Gingrich could lose Florida by a double-digit margin tomorrow. What will that mean for each candidate remaining the race? For Gingrich, February will be the toughest month. If he doesn’t pull off an upset in Florida, he isn’t favored in another nominating contest until March 6. Can he keep his campaign going until Super Tuesday? That will be his challenge if losses follow in Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan. There also aren’t any debates. But Gingrich is adept at using free media to keep himself in the spotlight. Mitt Romney is obviously hoping that Florida effectively ends the competitive porition of the Republican race. That doesn’t mean that he’ll go undefeated in the remaining primaries and caucuses (barring major candidate withdrawals). But the Romney camp hopes a solid Florida win will establish their candidate as the only one with a realistic path to the nomination. Rick Santorum is betting that even if Florida derails Gingrich, the depth of anti-Romney sentiment within the GOP is strong enough that there will be a search for another conservative alternative. Santorum will stress that he is a more principled — if less “flamboyant” — conservative choice than Gingrich in any event. It’s a long shot since Santorum isn’t favored in any February states either, but it’s more than enough to keep him in the race past tomorrow. Ron Paul has effectively bypassed Florida but is also hoping the Sunshine State ends Gingrich’s run as the main anti-Romney. Unlike Santorum, however, there are several caucuses ahead where Paul’s campaign believes he can do well. The next month will be a test of their caucus strategy, which has them prioritizing the delegate hunt over primaries where finishing ahead of Santorum would be considered a moral victory.
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Turning Point Florida
Florida is not South Carolina, and neither is it Iowa or New Hampshire, and the pundits rushing to early judgment about the likely result of next Tuesday’s primary in the Sunshine State should take a deep breath and calm down. Such was the advice offered by Florida GOP activist Sarah Rumpf yesterday, and I feel obligated to share her advice with people whose knowledge of Florida politics is less direct and extensive than hers. “These people in New York and D.C. are looking at it from 30,000 feet up in the air and you can’t do that,” Rumpf said. Currently involved in Republican Adam Hasner’s Senate campaign and not allied with any of the remaining GOP presidential contenders, Rumpf was an early supporter of Marco Rubio’s successful challenge of former Gov. Charlie Crist in the 2010 Senate primary, a crucial battle for the Tea Party movement. Rumpf called me Monday to warn against underestimating the strength of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign organization in Florida. Romney endorsed Rubio in 2010 and campaigned with him, garnering respect from Tea Party activists and also from the Cuban-American community that is an important GOP constituency in South Florida. Furthermore, Rumpf said, Romney has a large staff of experienced Florida operatives who have been working in the state for months, and have been especially active in pushing Romney’s supporters to submit early absentee votes, a process that began over the weekend. Most of all, Romney has a vast funding advantage which allows him to advertise heavily in Florida’s expensive TV marketplace. Monday, the Romney campaign rolled out a new ad attacking former House Speaker Gingrich : ” While Florida families struggled during the housing crisis, Newt Gingrich cashed in while working for Freddie Mac.” In Monday’s debate televised by NBC, Romney doubled down on Gingrich’s work for Freddie Mac, a federally funded enterprise implicated in the meltdown of the home mortgage industry. “Freddie Mac was paying Gingrich $1.6 million while taking money from the American people,” he said. Romney also hit Gingrich’s support for Medicare prescription drug benefits, an attack that prompted Gingrich to accuse Romney of “walking around this state saying things that aren’t true.” But Romney came back hard, saying that Gingrich’s consulting clients benefitted from his advocacy: “You could call it whatever you like; I call it influence peddling.” Those trying to figure out who won the frequent clashes between Romney and Gingrich during Monday’s debate were deprived of the evidence provided by audience applause, which NBC moderator Brian Williams prohibited from the start. And pundits face similar problems attempting to prognosticate the result of next week’s primary. Bo th Gingrich’s supporters and his enemies appear to have over-interpreted his South Carolina victory. Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post seemingly succumbed to abject panic, warning that Gingrich is ” perhaps the only GOP candidate who could shift the spotlight from President Obama to himself, alienate virtually all independent voters, lose more than 40 states and put the House majority in jeopardy.” This is a genuine and widely shared concern among Republicans, that Gingrich’s controversial past and “grandiose” tendencies might prevent the election the party wants — a referendum on Obama’s first term. Yet Rubin’s “open letter” to GOP leaders including Haley Barbour, Jim DeMint, and Mitch Daniels, demanding that they either jump into the presidential race themselves or else “collectively get behind a not-Gingrich candidate,” was a premature warning about an emergency that has not yet arisen and may never arise. Gingrich is a Southern conservative, and Republican voters in South Carolina clearly shared his “mad as hell” attitude, rejecting Romney, whom Gingrich repeatedly called a “Massachusetts moderate.” The polls showing a Sunshine State surge for Gingrich need to be seen in the context of a remarkably volatile Republican electorate, which has repeatedly jumped from one frontrunner’s bandwagon to another over the past several months. In a Rasmussen poll taken Jan. 11 — the day after the New Hampshire primary — Romney led in Florida by 22 points; in Rasmussen’s poll taken Sunday , Gingrich led by nine points, a 31-point swing in less than two weeks. But Florida is not South Carolina, and Gingrich’s ability to sustain his post-Carolina momentum cannot be extrapolated from polls taken more than a week ahead of the Jan. 21 primary. Rubin’s evident panic over Gingrich’s surge is as unnecessary as the demands from Gingrich’s advocates that former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum quit the race in order to consolidate conservative opposition to Romney. Gingrich’s South Carolina win destroyed the “inevitability” argument that might have permitted Romney to score an early knockout in the 2012 campaign. Whatever the outcome in Florida, the battle for the GOP nomination will continue at least through “Super Tuesday” on March 6, and perhaps well into April. The stakes in Florida are much higher for Romney than for any of his opponents. If Romney loses Florida, the media will begin comparing him to Ed Muskie, the 1972 favorite of the Democrat Party establishment whose campaign unexpectedly fell apart, handing the nomination to anti-Vietnam War candidate George McGovern. But even if Romney’s organizational advantages help him recover to gain a narrow win next Tuesday in the Sunshine State, he will still be seen as very vulnerable heading into the Feb. 4 Nevada caucuses, where Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s fanatical supporters are hoping for an upset victory. Some Republicans expect Gingrich’s surge to carry the former House Speaker to victory in Florida, but playing the expectations game has been a high-risk endeavor in this year’s campaign. Last week, a member of Romney’s staff told me that they had initially expected former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty to be one of their most formidable foes, but Pawlenty was the first candidate to quit the race. Many conservatives expected Texas Gov. Rick Perry to be Romney’s strongest rival, yet Perry’s status as frontrunner lasted barely a month and he dropped out before the primary in South Carolina, which had originally been his must-win “firewall” state. Almost no one expected Santorum to be among the Final Four contenders for the nomination, yet he won the Iowa caucuses and remains resolved to keep fighting despite the formidable odds against him. A desire to hurry up the Republican nominating process was one of the motives that inspired Florida GOP leaders to leapfrog their primary from March to January (see ” Why Does Florida Hate America? ” Sept. 30), thus scrambling the entire campaign calendar. But one rather famous Floridian said Monday he is content to let the process play out: ” We’re nowhere near being over here. I don’t subscribe to conventional wisdom, and neither should you.” Who said that? Palm Beach resident Rush Limbaugh. And, as usual, Rush is right.
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No Need to Rush in Florida
[Posted by Karl] When it comes to WaPo blogger Jennifer Rubin, I’m not likely to top Dan McLaughlin : “For months, she mocked stop-Romney movements. Now this , writ & stained with tears”: Dear Govs. Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, John Kasich, Bobby Jindal; Sens. Jon Kyl, Marco Rubio and Jim DeMint; and Reps. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and Mike Pence (R-Ind.) : *** *** The voters in their infinite wisdom have just given a huge boost to perhaps the only GOP candidate who could shift the spotlight from President Obama to himself, alienate virtually all independent voters, lose more than 40 states and put the House majority in jeopardy. *** So how about it? One of you can run yourself. Or you can instead collectively get behind a not-Gingrich candidate. But really, if you are to have a Republican Party to lead one day in the future, you can’t very well do nothing. My own view is that any one of you would be preferable as a candidate to Newt Gingrich, as would either Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney… Rubin’s agenda here is typically transparent. Although styled as a “Anyone but Newt” plea, Ron Paul is implictly eliminated and NJ Gov. Chris Christie gets a pass because he has endorsed Mitt Romney. Indeed, she’s not stupid enough to believe any of her targets could plausibly enter the race at this point; her piece is merely a plea for Romney endorsements. Although generally critical of Rubin’s modus operandi (note she was equally critical of Romney to boost McCain in 2008), I previously kinda-sorta defended her, arguing conservatives disporortionately attacked her work because her prominent position at the WaPo presents a skewed view of the Right to a mass audience. However, the problems with Rubin run deeper and beyond the merits of her argument. The fact that Rubin’s diagnosis of the Romney campaign is that it lacks enough establishment endorsement says much about Rubin as a thinker, not much of it good. Those who do not read my work regularly should know upfront that I find the amount of venom spewed by some in the ongoing RINO/TruCon argument on the Right to be tedious. It’s an argument that leads both sides to make arguments that simply have no empirical support. Rubin is pretty clearly on the RINO side of that dispute and for the purposes of this post, I do not hold it against her. However, Rubin’s analysis of the campaign – i.e., Romney needs more endorsements, Romney needs to attack Newt (as though he hasn’t), Newt’s populism can be easily dismissed — is dull-witted, even when she has a point . The TruCon perspective is so (to use the Newtian term) fundamentally illegitimate to Rubin that it must be denied or crushed — as though there are not political consequences which would follow. The populism surging on both the Right and Left in the wake of the Wall Street meltdown and subsequent Obama malaise may not be an unalloyed good, but the lesson of South Carolina is it is one of the biggest obstacles to a Romney nomination and his supporters ignore or mock it at their peril. Romney’s skid — both in SC and national polls — coincided with renewed attacks on Romney’s image as a fatcat financier. However much Rubin — or I — may find those attacks wrong or unfair in many cases, it was obvious to everyone that such attacks would come. Well, obvious to everyone except Camp Romney (including Rubin, apparently). Rubin’s blog over the past few days has been an echo of the the flailing Romney campaign, stuck in denial that Romney should have been better prepared and running a more competent campaign (especially as competence is what Romney is selling). As someone who has catalogued Newt’s flaws as a candidate , noted that he is an idiosyncratic revolutionary in ways which may be unconservative and found his attacks on the courts to be over-the-top , I should be the sort of person to whom Rubin’s views might appeal. But if her dismissal of large factions of the movement were not offensive enough, Rubin seems unable to express that dismissal in any manner other than disingenuous condescension. Her agenda is transparent, but she seems to think she’s cleverly cloaking it in pieces like today’s “open letter.” I think even those who disagree with Rubin more than I do would at least respect her more if she honestly wrote that she thinks Mitt is the only electable candidate in the race and that the entire weight of the establishment needs to publicly destroy Newt Gingrich this very minute. Her disingenous attempts at subtlety make her sound like The Girl Who Cried Newt — even if she’s right, she’s bound to be ignored. –Karl
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The Girl Who Cried Newt
Press secretary Tim Miller gives the answer , “Mitt Romney beat us,” and then goes on to explain the things Mitt Romney has done well. That’s fine. Mitt Romney probably has been a better candidate this time than in 2008, but the answer regarding Huntsman’s own campaign is far from sufficient.
