Karl Rove’s “INSIDER”
January 14, 2012
Love Him Or Fear Him....He GETS IT!
Every week Karl Rove gives us a sneak peek at the strategic talks going on behind closed doors. Average voters like us spend our days wading through the media chat, pundits with agendas, and trying to read the results of polls and Primaries. Rove and his team know what’s going to happen…even before it does.
Especially the words we reprint here, which he shares in this piece from the Wall Street Journal yesterday, TAKE IT SERIOUSLY:
Romney Campaigning Moving With Confidence
“In an open race for the GOP nomination, no Republican has won both Iowa and New Hampshire, as Mitt Romney has. No one has come in fourth or fifth in New Hampshire, as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum did, and become the nominee. No one has entirely skipped Iowa, as Jon Huntsman did, and won elsewhere. No one has recovered after grabbing the 1% that Rick Perry received in the Granite State. And no one became the nominee after failing to win one of the first two contests, a position in which Ron Paul finds himself.
All this means history will be made this year, no matter what happens next.
The focus Tuesday was more on the winner’s margin than on the victory itself. Mr. Romney won the New Hampshire primary by an impressive 16.4 points. (The state’s last five contested GOP primaries have seen an average winning margin of 10.5 points.) True to its tradition, New Hampshire paid little attention to Iowa’s big story—Mr. Santorum’s impressive second-place finish. He finished fifth. The candidate who camped out in New Hampshire saw that pay off, as Mr. Huntsman did 17 times as well there as he’s doing in the Gallup national poll, where he’s at 1%.
Still Battling
All six candidates have enough resources to run hard in the next contest, in South Carolina on Jan. 21. Already, five campaigns have placed over $6 million on television in the state, with Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney accounting for over $4 million of it.
It’s important to understand that South Carolina is not quintessentially Southern in the way that, for example, Mississippi and Alabama are. Social conservatives in the upstate region (including Spartanburg) unfamiliar with Mr. Romney’s record might be more willing to support Messrs. Gingrich and Santorum than were their New Hampshire counterparts, who had observed Mr. Romney’s unwavering conservative positions on abortion and marriage when he was governor of neighboring Massachusetts.
But economic conservatives dominate South Carolina’s so-called Midlands region (including Columbia, the state capital), while the coastal Low Country (including Charleston) is home to many Midwestern retirees. In 2008, Mr. Romney and John McCain ran better in the last two regions than upstate. The presence of national defense conservatives everywhere has negative implications for Mr. Paul, with his heavy emphasis of isolationism. And the state’s stubbornly high unemployment rate, today at 9.9%, makes the economy the No. 1 issue.
South Carolina will be the last chance for several candidates. It will be hard to justify going on after being at the back of the pack in three contests—especially with Florida’s 10 expensive media markets and four million registered Republican voters for this closed primary looming at month’s end.
Gingrich An Outsider? Or A Washington Insider After A 30-Year Career In D.C.
You wouldn’t know this from listening to some Republicans’ lamentations. It sounds pretty strange when the former House speaker (Mr. Gingrich), the former No. 3 in the Senate Republican leadership (Mr. Santorum), a past chairman of the Republican Governors Association (Mr. Perry), and a former vice-presidential chief of staff (William Kristol) and others warn against letting “the establishment” choose the Republican nominee. If there is a “GOP establishment,” they are surely part of it.
More to the point, a small membership committee does not govern the process. No group of power brokers can pressure others into uniting behind one candidate. Millions of primary voters and caucus-goers will select the GOP’s nominee. That’s good enough for most of us.
Read more here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204124204577154470746488992.html
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No Newt – Newt votes while in Congress prove that he is not a “conservative” or “independent thinker.” Here is a nice little list of what Newt has supported.
March 21, 1991 – $40 billion to begin the unconstitutional bailout of failed savings and loan institutions
June 26, 1991 – $52.6 billion for agriculture program subsidies, and food stamps
October 5, 1992 – $66.5 billion for housing and community development
September 22, 1994 – $250.6 billion in appropriations for the Departments of Labor, HHS, and Education.
February 5, 1981, he voted with liberals to raise the National Debt ceiling by another $49.1 billion to $985 billion. He has gone this same route many times since.
December 21, 1987 – $603.9 billion for 13 regular appropriation bills larded with many wasteful, extravagant, and unconstitutional items
May 4, 1989 – outlays of $1.165 trillion and a deficit of $99 billion for a dishonest and spendthrift 1990 budget designed to barely skim in under Gramm-Rudman $100 billion deficit limit
March 10, 1994 – a vote against a responsible amendment offered by Rep. Gerald Solomon (R-NY) to balance the budget by 1999 through $698 billion in spending cuts (a mere 3.5% cut) over five years.
The 1992 House banking scandal revealed that Gingrich has run 22 overdrafts on his checking account, and this in spite of having voted himself a huge pay raise and having a taxpayer-provided, chauffeur-driven car!
His rating from the National Taxpayers Union during his latest session in Congress (the lO3rd) was a meager 75%.
His tax-and spend record over the years on votes tabulated by Tax Reform Immediately (TRIM) has so often contradicted his rhetoric that the National Director of TRIM, James Toft, was prompted to remark: “Professor Gingrich hopefully will never be called upon to teach a course in the proper role of our federal government. His rare votes against bloated big government usually have been prompted by the partisan wrangling of the moment, not by any great respect for, or understanding of, the Constitution.”