Renowned political insider Robert Shrum wrote in his column for The Week that Mitt Romney is standing on the precipice. One false step could send Mitt into that deep canyon etched with the names of men and women who might have been President but fell off the cliff, never to be heard from again. Republicans have gone from crowning Romney with the nomination to pulling out their hair at the huge mess that exists in the Republican Party. Shrum writes in "Romney on the Precipice"
At CPAC, Mitt eked out a narrow margin over Rick Santorum after the Romney campaign bought registrations to pad his total and the organization changed the voting rules in a way that benefited the establishment choice. The change was aimed at stopping Ron Paul, who'd won CPAC before, but didn't attend this year. It's part of a pattern in this year's GOP contest — from a "mistake" in Iowa that stole Santorum's victory on election night to the sudden rediscovery of previously unenforced rules in Virginia that are keeping Santorum and Newt Gingrich off the state's primary ballot.
The political commentator writes that unless Romney can eke out a win in Michigan it could be all over for the man from Utah or is it Massachusetts or is it Michigan?
As empty — or craven — as Romney is, you can't beat no one with no one. But it should worry the Romney campaign that in the PPP data, his favorable/unfavorable rating among Republicans is just 44 percent to 43 percent, while Santorum's favorable is 64 percent, and his unfavorable just 22 percent.
I still believe Santorum is a hopeless choice for the GOP, although I very much hope he's the nominee. And I see Newt Gingrich, the Colonel Blimp of this spectacle, as a "safety net" who in his ego-fuelled drive toward the bitter end may save Romney — to use his own phrase — from a "very poor" performance in the next round of primaries.
Romney still has all the usual assets — money, structure, endorsements — although the once penurious Santorum raised $3 million, at a clip of a million a day, after his February 7 triumphs. Most of the Santorum money is coming on the Internet from a grassroots that seems to be telling Mitt: "Don't tread on me."
So the bottom line is this: The nomination may be Romney's by the standard playbook and the prevailing GOP tradition of primogeniture, but he actually has to win it with real voters — and Santorum presents a real threat on February 28.
Shrum has doubts if the bitter and expensive attacks that Romney launched on Gingrich and Cain to bring them down to their political knees will work a third time.
In Boston, the Romney forces are plotting how the empire strikes back. Perhaps they'll even consider asking casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to keep funding the Gingrich super PAC; it matters less that the PAC would attack Mitt than that, in the end, Newt will continue to drain support from Santorum. If Gingrich drops out or is forced out because he runs out of money, PPP reports, 58 percent of his vote would shift to Santorum, and 22 percent to Romney. Boston can't afford that.
Surely the battle plan includes Mitt doubling down on doing anything, saying anything, shedding any remnant of his own record to appease the tea partiers and the culture warriors — while, the strategists have to pray, holding onto the suburban Republicans and the moderate remnant who believe Romney doesn't really mean it. But that's precisely the problem the "severely conservative" candidate faces: He sounds like an unconvinced and unconvincing mouthpiece with his pollster and handlers functioning as tag-team ventriloquists.
So that leaves Boston's other front, the kind of thermonuclear ad offensive that vaporized Newt in Florida. I know, it was the super PAC that did it, and of course Romney didn't know anything about it. And I know too that Gingrich is pretty good at blowing himself up. Now the Romney side has to launch again, but training the warheads of February on Santorum could backfire. Republicans could decide that Romney has gone nuclear one time too many.
Shrum discusses the fact that unlike Clinton and Obama last election where both were highly regarded by the other side, no one likes anyone in the Republican field. In the end, Michigan will tell us if it is soon to be the end of Romney.
We are on the precipice of uncertainty in a campaign whose path once and then again seemed predestined. The logic still says Mitt is it. But life, even in politics, isn't always logic. He can't lose his way to victory — and if he loses again in Michigan, the race will be blown wide open, at least for a while. All the while Romney will be weakened by the continued shape-shifting and out of touch indifference that have already brought him negative ratings from independents and general election voters. And with a plague of pollsters now showing him behind Obama, his electability argument frays — and he may be deprived of the last refuge of his opportunism.
As Steve Schmidt, John McCain's campaign manager in 2008, has observed, the drawn out Democratic primary contest that year reflected a truth that strengthened the party for the fall — Democrats wanted to nominate both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton; this year Republicans want none of their candidates. Still someone has to prevail.
The improbably named Foster Friess, the wealthy investor whose largess has sustained Santorum through the winter of his campaign, tells this joke: "A conservative, a liberal and a moderate walk into a bar... [T]he bartender says: 'Hi, Mitt.'"
That's what nags about this manufactured man. So despite six years of campaigning, an ocean of cash, the imprimatur of GOP elites, and the consensus of the commentariat, it's Romney who now stands on the precipice. Ironically, his Mormonism may be the least of his difficulties and a vital asset; it certainly was in Nevada, and should be in Arizona. But now it's Michigan that matters. Maybe, just maybe, you can't be as severely phony as Mitt Romney and win the nomination early on — or even at all.
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