The real problem is Ron Paul.
There are really only two viable conservatives left in the race, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. Unfortunately, after Paul and Romney are accounted their irreducible minimum percentage of votes in the primaries there remain only about 50% for Santorum and Gingrich to divide up. When we hear that 75% of the Republican Party by polls and in the Iowa caucuses repudiated Mitt Romney, we must understand that the Paul vote has nothing to do with Romney.
The Ron Paul vote is sui generis which means that it is an outlier, it is largely unaffected by current events, such as developments in Iran, indeed, Ron Paul's support is largely unaffected by any extraneous considerations except his conception of fiscal matters. His acolytes have seized on one elemental truth, the federal government has overstepped its constitutional bounds, it has violated the 10th amendment, as a result it has run up a debt which threatens the very existence of the Republic, and Ron Paul can rightly be heard to say, "I told you so."
Ron Paul has been exceedingly effective at moving the Republican Party to the right but he is and will be a singular failure at moving the country to the right. When the Democrats attempt to push the country to the left by explicitly telling people what they are doing they lose in landslides. Ron Paul says, "I want to enforce the Constitution" but people hear, "I am going to take away your Social Security check." The Democrats got smart, they run right and govern left. The Republicans have an advantage, the country says it wants a conservative view, the constitutional view, but the country actually tends to vote its purse. The electorate wants to hear conservatives preach constitutional purity but they want their Social Security check on time.
The Democrats win elections not not just by demagoguing the Republican's fiscal austerity but by supplying the rationale by which people can have their self-righteousness and their big government too.
One major way they do this by playing the race card. They deflect the issue away from our looming fiscal disaster and call their opposition racists. That ends the debate and the music plays on.
Their demagoguery is versatile and there is no question that Ron Paul will be painted to be such an extremist that he could not possibly win an election against Obama. Even a Republican with a good pedigree will have difficulty combating $1 billion worth of Obama demagoguery and the media's echo chamber. Ron Paul has no chance whatsoever.
The arithmetic in the primaries is inexorable. Romney maintains is 25% because he has won the electability issue. This is not to pass judgment on whether Romney's claim to electability is really viable, it is simply to identify the rationale for his support.
The challengers to Romney have not been able to shut down his campaign because of their own failings. Every one of them has put a foot down wrong and has been punished as a result. Cain has a zipper problem, Gingrich baggage problem, Bachmann a gravitas problem, Perry a goofus problem, and so it goes.
When one of the rivals sticks his head above the parapet Romney's satellite organizations kill them with negative ads. Because it is so difficult for the non-Romney candidate to gain traction when there is only 25% electorate available to him, Romney, with his money and surefooted campaign, remains the leader. If Mitt Romney has 25% and Paul 20 to 25%, and the challenger 25%, there is only 25% more from which to get votes if they cannot be taken from either Paul or Romney. Circumstances demonstrate that it is difficult to take votes from either the fanatics who support Paul or from the entrenched establishment which supports Romney.
The Paul votes for the most part are unaffected by reason and, shamefully, are unaffected by the stark truth that they might well hand the election to Barack Obama. Much less are they affected by the truth that they might hand the nomination to Mitt Romney. The latter would be a shame but the former would be a national tragedy.
Nevertheless, they remain adamant because they are self-righteous.
