HolyCoast: Santorum: I Can't Win Without a Brokered Convention
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Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Santorum: I Can't Win Without a Brokered Convention

I'm not sure a brokered convention is really something we should be hoping for:
Rick Santorum has conceded that he can’t win a majority of the delegates to the Republican National Convention outright.

In a strategy memo pushing back on Mitt Romney’s narrative that it will take an “act of God” to deny him the nomination, advisor John Yob argued that they have a strategy to win — at a contested convention.

Majority Needed for Romney, Not for Santorum


Mitt Romney must have a majority on the first ballot in order to win the nomination because he will perform worse on subsequent ballots as grassroots conservative delegates decide to back the more conservative candidate. Subsequently, Santorum only needs to be relatively close on the initial ballot in order to win on a later ballot as Romney’s support erodes.
He's probably right that Romney's only chance is to win it on the first ballot. After that all delegates are released and I don't think he'll gain much from more conservative candidates. He's more likely to lose some he showed up with.

The big problem with a brokered convention is the candidate will have very little time to put together a national campaign to compete with the well-funded Obama machine. That's a major disadvantage, even if the GOP base is more excited about the candidate.

1 comment:

Larry said...

I have a hard time believing that the 'Republican Establishment' would be handicapped by a brokered convention. The same RINO's who love Romney have given us debates moderated by ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC. Those same RINO's are fine with the primary schedule putting eleven blue states ahead of Oklahoma -the state that had a higher percentage of Republican votes in the last presidential election than any state in the union.

Does Santorum honestly think that these same Republican Establishment RINO's (think Bob Dole, Alan Simpson, heck, maybe they can get Arlen Specter in on this too), after owning every part of the nominating process to this point, are just going to let a brokered convention stand between them and Romney's nomination?

They'll control that too.

These same manipulators of the Republican past, present and future have dug us into a situation where they're honestly saying that losing the White House is okay. Their argument is that the Executive branch can't do anything if the Republican Party owns the Senate.

These geniuses may have missed the last year where Obama made recess appointments when that same Senate was in session.

They must have missed the actions taken by HHS that has the effect, for all intents and purposes, of new laws passed by both houses of Congress.

To what end does holding the Senate serve if a previous Senate gave the Executive, and his officials, legal authority to circumvent their authority?

Their plan is akin to letting the Democrats run the football team, while the Republicans run the cheerleading section. And the Republican Establishment is happy with that, so long as they're one of the cheerleaders who get to date the quarterback, and Rick Santorum's nomination would mess up their prom.