Romney finally got his gold. Now what?
Mitt Romney is back.
The man whose father was once governor of Michigan won that state's primary, giving him a much-needed win in the race for the GOP nomination. And his aides are proclaiming his "Mitt-mentum."
Mitt Romney’s victory in Michigan is a testament to his remarkable elasticity. Having spent two years running as a social conservative, which he is not, he decided a week ago to run as a businessman reformer. It didn’t carry him over the threshold there, but it evidently has in Michigan — where, among other things, the Republican candidate seems to have made wildly un-Republican promises to use the powers of the federal government to restore, through some mystical spell, automotive-industry jobs to the suffering state.
Romney may not have won in Michigan so much as McCain lost it.
Now Romney is once again moving on from Michigan, just as he did when he left the state for school, a career, a family; for life, basically. By beating McCain here, he kept himself in the race and kept the field wide open. Three different candidates have won the first three contests.
To hear him tell it, Romney won in Michigan because voters are finally sick of a broken Washington. He's the candidate of the future, he says, not the pessimism of the past. But if his path to the White House is going to stretch longer than his father's did, Romney needs to prove he can keep winning -- even when the race moves to states where no one keeps the family's old memorabilia lying around.
Sen. John McCain seeks conservative support.
With John McCain’s victory in New Hampshire and his surge in the polls going into today's Michigan primary, the Arizona senator has moved from struggling hopeful to serious contender to become his party’s standard-bearer. That, in turn, shines a spotlight on the policy differences between John McCain and his GOP colleagues.
There’s a reason some of John McCain's conservative supporters avoid discussing his record. They want to talk about his personal story, his position on the surge, his supposed electability. But whenever the rest of his career comes up, the knee-jerk reply is to characterize the inquiries as attacks. In fact, the McCain domestic record is a disaster.
By all accounts, Romney is basically a managerial technocrat interested in finance, the economy, and related issues. Put another way, he's interested in doing bad things that largely require legislation to be enacted. This means he's subject to the checks and balances of a Democratic Congress. Giuliani and McCain, by contrast, seem to be interested in doing bad things in foreign policy, where the president has considerable autonomy to deploy fighter jets and anger allies.
The former president drew criticism for the "fairy tale" comment he made while campaigning in New Hampshire for his wife Hillary Clinton, Obama's main rival for the Democratic Party nomination in the November presiden
Petards can be dangerous devices. For a couple who brag about their ties to the African-American community, these attacks on Obama seem uncharacteristically tone-deaf. Using terms like "fairy tale" to describe Obama's call for change and unity may say a lot more about the Clintons than it does about Obama.
Obama's October 2, 2002, speech at an anti-war rally in Chicago in which he laid out his case against the war provides a very strong refutation of the case that his opposition to the war did not necessitate leadership and courage. The speech was exceptionally prescient, and it was a serious wager in direct opposition to the claims of the Bush administration, most of which went unchallenged by a majority of House and Senate Democrats at the time.
Hillary Clinton on the trail.
Young women at Hillary Clinton's alma mater, Wellesley, are torn: Do you vote for a woman to shatter the glass ceiling and further the cause? Or do you make an empowered, individual decision that is not confined by gender?
An unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House? Ahem... Gloria? Can you say anything about the feminist issues entailed in a woman running for the presidency on her husband's accomplishments? If not, you're speaking as a Clinton partisan and not as someone who wants to seriously engage with feminism.
I don't have a feminist obligation to vote for Hillary Clinton, or donate money to her campaign, or show up at her rallies. My obligation is to support her right to compete on an equal playing field. To decry the disgusting amount of sexism she faces every day. And then to vote for another candidate if I feel he would make a better president. That, too, is a feminist act.
Was the New Hampshire vote on the up-and-up?
New Hampshire isn't over. Not quite.
Dennis Kucinich is asking for a recount of votes in that state's primary election, which was held Tuesday, saying he wants ''100 percent of the voters had 100 percent of their votes counted.''
Kucinich is going to spend at least $2,000 out of his campaign funds to conduct a recount based on Internet rumors. The total could run much higher than that, depending on the cost of the recount, and Kucinich -- who finished dead last --would not benefit from any adjustment in the vote totals. The one campaign that might, and who actually has the cash to pay for a recount, hasn't asked for one. Why not? Because the Barack Obama team doesn't make decisions by listening to the fever swamps.
There's tremendous arrogance and/or ignorance at play when people assume that Hillary Clinton's victory in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary is or might be explained by election fraud. Has it not occurred to those people who know little or nothing about voting patterns in New Hampshire that the hundreds of staffers on the Obama and Edwards campaigns, who've immersed themselves in past voting data and models of expected vote turnouts for Tuesday, wouldn't these staffers have noticed discrepancies that might warrant a recount? If Tuesday's results really were the likely result of malfeasance, the Obama and Edwards campaigns would be raising holy hell.
