Who Will Win the GOP Nomination for President?

The Republican primaries for the presidential nomination have finally started in earnest. It's time for voters, especially Democrats and independents who have no intention of voting for Republicans to examine the chances of the various GOP candidates to see who is going to come out of the pack to challenge President Obama.

We can ignore the hyperbole of the GOP candidates as they argue about who is more conservative, who wants to abolish more federal agencies and who can act more apoplectic about the prospects of another 4 years of Obama. In the end my guess is a majority of Republican primary voters will go with the candidate they think has the most financial backing. Additionally as the prospects for unseating Obama dim the more likely it is they will settle for the candidate whose turn it is, the next in line. It's convenient for confused Republicans that "the next man up" also happens to be "corporations are people" Mitt Romney, the candidate with more Wall St backing than anyone. Seeing as few Republican voters or anyone else really trusts him or shares his burning desire to see him in the White House he's becoming the perfect candidate for them to sacrifice at the head of the ticket. As one South Carolina Republican said he thinks of Romney as the "central casting candidate". He looks like what they think a president ought to look like. The GOP establishment is allowing the old untrustworthy moderate deadwood (first McCain in 2008 and now Romney) to wear out their welcomes while leaving the Democrats to clean up the messes left over from the last 30 years of their failed experiment in trickle down economics. In 2016 there will be a new crop of candidates and maybe Republicans will find one they can really get excited about. It's been a long time since they've had a candidate they revered like Reagan and they don't have one this year.

Despite an effort by evangelicals to meet in Texas next weekend before the South Carolina primary to coalesce around a single candidate to oppose Romney they probably won't succeed and even if they do it will probably be too late. These religious right power brokers, hosts (and Rick Perry supporters) Paul and Nancy Pressler, and other panjandrums like Don Wildmon, the former chairman of the American Family Association (and a supporter of Newt Gingrich); former presidential candidate Gary Bauer (who has just endorsed Rick Santorum); and Focus on the Family Founder James Dobson might have enough sway to convince Perry and possibly Gingrich to drop out but that won't change the trajectory anywhere but South Carolina and I'm guessing not even there.

Now that's not to say Romney can coast to the convention in Tampa. His poll numbers have steadily dropped, as I write this on Sunday afternoon (1/08) he's lost 8 points in the Suffolk poll in New Hampshire, down from 43% right after Iowa to 35%. In last night's debate the other candidates continued squabbling amongst themselves much to the surprise of the media. Chastened by the coverage they went after him harder in this morning's debate on NBC. While some of Romney's slide in NH can be attributed to attacks by other candidates, left leaning bloggers, and the White House I suspect most of it is self inflicted. The more voters see videos like this the less they like him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjxCQaqhydA

As a candidate there's nothing remarkable about Romney. He's just another very rich Republican with a lot of other very rich Republicans' money behind him. Still pretty wooden on the stump, the few policy papers he's released are standard GOP junk. According to the Tax Policy Center his recently released tax plan would raise taxes on people making less than $40,000 a year and lower them for millionaires by another 9% - what else is new with Republicans? Remember, John McCain an awful candidate himself, who couldn't even remember Romney's name the other day and mistakenly endorsed Obama momentarily before correcting himself, beat him in 2008.

One of his worst features is his poorly aimed criticisms at Obama. For instance to disprove the attacks others have leveled at him that he's just Obama-lite or secretly still a moderate he lashed out at Obama earlier this week for announcing $480 billion in defense cuts over the next 10 years saying "absolutely not, we must protect our military". That's ridiculous overblown bombast. Doesn't he realize the agreement John Boehner and the tea party demanded in the debt ceiling deal last summer calls for even larger defense cuts? His pattern of overheated rhetoric to endear himself to the tea party base will come back to haunt him in the general election.

Of course appealing to the tea party and the religious right hurts all their candidates. According to a study done by David E. Campbell, an associate professor of political science at Notre Dame, and Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard the tea party is the least popular political group or person in the country out of 24 with the Christian right coming in 21st.   

Republican primaries before April 1st now award delegates proportionally instead of on a winner take all basis wth one big exception, Florida January 31st will still give all it's 50 delegates to the winner as will most later states. Some say that should slow Romney down enough for someone else like Santorum or Gingrich to overtake him. I say it's not going to happen. The last thing the RNC or Republican voters want is to drag the primaries out all spring for the dubious benefit of candidates who have no realistic chance of winning the general election. The DNC already has enough juicy video in the bank of all these guys to run attack ads until November. And then there's money, campaigns are expensive.

None of the rest of the field has the kind of money Romney has, or his financial backing. He made a lot of his money as a vulture capitalist, he's still getting over a million a year from his former company Bain Capital and is said to be personally worth between $200 and $250 million dollars. He refuses to release his tax returns and won't divulge who his financial bundlers are, which is unheard of in presidential politics. He had his aides buy up the hard drives of their computers and destroy all emails when he left the lone office he was elected to, the Massachusetts governorship, again unprecedented secrecy. His approval ratings went down every year he was governor of MA and he wouldn't have been re-elected if he had run again in 2006. He's flip flopped on about every position he's ever held, he knows nothing about foreign policy as evidenced by a laughably ignorant op-ed he wrote in late 2010 attacking Obama over the pending START treaty which virtually every foreign policy expert and knowledgeable former Republican politician supported.

Gingrich is right calling Romney on his "pious baloney" about not being a career politician. Romney ran for senate in 1994 and lost to Teddy Kennedy during the Republican wave when he blew a lead in September. He was Governor of Massachusetts for one term from 2003 to 2007 — when he would have lost re-election — and then immediately ran for president, where he lost the Republican nomination to John McCain in 2008.

“You’ve been running consistently for years and years and years,” said Gingrich. “So this idea that suddenly, citizenship showed up in your mind — just level with the American people, you’ve been running since the 1990s.”

His claim that he's not a career politician is a bad joke on a par with his sidesplitters that he's middle class and unemployed. Gingrich is right, Romney's been a politician for years, just not a successful one.

It's that money that makes him the frontrunner and makes him dangerous to Obama's re-election prospects as Gingrich discovered to his chagrin in Iowa when he was buried under millions of dollars of negative ads, most of it spent by anonymous Romney backers through a Super Pac run by his former aides.

So while Republican candidates search for anyone but Romney and find them all lacking keep your eye on the guy who will be their last man standing. As bad as he is it will be Romney.