Dave me, Dave me, Dino!
Posted on 04/04/2012 7:34:47 PM PDT by VinL
Coming off of his primary wins in liberal Maryland and DC and a relentlessly negative campaign in Wisconsin, Mitt Romney’s campaign has signaled to the other candidates for the Republican nomination for President that there will be no let-up in the negative tenor of his campaign going into Pennsylvania and the other spring primaries. Mitt Romney As Bloomberg’s Heidi Przybyla noted, the “defining feature of the 2012 Republican presidential primary race” has been Romney’s relentlessly negative campaign. According to Przybyla’s research, “Since the contests began, Restore Our Future has spent $35 million on commercials attacking Santorum and Newt Gingrich” and “just $1.1 million promoting Romney.”
According to Przybyla’s reporting, Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group, Romney’s super PAC Restore Our Future aired 16 negative ads 41,612 times in GOP primary states such as Michigan, Florida and Colorado.
Romney’s negative ads, many of them factually questionable, have carpet bombed the conservatives in the race. As Romney has unleashed this wave of negativity, the campaigns of conservatives from Rick Perry, to Michele Bachmann, to Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich have withered, leaving Rick Santorum as the last conservative standing to bear the brunt of Romney’s attacks.
However, these attacks have done nothing to build support for Mitt Romney, especially among movement conservatives, and to the extent that Romney can claim front runner status it is because he has come to be seen as the “least worst” alternative by rank-and-file Republican primary voters.
Romney’s campaign has already made clear that it will employ the same hard-edged tactics that he used to crush Newt Gingrich in Florida and overtake Santorum in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin, to defeat Santorum in his home state of Pennsylvania.
Whether Romney’s slime machine campaign will work against Santorum in Pennsylvania remains to be seen – it didn’t work against Gingrich in his home state of Georgia where Newt buckled down and ran like he was running for county sheriff to neutralize the charge that he was an out of touch Washington insider.
Even if one accepts the fuzzy math that Romney claims puts him half way to the 1,144 delegates he needs to clinch the Republican nomination – and we don’t – his negative campaign has left him with a substantial enthusiasm deficit, and no real base upon which to mount a winning campaign against Barack Obama.
As long as Romney relies solely on negative advertising to tear down his more conservative Republican opponents, without making the positive case for his own bona fides to be the Republican standard-bearer, conservatives will have little reason to support him.
Given the huge hole that leaves in the Republican base, the other candidates should prepare to stay in the race all the way to Tampa, knowing that if Romney’s delegate count doesn’t give him the nomination on the first ballot, conservatives whom he has failed to convince during the primaries will continue to look for an alternative until the roll is called and the last vote is counted.
AMEN!
Running against a lying moronic ignoramus communist Muslim [who is mentally ill] is pretty simple. Just put the description of the WH occupier in every Republican and PAC advertizement
BTW: I hope all conservatives are campaigning and voting in their respective Republican primaries for the real conservative if the incumbent is a RINO.
Well we sure as hell don't have one in Romney!
It looks pretty bleak regardless of the nominee.
That is why the house and SENATE are so important.
Mark Levin was covering this tonight. 91% of Romney ad dollars went to smearing GOP candidates and not promoting himself or bashing Obummer. What a swell guy. What burns me is that the GOPe is going to blame Conservatives that it is our unwillingness to roll over and allow Milt to be the nominee now that is damaging to the party. BS. Romney is the one who has singlehandedly destroyed party unity and any good will towards him. He can screw.
No they won't. Been here before, the press will start hammering the negative thing over and over again until Romney can't use his attack ads. There will be polls saying the people are sick of negative campaigning (which by the way is true) and the attack ads will be impossible to run.
So what does Romney do then? How does he campaign when his Alinsky ads are gone?
Dave me, Dave me, Dino!
Statist Romney or Socialist Obama? Hmmm. That’s like giving me a razor blade and giving me a choice to slit my wrists or my throat.
Do not fool yourself into thinking that Santorum and Newt wouldn’t have run vicious attack ads against Romney, if they had had the money. They would have done so in a heartbeat.
And it seems to me that the anti-Romney people on web-sites, blogs and Twitter are just as vicious; they just don’t have the money for a wider range of ads.
Politics is not tiddlywinks. This is the reality of extended primaries, and it is a repeat of what happened in 2000.
Fighting liberalism isn’t just about fighting one man, it’s about fighting an ideology. And if you let that ideology infect your own side at the highest levels how do you EVER put up a fight against it EVER again? What would have been more dangerous when fighting the Soviets, the Cold War as we fought it, or the Cold War if we elected a Soviet party member as our own president?
Actually, in this case, it is good news that they don't. Otherwise Obama would be reelected. Any Republican, even Ron Paul, is preferable to another Obama term and his appointments/executive orders/destruction of our military. He was caught on an open microphone conspiring to betray our missile defense system. He wants to strip us of our ability to prevent a nuclear attack and to respond to the same. There is no way I can take anyone seriously who equates any of the Republican nominees with this socialist traitor.
No way. Tell me what election cycle where one of the candidates spend 91% of their ad budget on attacking the other candidates. It never happened. All the money to destroy the other candidates and all he can muster is 41% of the GOP vote thus far with Rick coming in close in contests with a limited budget.
The other huge issue with Milt is that you can go down the list of the other three candidates and list at least 2 issues you know are important to them through their messaging. Milt has nothing. Even his economic plan is 59 points of muddy garbage. Romney is a huge loser that the GOPe is pushing hard for and they can't even give Conservatives a reason to vote for him other than he isn't Obummer.
They wouldn't have run dishonest, lying ads. Of course with Mitt, they wouldn't have needed to. Just look at the ads they did do on him. They pointed out his liberal record truthfully. Meanwhile the lefty liberal progressive Romney put out lying ads claiming Newt and Rick were liberals. Truth matters.
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