"America needs the Republican Party of Eisenhower, Reagan, the Bushes, and even Nixon" :
The Week
It was a Super Tuesday for Democrats
A battered Mitt Romney is still a near lock for the GOP nomination — and that's good news for Dems not just in 2012 but in 2016 too
March 7, 2012
By Robert Shrum
Robert Shrum was a senior adviser on Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign and chief strategist for John Kerry's 2004 campaign. He has advised 30 winning U.S. Senate campaigns and eight winning campaigns for governor.
It was a Super Tuesday for Democrats
Some excerpts :
Ohio exit polls reaffirmed that Romney hasn't reassured conservatives and evangelicals — or connected with blue-collar voters. Mitt swept New England states he will surely lose in the fall and won in Virginia because Santorum and Gingrich were off the ballot
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In addition to Tennessee, Mitt Romney lost Georgia and Oklahoma — and in the Great Plains, he finished third in North Dakota. He won handily in the Mormon-heavy caucuses in Idaho, barely squeaked by in Alaska.
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Next week appears bleak; the big action is in Romney-averse Mississippi, Alabama, and Kansas. His main chance may be in Hawaii; reporting in the wee hours, its votes are unlikely to modulate the outcomes elsewhere.
On the evidence, Romney is a recurringly hard sell in a political party that has morphed, as one GOP strategist privately puts it, into a sectarian religious party — where no matter how he bends to the right, the true believers will not be inclined to him. This leaves him with one tactic — heavy super PAC spending to trash Santorum — the expedient that let Romney eke out Ohio. Only 13 percent of all the pro-Romney ads there were pro-anything; they were relentlessly negative. Such tactics may soon prove ineffective; Santorum not only survived such a blitz in Tennessee, but triumphed over it.
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The long contest, the constant pandering, and his own tendency to sound like a political incarnation of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous have taken their toll on Romney as a general election candidate. In the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, his positive rating is now down to 28 percent, and his negative is 39 percent. The erosion continues week to week — and is compounded by real world events. As the economy improves, Romney's rationale wanes: Why do we need an out-of-touch, unlikeable, asset-stripping ex-CEO to secure a recovery that's already underway?
Obama's favorable rating is 20 points higher than Romney's, and his unfavorable is lower. In most polls, the president's lead over Romney is widening. There are the pro forma qualifiers — for example, a eurozone shock to the economy, or a conflict with Iran, which too many Republicans are recklessly inciting. But the prospect of the first seems increasingly remote, and the political fallout of a foreign crisis is unpredictable — except that when one hits, Americans tend to rally around the president.
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