President Obama raised a lot more money for his own campaign in the third quarter than Mitt Romney and Rick Perry combined. What’s more interesting is that Rick Perry outraised Romney by $3 million, despite having a catastrophic September on the campaign trail. I see a lot of articles about how the Republican Establishment is coalescing around Romney as more and more people see him as the inevitable nominee. But that isn’t translating into big fundraising numbers. You’d think every hedge fund manager and banker in the country would be throwing money at Romney’s feet, but they seem to still be hedging their bets. Maybe it’s because Wall Street can see that the Republicans are engaged in Alice in Wonderland economics. Whatever else you might say about them, the people who work on Wall Street do understand basic economics. Many of them are more interested in how to game the system than in supporting a stable, fair, and even playing field, but they know what will cause budget deficits and that all the Republicans’ economic plans would do catastrophic damage to the health of the economy.
Meanwhile, rank-and-file Republicans continue to reject Romney as they try out new flavor of the month candidates. This month it is Haagen Dazs Black Walnut. Next month, maybe it’ll be Newt’s turn. Peach Cobbler, anyone?
I remember this same conversation happening to McCain in 2007 when his campaign was literally dead. Republicans play this game all the time and we should ignore it. Unless Ronald Reagan’s corpse can be called to service or if Jesus Christ himself decides to throw his hat into the ring, Romney will be the nominee. Fait Accompli! Who else is there? The R’s just don’t want you or I or the media to know that yet. Also, the fact that none of the other R’s are seriously trying to take him down proves that the fix is in.
The thinking goes: Who cares if Romney’s a Mormon when you have a Muslim in the White House? There was a method to the years and years of madness surrounding Obama’s religion, and the fruit has been born in the name of a Mormon, which can’t be so bad. Right?
Jesus Christ? Are you kidding? They’d crucify him.
I suspect you’re right, but I still wonder about the Mormonism. I mean, all religions seem pretty equally crazy to me, but are fundies going to vote for someone who believes that Jesus came to America, for example, and that, according to Wikipedia:
God the Father is a physical being of “flesh and bones.” According to Joseph Smith, God “once was a man like one of us and…once dwelled on an earth the same as Jesus Christ himself did in the flesh and like us.”
In Mormonism, ‘Heavenly Mother’ or t’he Mother in Heaven’ is the mother of human spirits and the wife of God the Father. (Some Mormons only, apparently.)
Mormon cosmology teaches that the Earth is not unique, but just one of many inhabited planets, each planet created for the purpose of bringing about the immortality and “eternal life” (i.e., the highest degree of salvation) of humanity. These worlds were, according to doctrine, created by Jesus.
I mean, asking people to believe that a tax rate of 0 will lead to infinite revenue is one thing. But asking them to believe that Jesus wandered around Ohio? They know Jesus.
I’m not talking about that Jesus Christ. Why, he’s the premiere DFH with all the healing the sick rhetoric and feeding the poor and all that socialist jazz. I meant the new, even more mythical Republican Jesus: the one built like Rambo, has blonde hair, wearing a tri-corner hat and carries an M-16 on his back, has his 2nd Amendment in his pocket with a Bible in one hand and Planned Parenthood picket in the other.
Oh! Right, of course. J-bo Christ. My mistake.
I don’t think that’s what’s going on at all – the media is seriously pimping for Romney and it’s pretty obvious that the elites want Romney too.
No – it’s not that the Republicans don’t want us to know anything. It’s that the Republican leadership can’t convince the Republican base to fall in line yet. The base is casting around for anybody BUT Romney. They’re lodging protest vote after protest vote. And when their protest vote candidate turns out to be a jackass or (worse to them) insufficiently conservative, they look for another one.
First of all they are attacking him somewhat. It doesn’t really matter – the folks who are going to support Romney will continue to support Romney.
Romney’s support is holding solid at between 20-25% of likely Republican primary voters. So why attack him directly and possibly generate some sympathy for him? Why not try to position yourself so that you appeal to the 75% who are not currently voting for Romney? If you look at some of the links in Nate’s post that I link to above you can see that there’s a swath of voters who are hanging onto each candidate and a good sized chunk (15%) continually saying “None of the above”. Convince those Gingrich voters that they need to pick a different guy and you think they’re going to Romney? Or those Bachmann voters?
Right now Romney’s best chance to win is to keep as many marginal candidates in play as possible for as long as possible. If it gets down to him vs. just one nutter too quickly he runs a high probability of losing. If he can keep two or three nutters splitting the anybody but Romney vote while simultaneously not making themselves credible enough for the remaining “sane Republicans” to dump Romney, he wins.
I honestly will not be surprised if we find out later that Romney himself is finding ways to funnel money towards Herman Cain and/or Rick Perry and/or Michelle Bachmann. And Ron Paul – he needs to keep that 15% of Ron Paul support tied up with Paul so that it doesn’t decide to support a protest candidate instead of Romney (or instead of just staying home on primary day).
I suspect you underestimate the nuttiness of much of the base. The GOP lost control of its House members and may have lost power over its voters as well. I’m surprised no one is talking about a serious 3rd-party Christianist/teabagger movement if Romney does get the nod.
Has this ever not been true in twenty years? Has any recent sitting president ever not had the financial advantage due to incumbency over any challenger?
I wonder what our political discourse would be like if we weren’t reinventing the wheel every six months.
Texas oil. And Perry’s candidacy was brand new this quarter. These are basically his first out of the gate, most enthusiastic fundraisers. Mitt’s been running for president for seven years now, in contrast.
Just wondering when Rep’s & their TPartiers are going to take a look at their current crop in office…how most are turning a blind eye to jobs creation, chewing away at women’s rights, giving money away hand over fist to the 1%, and come to think of it pretty much igoring their promises to the TParty that brought them, oh yeah and then count how many are under recall.
Now that Perry is on a crash flightplan, Cain’s 999 plan is digging him into a political hole (we’re laughing and Right is horrified) Romney will be picking up the pieces. Rove’s probably right to give up on the Presidency and turn his energies towards holding onto Congress and trying to make headway with Senate.
I think you give the Wallstreeters and their nationwide brood far more credit than they deserve. They may or may not know about basic economics (Alan Greenspan being just one prime case of the latter), but they don’t care about what will cause budget deficits and that all the Republicans’ economic plans would do catastrophic damage to the health of the economy. As we’re seeing right now, thieves do just as well in a dying economy as a robust one — maybe even better.
The plutocracy has been betting on the ignorant and the crazy for decades, and they’ve won the game big time. They happily backed Bush and Reagan, so why not Perry or Cain? The only real difference between them is the marketing. My guess is that the kleptocracy has found that it doesn’t much matter to their interests who’s in the WH, so they’ll concentrate their fire on Congressional races. If they’re as clever as you seem to think, they might even realize that a GOP president presiding over continued economic could cause some fundamental rethinking about the way the whole system works.
Why give money to Romney when you already own Obama?
the ONLY thing people are passionate about when it comes to Willard is..
THAT HIS CHECKS CLEAR
without the money, they wouldn’t give him the time of day.