February 19th, 2012
With Texas court-ordered to move its primary back to at least May 28, the delegate math it takes to win the GOP nomination just got a lot tougher.
Now, the likelihood that any candidate will clinch the nomination before late May or even June seems increasingly distant. After all, the Lone Star State alone offers 155 delegates—more than one tenth the total needed to get to the nomination holy grail of 1,144. And the vision of a brokered convention is edging from overheated political-junkie fantasy to dim possibility, with the odds up to 26 percent on the Internet gambling site Intrade.
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February 16th, 2012
Mitt Romney is learning that there are costs to an ugly, extended primary fight marked by a rush to the far right. Independent voters get alienated by the extremism.
Last weekend, Romney was trying to reassure attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference he was “severely conservative,” but that elevation of ideological inflexibility sounds like someone who’s hitting the Kool-Aid a little too hard for most independent voters. Read More…
February 15th, 2012
After the epic fail of Iowa’s caucuses—falsely naming Mitt Romney the winner for more than a month—now it looks like there’s trouble brewing in the Maine caucuses as well.
Romney was named the narrow winner in Maine on Saturday over Ron Paul—gaining him a triumphant top-of-the-fold photo in the Sunday New York Times—but it now appears that several counties that held caucuses were not calculated in the “final” tally. According to the Bangor Daily News, there is growing pressure on the state GOP to reassess the votes and at least potentially declare a new winner. Read More…
February 13th, 2012
President Obama’s re-election strategy is focused on portraying himself as the defender of the forgotten American middle class. And, writes John Avlon, there are signs that this strategy is succeeding.
For the first time since the short-lived boost after the death of Osama bin Laden, a majority of Americans now approve of Obama’s job performance. He is beating the battered, but still presumed Republican nominee, Mitt Romney in a new Washington Post/ABC poll. Read More…
February 10th, 2012
Rick Santorum was a lawyer for professional wrestling.
It sounds like a surreal plot of political pulp fiction, but it’s true.
Back in the late 1980s, the family-values candidate played a central role in deregulating professional wrestling in Pennsylvania as part of a team that lobbied the state government to get wrestling’s status changed from sport to entertainment. Read More…
