Feb
7
The end?
February 7, 2008 |
Lots of talk in the Corner that it appears as though Romney is prepared to drop out. Therefore Huckabee is technically correct that this makes it a two-man race, but let’s be real. This clinches it for McCain.
So what do I do next Tuesday for the Maryland primary? I would vote for McCain over Huckabee in a hearbeat, but I tend to doubt that Huckabee is really going to challenge John McCain in the state. According to the prep ballot I received in the mail yesterday, Fred Thompson is still on the ballot in Maryland. I had toyed with the notion of voting for Fred even with Mitt still in the race, and now I might as well go ahead. Of course I could just stay at home, though there is also the GOP congressional primary to vote in, and sure I have to think long and hard about which candidate is the best guy to lose to Van Hollen in November.
Update: Yup, he’s out.
Comments
6 Comments so far
For lack of a better venue to raise the question I’ll raise it here. It seemed to me that the rationale for Romney pulling out of the race was that internal conflict within the GOP means that the Democrats will win. Keeping in mind that I’m not opposed to a Dem victory in Nov. this seems like a stupid reason to abandon the race for the Presidency. When did we get to the point in our politics that disagreement was a bad thing? Granted I was enjoying the GOP internal split (to the extent that there really was one going on), but that doesn’t mean that it was/is either a) bad for Republicans or b) bad for the country. This is a corollary to my objection to Obama, who seems to be advocating a sort of “post partisanship” type politics, where a la Rodney King “we all just get along.” Hogwash. I don’t want to get along substantively with Republicans any more than they want to get along policy wise with liberal democrats like me. Disagreement is good. Competition for ideas, policies, and visions are good. Partisanship, when practiced responsibly, is a good thing. In short, why are we so afraid of disagreement right now? Both between those who share our ideas and values and those that oppose them? Thoughts.
I agree with you almost completely, but I don’t think Romney is dropping out just to avoid conflict. After all, we’ve had plenty of conflict especially over the past two months. What he’s thinking, evidently, is that he obviously has no chance to win now, that McCain has things wrapped up, so let me step aside and let’s work together to ensure that the party wins in November. His continued campaigning serves no real purpose, so I think he did the noble and right thing. He had a competition for ideas with McCain, and he lost.
Now, there might be something to the idea that a convention fight is actually a good thing. Conventions have become boring affairs that are simply lovefests for the nominee. An open convention could actually draw attention and keep the public focused on the party. Then again, maybe an ugly convention fight could turn the public off - see the Democrats in 1968. I’m not sure, but it sure would be a lot more fun to watch than what we’re currently treated to.
Okay, I see what you’re saying, but did he really lose, or was he merely afraid of losing? McCain barely has 1/2 the necessary delgates, there were several very “conservative” states still to come (VA, TX, NC) and Romeny seemed to have the financial means to continue. Grated perception is a lot in primary politics and that is definately on McCain’s side right now, but I’m not sure I think it was a done deal. Besides, if what you say was true, why not make that the theme of the speech rather than what he said at CPAC? Or was he just pandering to a friendly audience?
As for the conventions, I agree 100%. I’m not opposed to a brokered, divided democratic convention at all. In fact, I think if the GOP rallies around McCain and has a “lovefest” while the Dems duke it out on the floor on national cable TV I think we win bigtime. Huge multi-day free media extravaganza and the ability of whomever comes out of Denver having the ability to say that all voices were heard and truly unite the party in a way that Gore and Kerry were never able to do. I think the same would have been true of such a convention between Romeny and McCain. This is why I ask what so many people — present company excluded of course — are afraid of when it comes to disagreement. It seems like so many good thing can come of it, but yet we are moving in the opposite direction as fast as we can run.
Romney made the right choice. With the Huckster in he had no chance for a one on one contest with McCain which was his only hope. His decision was also good for his party. Since World War II, serious nomination contests which battle on to the convention are almost always bad for the party experiencing them: Republicans 64, Democrats 72, Republicans 76, Democrats 80, for example. Clinton and Obama get to cut each other up while McCain solidifies his support, raises money for the Fall and hones his message. Luck is an oft over-looked element in politics, and since January McCain has had the best patch of political luck I’ve seen in many a year.
I think Donald brings up a good point. The new conventional wisdom - no pun intended - is that convention fights are a good thing? But are they? Well, we haven’t had one in nearly three decades, so it will be tough to tell. The years in which there were convention scrums, as Donald highlights, were years in which the party that had said fight had little chance to win anyway. The convention fight was really the culmination of brewing tension within the party. This year might be a different scenario. But, we shall see.
As for Romney’s decision to drop out, you have to think they had some internal polling numbers that indicated he wasn’t doing well enough in the remaining states to have any chance. I have not seen any polls from those states, but unless he just about swept what was left, he really had no chance. He and Huckabee could only have prevented McCain from winning the nomination pre-convention, which of course brings us back to the discussion of whether convention fights for the nomination are a good thing.
Romney never sounded better to me than in the CPAC speech. If he had written his farewell speech as a stump speech 2 months ago, it might have turned out differently.
As to his motives, I kinda think everyone is over-analyzing it. Yes, there’s the Rudy factor - drop out before you take big losses to maintain viability in the future.
But quite simpler than that is the fact that Romney was self-financing his campaign. If nothing else, Huckabee has shown he’s an old-school classic soapbox campaigner. He can run a campaign on a shoe-string budget and do ok. So Huckabee has no reason to drop out until he is literally getting pounded.
As for Romney, while super rich, he’s not Ross Perot or Bill Gates rich. Romney probably invested 10-20% of his net worth on the campaign. And that $40 mill got him 4 mill votes and made him a player on the national scene. But he realizes he’s reached the point of diminishing returns. And it will only accelerate from here. Why throw the money away? I really think that’a all it is.
If Romney still had a large warchest that wasn’t filled with his own money, I think he’d still be out there too. Once again proves politics is all about the money - for better or for worse. And right now, nobody has more than Obama. So watch out everyone else!