Bye, Rick

Santorum is apparently suspending his campaign. Next week, Commissioner Goodell is expected to uphold the suspension.

Even if Mitt loses Louisiana, Mitt wins in Louisiana

If you're a Republican voting in today's primary (God bless you) it looks like you're likely to check the little electronic box next to Rick Santorum's name on the ballot. (Again, vaya con Dios, my friend. Nicely done.) Santorum holds a big big lead according to this PPP poll released the other day.

Rick Santorum is headed for a commanding win in Louisiana on Saturday. We find him with 42% to 28% for Mitt Romney, 18% for Newt Gingrich, 8% for Ron Paul, and 2% for Buddy Roemer.

That poll is worth your time to read, by the way. PPP also provides us with approval ratings for Les Miles and Sean Payton... whose positions, I've long argued should be elective offices anyway... and Saints' quarterback Drew Brees who has apparently broken yet another record.

Drew Brees broke the all the time PPP record on this poll for the most popular figure we've ever polled, with 94% of likely primary voters rating him favorably to only 1% with an unfavorable opinion. We found Abraham Lincoln at a 91/2 rating nationally on a poll we did in November and that was the previous record.

Brees has surpassed down Marino and now Lincoln in the same year yet remains unsigned. Looks like his price went up yet again.

Anyway back to Santorum and his impending "commanding win." Thanks to the screwy way Louisiana Republicans apportion their delegates, here's what that margin will gain for him.

While a strong showing would be a momentum booster for any of the candidates, even a clear winner of the primary might not get all of the state's delegates when the national convention rolls around.

Louisiana's GOP will have 46 delegates at the national convention. Twenty at-large delegates will be allocated proportionally among candidates who get more than 25 percent of the vote in Saturday's primary. If no candidate gets 25 percent, the party says, the 20 delegates remain uncommitted.

According to a party news release, of the other 26 delegates, there will be five at-large delegates elected at an upcoming state convention. Eighteen will be elected during congressional district meetings; three others are Republican National Committee delegates. None are bound by the primary results.

So, of the 20 delegates at stake today, a number of those will certainly go to Mitt. I don't know exactly how the math is supposed to work here. If this poll is any barometer, I'm guessing he picks up at least 5 of the 20. Then after the caucus and the conclave and the Etching and the Sketching or whatever the hell else happens, what are the odds Mitt picks up most if not all of the remaining 26 too? Pretty damn good, I'd say.

Mitt is (finally) starting to pick up the endorsements of angsty twitchy Republicans ready to get the primary fail-a-thon wrapped up. Even especially angsty and twitchy South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint appears to be climbing on board. And even though Louisiana is famous for its political contrarianism, the fact that the bulk of the delegates will be awarded by party insiders like Jay Dardenne and Mike Strain who endorsed Mitt earlier this week, is likely to negate this impulse. But hey, if you're a GOP primary voter, don't let any of that ruin it for you. By all means have fun mashing the meaningless buttons on your ballot today. Really.

And while you're there, please feel free to vote against as many of these Council-At-Large candidates as you can. Lord knows they could use the discouragement.

Well I kind of did

Doesn't matter. Mitt will be the nominee.

Romney senior adviser Erich Fehrnstrom appeared Tuesday night on CNN, saying that the primaries tonight would be a success — that Romney's actual goal was to win a third of the delegates at stake in Alabama, Mississippi and the Pacific islands contests.

"I don't think anybody expected Mitt to win Alabama or Mississippi. As Mitt said early on in the campaign, this was an away game for him, and I think that's true."

No matter. I'm sticking with my longstanding two unwavering opinions about this GOP field. Mitt will be the nominee no matter what. And Santorum has a better shot at beating Obama.

Meanwhile I'm crestfallen over not getting to see Mitt give a speech tonight. I'll have to settle for the fact that I did get to see the end of Santorum's event in Lafayette tonight where a folk-ish Indigo Girls sounding musical act performed a song about how "God gave us the Bill of Rights" moments after Santorum railed against Obama for being the most shamefully ineffective job-killer in history. Tone-perfect surreality.

The snob racket

Last week on the campaign trail, Rick Santorum called President Obama a "snob" for having professed a desire to see more Americans attain some level of higher education.

Santorum, of course, was intentionally misrepresenting some innocuous remarks from the President about easing access to college, junior college, or technical school in order to culture-bait over evil librul college perfessers who want indoctrinate your children or some such nonsense.

Although he didn't have to, Obama went ahead and answered the absurd criticism anyway.

Speaking to the National Governors Association, Obama called on the group to protect public investment in education at a time of shrinking state budgets so that teachers remain in the classroom.

Obama did not mention GOP presidential candidate Santorum by name in his remarks. But the president paused to say he wanted to make a specific point when it came to higher education.

“When I speak about higher education we’re not just talking about a four-year degree,” Obama said. “We’re talking about somebody going to a community college and getting trained for that manufacturing job that now is requiring somebody walking through the door, handling a million-dollar piece of equipment. And they can’t go in there unless they’ve got some basic training beyond what they received in high school.”

At the end of this meaningless back and forth over higher learning, we're all a little dumber from having been witness at all.

What gets lost, though, in all this nobly un-snobbish rhetoric about the prosaic virtue of job training and trade schools and so forth is that the policy we're really discussing is pumping more money into the "for-profit college" racket.

One of the most sickening kleptocratic rackets to come down the pike are the for-profit “educators.” It’s a scheme that is almost totally enabled by Government funding via Title IV loans. The loans fit the modern American model of getting people heavily in debt, who then have little ability to pay the loan back. This has been described as “Sub prime Goes to College”.

But until that bubble pops, if it ever does, we'll just keep shoveling free money to the ITTs and DeVrys of the world regardless of whether they're doing their enrollees any good.

The performance of these schools in terms of keeping students around, or even graduating them, let alone preparing them for meaningful employment is poor. The next charts shows the churn and burn nature of these schools. The goal is to get the student to the first day of class, which immediately kicks in the liability for the tuition. If he or she quits a week later it makes no never-mind to the school.

Click the link to see the charts referred to in the quote. That is if you have the sort of fancy book learning that enables you to decipher charts and graphs, anyway. Sounds suspiciously snobby to me.

Nobody said it would be pretty

Kind of a rocky night for Mitt but he still comes out of Super Tuesday with the advantage. It's been interesting to see Santorum challenge.. but not quite knock off.. Romney in Michigan and now Ohio. I think Santorum's ability to appeal to disaffected rust belt voters using the same kind of superficial wrong-headed identity politics Republicans have been appealing to that demographic with since Reagan might make him a better challenger to Obama than Mitt will be. But, as I've said dozens of times, Santorum will not be the nominee... even if he does convince Newt to shut up. And what are the odds of that happening, anyway?

Energizing turnout

Contrary to all the hubub, Rick Santorum's crossover appeal is about more than just mischievous Michigan Democrats voting in the Republican primary.

No one knows who will win Michigan tonight, but the fact that it will be incredibly close has weakened Romney’s campaign by underscoring his enduring problems connecting with working class and evangelical voters. This was supposed to be an easy state for Romney, who took it by ten points in 2008’s primary and has outspent Santorum there this time by 2 to 1. Even headlines like Romney barely wins home state will not be doing him any favors. In the same way, as both Republicans and Democrats have commented, Rick Santorum may lose Michigan, but in a sense he’s already won by coming this close.

I expect Mitt will eke out a "win" tonight but it's going to be an embarrassing one. But beyond that there are many reasons to believe that Santorum would make a stronger challenger to Obama should he manage to gain the GOP nomination. He won't be the nominee but it won't be because he's any less "electable."

Maybe

Good grief, Mitt.

Asked by CNN moderator John King whether he would follow his father, former presidential candidate George Romney, and release more than a decade of returns, Romney was noncommittal.

“Maybe,” he said, prompting boos and jeers from the audience. “I don’t know how many years I’ll release.”

I was out while Newt was answering the question about his ex-wife with a prolonged "Fuck You," but my open relationship with this campaign allows that sort of thing. By the time I got to my TV, Newt was on to telling us about his big thinking about doing big things which is okay since we already know he's a big person.

Let's see, what else?

Mitt attacked Newt for having only 4 years experience as Speaker compared to Mitt's 25 years experience in business. But if you score it in terms of damage done to people's lives, it all works out kind of evenly. Maybe he should have converted to dog years.

Mitt also told us something about being, "from the real streets of America," video evidence of which is provided below.



Paul and Santorum held an elevated discussion on the merits of putting more Americans out of work so as to depress the price of the consumer goods they won't be manufacturing and so won't be able to afford anyway. I think Santorum even suggested more tax credits to "make American manufacturers competitive" or something like that. Perhaps he meant for them to be able to purchase suicide nets.

Mitt and Newt both seemed eager to outsource immigration enforcement to Visa and Mastercard.

Paul appeared to suggest that abortions happen because money is fungible before concluding that "South Carolina is known for its respect for liberty" which was almost as funny as Newt's closing plea that we vote for him as a means to avoid "radicalism."

The bobbleheads are all saying that Newt and Santorum "won" this debate. Whatever that means, it's pretty obvious that Mitt lost.. or at least looked (even) worse than he had in the 70 previous such appearances. Anyway, I'm going to change the channel now so I don't have to listen to Erick Erickson talk anymore. I suggest you do the same.

Because I feel obligated to take a guess at this

The big shocking revelation I just made up would be I think Huntsman will overtake Paul tonight in New Hampshire. Other than that, I got nothing.

Mitt: 32%

Huntsman: 22%

Paul: 20%

Santorum: 12%

Newt: 10%

Perry: Hello, I'm actually on this ballot too, I think.


Update: Looks like I may have overestimated the Huntsmania.

And another one gone

FDL: Santorum about to crash now in New Hampshire.

I know we're all supposed to be watching South Carolina more closely anyway, and that we're supposed to be talking about the latest week's happenings at the circus and all but this still is looking like Mitt is going to take the nomination no matter what.

Iowa Post-Mortem

I stayed up just late enough last night to watch a furnance-faced Mitt Romney speed read through a speech like a coked up version of the guy who recites the legalese at the end of a 30 second radio ad for a car dealership. Except, unlike the ad guy, Mitt was really bad at it. At one point he attempted, for whatever reason, to add in a few lines from America The Beautiful but ended up slurring something about "amber waves of rain" before getting on to the MSRP part.

Mitt's a pretty wooden actor so it's difficult to know if he was exultant or just pissed but there can be little doubt he wanted the room to know he was excited. And why shouldn't he be? Here's Mitt leaving Iowa with an ever-so-slight 8 vote win over Crazy Hopeless Alternative Candidate Of The Week Rick Santorum which entitled him to.. well actually just 13 of 25 delegates.

But, on the other hand, Iowa was supposed to be the phase of the primary where the turbulent anti-Mitt imperative coalesced around a spokesperson with a legitimate chance at denying him the nomination. Instead it flirted with a series of laughably non-viable alternatives in a desperate game of spin-the-bottle which happened to be pointing at Santorum on the day the caucus was held.

Don't worry. It won't stay there long. Santorum's "victory" speech was maybe even funnier than Romney's. Not only did he have to suddenly pretend that he had been doing and saying things in Iowa all this time that anyone had paid any attention to, but he had to do it with that icky smirk on his face. You know the one that says to the world this is a man deeply conflicted over whether to be a corrupt douche or a sanctimonious weirdo from one minute to the next? Yeah that one. Expect to hear a lot more about that between now and the time Santorum becomes completely irrelevant again. Probably Saturday.

Meanwhile former Crazy Hopeless Alternative Candidate Of The Week Michele Bachmann is finally out. For a while last night it wasn't clear what she was going to do. At one point she said "I am not a politician" and then moments later insisted to supporters that she was not dropping out of the political campaign she had been engaged in since last summer. And then today she's gone.

But if last night's results are any indication no one will notice. Bachmann's poor performance, most perturbingly, screwed up my projected numbers. Because Bachmann, Roemer, Huntsman, and the remnants of Herman Cain couldn't combine for more than 5% of the total, there was far more Crazy vote out there to spread between Santorum and Paul than I expected. Also note that even though 123,000 Iowa Republicans is a ridiculously small number of voters for us to be giving all this attention to, it is also a record high turnout for a GOP caucus. More highly motivated Crazy Caucus Goers than at any time in history were on hand last night, they were less divided than they could have been if Bachmann still pulled any interest at all, and, even still, Mitt finished first.

So Bachmann's departure shouldn't affect Mitt's ability to fend off the Crazy vote in future primaries. And now that Rick Perry has apparently decided not to go back to Texas and secede from the race, the Slightly Less Crazy Anti-Mitt vote he split with Newt in Iowa will probably split again in South Carolina.

Restless GOP voters may not have much confidence in Mitt but the rest of their field is a mess. And now, because of the long experience in Iowa, they know it. I'm sure there's still some time left for one half-hearted feint at a stand in South Carolina but after that, don't expect there to be much sport left in this race.