Free Republic

Kevin Madden, a Republican communications expert with long ties to Mitt Romney, will become a more frequent and visible spokesman for the presidential campaign, a source close to the decision said on Friday. The increased responsibilities for Mr. Madden came in the wake of criticism from nervous Republicans about Mr. Romney’s campaign team. The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial that the campaign “looks confused in addition to being politically dumb.”

TROY, Mich. — Employing a trick they used during the hotly contested Florida primary, the Romney campaign is deploying surrogates to Sen. Rick Santorum’s campaign events. At least two surrogates — former Michigan State Rep. Rocky Raczkowski and current State Rep. Aric Nesbitt from Kalamazoo — will be attending Santorum events throughout the state in the days leading up to the Michigan primary on Tuesday, a campaign official told ABC News. Other surrogates attended Santorum events held earlier in the week. Nesbitt was spotted at Santorum’s event this morning in St. Clair Shores. Rep. Connie Mack, R-Fla., and Rep. Jason...

Thanks to some remarkable reporting from Big Hollywood, it has become increasingly clear the upcoming HBO movie "Game Change" is less a political melodrama than an all-out attempt to destroy the person and reputation of Sarah Palin. The movie is based on a poorly researched book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, and it was criticized at the time of its publication by Howard Kurtz, then a media reporter for the Washington Post, and the New York Times for its overreliance on unsourced "deep background" interviews that were difficult to verify. Two of those sources have been revealed, according to...

Sarah Palin’s not running for president, but up until this month she has been beating GOP front-runner Mitt Romney in a different kind of race. For the past few months, the ex-Republican vice presidential candidate has been whooping the former Massachusetts governor in one website’s merchandise sales. CafePress.com, which lets customers design and sell their own clothing items and other merchandise, finds that in December, Palin-inspired gear far outsold items featuring Romney, 80 percent to 20 percent. An average of 137,000 designs are uploaded to the website each week. Even last month, people were still picking Palin over the White...

The Republican race for President in Arizona looks like a close one, with Mitt Romney leading Rick Santorum only 36-33. Newt Gingrich is third at 16% and Ron Paul fourth at 9%. Santorum is better liked by Arizona Republicans than Romney, but the gap isn't as wide as we're finding in a lot of other states. Santorum's at +34 (61/27), while Romney's at +24 (58/34). One thing to keep an eye on over the next week is whether Newt Gingrich can hold his support. 16% is pretty good for him compared to what we're finding other places right now, but...

Mitt Romney isn't singing anymore. A little more than two weeks after his off-key but enthusiastic renditions of "America the Beautiful" captured the spirit of a candidate who had won the Florida primary and seemed on the verge of locking down the Republican nomination for president, Romney is back in lackluster mode. It's not just that Romney is facing a surprising challenge in his native state of Michigan from Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who vaulted into contention in the state-by-state nomination battle with wins in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado. What alarms many Republican Party leaders and strategists are...

A thousand injuries I suffered Fortunato. But when he turned to insult, I vowed revenge." Those are the opening words to Edgar Allen Poe's short story – “The Cask of Amontillado” – ... For a case of real-life of revenge in real-life American history, think of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. Burr and Hamilton held a duel that led to the death of Hamilton, (who) had said something to someone about Burr being "despicable." Newt Gingrich has a deep and abiding case against Mitt Romney. Romney has spent millions with the single purpose of destroying Gingrich as a candidate. Oh,...

Mitt Romney, during campaign stops in Michigan yesterday, embraced his Michigan roots for all they’re worth. As he watches his popularity plummet in the state in which he grew up, he seems to be grasping at anything to keep from sinking any further. Romney tried to hit all the right buttons in order to resonate with Michigan voters leading up to their February 28 primary, by making himself one of them again. “I was born and raised here. I love being in Michigan,” Mr. Romney said. ”Everything seems right here. You know, I come back to Michigan; the trees are...

KENTWOOD – Jerome Bush, an 81-year-old lifelong Republican, shook GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s hand Wednesday, recalling doing the same with his father, George Romney, during his campaign for governor more than 40 years ago. “I voted for his dad,” said Bush, the former supervisor of Fillmore Township in Allegan County. “Right now, I’m still undecided if I’m going to vote for him.” It illustrates the difficulty the former Massachusetts governor is facing on the 2012 campaign trail. Three polls released Wednesday show Rick Santorum ahead of Romney in the state where he was born and raised, a place once...

The Democrat-leaning Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is trying to revive the so-called "scandal" that the Democrats trumpeted during their successful campaign to unseat Rick Santorum in 2006. Other news outlets are starting to pick up the Post-Gazette's claims. For example, in an article published on February 14 and linked to by the Drudge Report ("Santorum's Electability Pitch Undermined by 2006 Senate Reelection Loss"), Bloomberg reports: Santorum's 2006 loss came after he was accused by Democrats of being hypocritical for moving his family to suburban Virginia, yet still claiming a property tax deduction and tuition reimbursement in Pennsylvania. The school district where his...

(CNN) - A trio of Missouri surrogates for Mitt Romney took aim at Rick Santorum on Tuesday, saying the former Pennsylvania senator has misled voters on his fiscal conservative record. "He certainly has been outspoken on social issues, and we honor his record in that regard. But when you get outside those issues…his record shows he's been in the liberal wing of the Republican Party," former Sen. Jim Talent said on a call with reporters. -snip- Also on the call was Rep. Billy Long of Missouri and State Auditor Tom Schweich, both of whom praised Romney's credentials in the private...

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney responds to Sarah Palin saying she is not convinced he is a conservative during his appearance on Wednesday's "FOX & Friends." "Well we should probably spend some time with Sarah Palin, although she is hard to find. She's on your show all the time," Romney said. "I'm not quite sure what she'd be referring to. I'm pro-life, pro-traditional marriage. I believe in the second amendment. As governor, I balanced the budget every year I was in office. Put in place a $2 million rainy-day fund. Cut taxes 19 times," he also said.

Via BuzzFeed. As expected, they’re going hard after his fiscal heresies. I’m giving you Santorum’s new ad here too, which is noteworthy first because he touts his tea-party cred (ironic) and second because he’s now making electability a core component of his pitch. No other Not Romney has been in that position before — but the numbers do back him up, for now: One thing that has remained constant in the ever changing GOP Presidential race is that Mitt Romney is the strongest candidate against Barack Obama…at least until now. PPP’s newest national poll finds Romney trailing Obama by 7...

FEBRUARY 15, 2012 Romney Races to Defend Michigan State Up for Grabs as Santorum Surges BY JOSEPH B. WHITE AND NEIL KING JR. [Subscriber Content Preview] DETROIT—Amid signs Rick Santorum could win an upset victory in Michigan, Mitt Romney escalated his campaign to win the state's Republican primary by taking on the powerful auto union and reigniting the debate over the federal bailouts of two Detroit auto makers. Mr. Romney, writing in a Detroit News editorial-page column Tuesday, attacked as "crony capitalism on a grand scale" the Obama administration's $81 billion auto-industry bailout nearly three years ago. The salvo comes...

Mitt Romney is getting some heavy air support in Michigan — the state where he was born and raised — as the “super PAC” supporting him invests almost $500,000 on television ads there. According to someone who tracks Republican media spending, Restore Our Future has committed just over $470,000 for commercials starting Tuesday and set to run through Feb. 20. That marks the group’s largest purchase yet in Michigan, where it will have spent more than $700,000 on ads by next week. The group said Monday that it would continue for now to run an ad called “Risk” that targets...

As I’ve been noting here, one key metric to determine whether the prolonged GOP nomination process is damaging Mitt Romney’s general election prospects is his standing among independents, many of whom remain sour on Obama’s economic performance. Today’s new Pew poll offers another installment. The topline is striking enough — it finds that Rick Santorum is surging among Tea Partyers and conservatives, again suggesting that they just can’t come to terms with Romney as the nominee. But look, Romney is still likely to get the nomination, anyway. Which is why this slide among independents is also extremely noteworthy: A month...

We’ve all heard the axiom, “as goes Ohio, so goes the nation”. In fact, no Republican has ever won the Presidency without winning Ohio. And for this year’s GOP presidential primary, Ohio is the top prize in what is turning out to be a critical Super Tuesday on March 6th. In fact, just yesterday analyst Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics identified Ohio as the key state between a Romney runaway and the possibility of a brokered convention. So the viability of a three-way split probably comes down to Ohio, which has a fair number of evangelicals, though not to...

PORTLAND, Maine (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has a Rick Santorum problem that can't be easily swept aside, even with wins in the sparsely attended Maine caucuses and a poll of conservative activists. The former Massachusetts governor arguably has fewer effective weapons against Santorum than he was able to pull out against Newt Gingrich after getting a thumping in South Carolina from the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. As they battled for the 2012 Republican nomination, Romney attacked Gingrich on several fronts, scoring a big hit with ads focused on Gingrich's ethics violations in...

The purpose of MitigateRomney.com is to serve notice to the GOP establishment and the moderate media that we are resolutely rejecting their manipulative tactics. They have worked vigorously to discourage supporters of conservative candidates and make the so-called “inevitability” of Mitt Romney into a self-fulfilling prophesy. For –at least- the past two election cycles they have pushed their left leaning candidates right into the GOP nomination by carefully massaging polling questions to fit the mantra they want unsuspecting viewers to adopt about their preferred candidate and even what spurious notions they chose to propagate about the candidates they ttansparently oppose....

Newt Gingrich's remarks Saturday night after the Nevada caucuses and on NBC's "Meet the Press" the next morning proved that presidential candidates should talk policy, not process. Proclaiming "We want to get to Georgia, to Alabama, to Tennessee," Mr. Gingrich said primaries in the South would produce "a series of victories" that by the April 4 Texas primary would make him "very, very competitive in the delegate count." Well, the Gingrich Southern strategy faces big obstacles, starting with Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. Demanding that these two candidates drop out so he becomes the only conservative alternative to Mitt Romney...