Motley Moose – Archive

Polls close in a few hours and the Florida GOP primary will probably determine the course of the nomination race and possibly cement Romney’s frontrunner status.

Aggregate polling has shown a very slight tightening but the only significant variation among pollsters is the magnitude of the lead Romney enjoys although most agree he is now the expected victor.  One interesting exception has been the recent Dixie Strategies/The News-Press/First Coast News poll which predicts a dead heat:

Our poll has Gingrich leading Romney by an eyelash – 35.46 percent to 35.08.

Could our poll be right and all the others wrong? Maybe.

In polling terminology, our poll is what’s called an outlier (for a set of numerical data, any value that is markedly smaller or larger than other values).

However, there is one factor that works in our favor. The News-Press poll’s sample size (2,567 likely voters) is three to four times larger than that of other pollsters and thus our poll has a very small margin of error (1.93 percent) with a confidence level of 95 percent.

Scott Bihr – Why our poll may be right News-Press 28 Jan 12

Given the brawl that this campaign has become it will be interesting to see how the Gingrich/Romney battle in Florida influences the remaining contests.  In spite of Gingrich’s assertion that he will carry the fight all the way to the convention it is pretty hard to see how he could if he loses big to Romney tonight.  On the other hand a narrow victory or loss could derail Romney’s presumed coronation, given his immense media buy and his campaign’s apparently reckless attitude toward managing expectations in this contest.

The campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has entered a new phase and it is beginning to look like support for Romney and Gingrich aligns with the deepening division between “establishment” Republicans and the insurgent Tea Party movement.  We have seen Tea Party support crystallise around Gingrich, even though he is an “imperfect vessel,” largely because they are even more unwilling to support the mainstream candidate.  

The Republican party is experiencing an insurgency among the same disaffected cohorts they had enlisted in their campaigns against Obama and it’s causing a degree of panic within their ranks evident in the sheer volume of negative campaigning they have deployed, most recently in the Florida primary, where their advertising buy is approaching $13.8 million; not to mention the unprecedented, co-ordinated public attacks on Gingrich’s candidacy by former and current legislative Republicans.  Consider the reaction from the self-appointed spokeswoman of the Tea Party movement, Sarah Palin:

What we saw with this ridiculous opposition dump on Newt was nothing short of Stalin-esque rewriting of history. It was Alinsky tactics at their worst.

But this whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party grassroots and independent Americans who are sick of the politics of personal destruction used now by both parties’ operatives with a complicit media egging it on. In fact, the establishment has been just as dismissive of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Newt is an imperfect vessel for Tea Party support, but in South Carolina the Tea Party chose to get behind him instead of the old guard’s choice. In response, the GOP establishment voices denounced South Carolinian voters with the same vitriol we usually see from the left when they spew hatred at everyday Americans “bitterly clinging” to their faith and their Second Amendment rights. The Tea Party was once again told to sit down and shut up and listen to the “wisdom” of their betters.

Sarah Palin – Cannibals in GOP Establishment Employ Tactics of the Left Facebook 27 Jan 12

That Palin would identify the GOP establishment as the opposition and characterise their behaviour as “cannibalism” suggests the famous aphorism on the French revolution:

La révolution dévore ses enfants.

Georg Büchner, Danton’s Death, Act I (1835)

The revolution, like Saturn, devours its own children.  And Republicans are setting themselves up for an inevitable banquet on Newt and his supporters; a recipe for a disastrous nomination fight entirely of their own making and a Tea Party cohort even angrier at them than Obama, if such a thing is possible.  The challenge for Democrats is to stand back and let them have it out, for now.  They seem to be making an excellent job of it so far.

In an hour or so the GOP candidates still standing will square off in the last debate before the Florida primary.  With poll position changing hands between Newt and Mitt this week expect to see some strong performances.  If Newt delivers anything like this, as he did yesterday, it will definitely be worth watching live:

“We are not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs who have foreclosed on Florida and is himself a stock holder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together and understand what this is all about,” Gingrich declared in a preamble to a decidedly angry stump speech.

“In 1992, he gave money to Democrats for Congress,” he added at another point. “He voted in the Democratic primary for Paul Tsongas, the most liberal candidate. This is the man who stood up the other night and questioned my credentials as a Reaganite? This is the kind of gall they have, to think we are so stupid and we are so timid that we will let someone who voted for Paul Tsongas — in 1994 he is running for the U.S. Senate to the left of Teddy Kennedy. Do you know how hard it is to run to the left of Teddy Kennedy? And he says, ‘You know, I don’t want to go back to the Reagan-Bush years, I was an independent then.'”

“He won’t tell you that now, because he is counting on us not having YouTube,” Gingrich said. “That’s how much he thinks we are stupid. And we are not stupid. The message we should give Mitt Romney is: we aren’t that stupid and you aren’t that clever.”

Sam Stein – Mitt Romney ‘Is Counting On Us Not Having YouTube’ Huffington Post 25 Jan 12

Heh, grab some popcorn and join the fun.

One would be forgiven for confusion over the issue of Speaker Gingrich’s ethics investigation given the conflicting claims made in the course of the current GOP nomination.  Out of eighty-four complaints made against Gingrich the Select Committee on Ethics made a case out of three, two were not pursued because he had ceased the offending activity leaving one case against him for improperly claiming tax-exempt status for a partisan college course he taught known as “Renewing American Civilization:”

On December 13, 1996 the Committee issued a [Statement of Alleged Violations] charging Mr. Ginrich with three counts of violations of House Rules. Two counts concerned the failure to seek legal advice in regard to the 501(c)(3) projects, and one count concerned the providing the Committee with information which he knew or should have known was inaccurate.

In the Matter of Representative Newt Gingrich House Committee on Ethics 17 Jan 97

After a year of investigation the bipartisan Committee found as follows:

It was the opinion of the Members of the subcommittee and the Special Counsel, that based on the facts as they are currently known, the appropriate sanction for the conduct described in the original Statement of Alleged Violations is a reprimand and the payment of $300,000 toward the cost of the preliminary investigation.

In the Matter of Representative Newt Gingrich House Committee on Ethics 17 Jan 97

On first principles Gingrich is right that he didn’t pay a fine and it is arguable that the sanction was “narrow and technical,” as he has been suggesting since before the finding was released.  But it is hardly an exoneration, as he has claimed, and the complaints which didn’t make it through the hurdles imposed by a majority Republican House at the time illustrate a pattern of deliberate flaunting of the laws of election finance, the rules of legislative probity and the regulations governing lobbying on a grandiose scale over almost the whole of Gingrich’s congressional career.

Image: J Scott Applewhite/AP

The Republican party is in crisis, as has been evident for the bulk of this nomination race, but now its chickens have come home to roost.  The Tea Party experiment, already causing second thoughts and ruction among establishment and legislative Republicans, and their sponsors, was being assiduously ignored as the well-oiled Romney coronation rolled ever on while a clown-car of unlikely aspirants came and went, to the mortification of the electorate and the evident relief of party elders.  

However one rarely sees such a lengthy, cautious, well-funded campaign collapse in a single evening as Romney’s did at Thursday’s debate; a performance undermining with prevarication and dissembling the narrative his handlers had so carefully crafted for him over previous months.  

It was clearly his worst performance in several seasons of campaigning and at that moment it proved catastrophic.  Every pre-existing doubt about his candidacy was exacerbated by his weaselling over his tax returns; he plainly can’t be trusted, the gold standard of a presidential candidacy in either party.  And it changed the course of the campaign going forward.  He seemed damaged goods even before Gingrich cleaned his clock tonight.

So Newton Leroy Gingrich, the “bad boy” of Nineties conservatism, swoops in, channelling working-class, Right-wing angst, to deliver a crushing blow to the only credible argument Romney had; the slender one of electability from the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Obama.

Clearly the “base” would prefer going down in flames with Gingrich than slitting their wrists in a warm bath with Romney.