Listen, if the base wanted to turn out, then it could have turned out. No one is forcing anyone to stay home.
If he wasn’t on the ballot, it’s because he failed to get on the ballot. If you want to win the nomination for president, you have to win primaries and in order to do that, you have to be on the ballot. He is smart enough to know that.
Had Newt, Perry, Santorum et al been on the ballot, I do no think they would have been removed from the ballot, so they all need to look at themselves on that one.
The press is going to ridicule anyone that isn’t a communist and that is all there is to it.
I’ve never heard Rush say anything particualry harsh against Newt or anyone else for that matter. He isn’t supporting anyone in this primary and he has stated so numerous times. Ann Coulter is a babbling idiot, and personally I don’t think anyone should listen to her.
I will agree that it is remarkable that he hasn’t dropped yet, but it’s kinda pointless now, and a lot of people are saying that he appears arrogant in not dropping out, but I don’t know.
I voted for Newt, but I am also a realist. He failed in convincing enough people that he should be a leader, and as a result, he is not likely to be a leader. There is no point in making excuses for him, he failed to connect thus he was passed over, and that is the history of this.
The reason Newt didn’t get on the ballot in Virginia is because the VA GOP workers decided they would require petitioners to also provide their ADDRESS. Only they didn’t tell anybody that. So they ended up throwing out enough petitioners that Newt and Santorum didn’t make it on the ballot. The Mitt and Ron Paul petitioners never got checked for addresses because the VA GOP head set an arbitrary “grace margin” - a certain number of excess signatures that would supposedly guarantee that the candidate had enough valid ones even if there was fraud. And Ron Paul and Mitt Romney had enough signatures that they fit into that grace margin.
IOW, as long as they had ENOUGH Mickey Mouse signatures on the petitions, the signatures on the petitions for that candidate would never be checked for validity. Newt and Santorum just missed that number (aw, shucks), Romney and Ron Paul just exceeded that number (imagine that), so Newt and Santorum’s signatures were checked and excluded because they didn’t have addresses provided - which was an extra requirement (not provided for by state law) that the VA GOP just sort of tacked on there without telling anybody. If there had been enough with addresses, they would have required mother’s maiden name, height and weight, or some other nonsense - whatever their whims told them because God knows nobody has to know what the rules are before the rules apply...
And now you know why I believe the GOPe is just as criminal as the DNC. There is foul play all over the place - some of it in plain sight like this, where the GOPe apparently has no fear of any consequences (which should tell us what else they are capable of...)
I’ve been talking a lot about lawlessness. Well, the GOPe speaks mobster language just like the dems do...
Neither Gingrich nor anybody else with a day job realized the aggressiveness of Romney or how much he wanted the nomination and how much advance planning he had done. Santorum did, but since he didn’t have a day job either, he could afford to go and spend a couple of years canvassing the Midwest.
That was what enabled Santorum to get his early win, along with the fact that most GOP voters are not fiscal or political conservatives but social conservatives, and he was the one who decided that this would be his pitch (even though both Perry and Gingrich had longer track records as social conservatives). However, in the long run, Santorum and Romney shared the same big-government ideas, so while he may have forced Romney to make more socially conservative statements, his voters were voting only on that one basis and actually weren’t looking for a political or fiscal conservative.
So therein lies the problem. The fact is that GOP voters are little different from Dem voters; the soccer mom may want somebody who’s not a raving pro-abortionist, but she also wants a big-government “compassionate conservative.”
Whenever people got to hear Newt, they loved him. But he had no infrastructure here in Florida - even though thousands of people turned up for his talks and cheered all the way through, as opposed to hundreds at best for Romney’s talks (with no cheering!), you couldn’t even get yard signs for him. Romney, in the meanwhile (and Paul, oddly enough, who was very popular here), had been busy distributing yard signs for nearly a year in advance.
Should Gingrich have been ready for this? Probably, and in addition, I was not impressed by the people I met on his campaign, so he probably should have spent more time working on his infrastructure.
However, the fact that the “front runners” started finding ways to avoid debating him, and the fact that the press practically locked him out after he challenged them in SC, shows that they were aware of his campaign strategy, which was visibility, debates and ideas.
As for Rush, I attribute the first big anti-Gingrich wave to Rush’s stupid statements that Gingrich was anti-capitalist because he questioned Romney’s version of his past business history. Nowadays, Rush sometimes says things just to say them after a quick glance at a headline (or because he doesn’t hear a question very well and hasn’t understood it), but since the Dems and the GOP E were just looking for an excuse to get rid of the radical Gingrich, Rush gave them all the excuse they needed.
However, the fact that Gingrich is still in it shows that he still hopes to get a hearing. Remember, guys, this is about ideas and political track record, not about a candidates’s marital status, number of children, number of sick children, the physical appearance of his wife (as if anybody could be worse than Michelle!) or anything else.