The Republican Party Primary Contest, 2012: three cornered fight
At the 2007 Conservative Political Action Committee Conference, John McCain and Mitt Romney were both pilloried as fakers, Mitt Romney memorably followed around by people wearing dolphin costumes to denote “Flipper”. One year later, after the New Hampshire primary put John McCain on a glide to the Republican nomination, Romney was moving around the conservative talk radio circuit in a last dash for the nomination, and was greeted as a hero at the CPAC conference whence he bowed out with a speech that craftily placed him to McCain’s right in looking ahead to 2012.
Was there any reality to these political placements? Politics is like that, and as often as not the media and conventional wisdom narrative of how the electorate jibes comes across as arbitrary or false.
The 2012 Republican scramble, after a few high profile adieus, seemed to settle into something digestible. Mitt Romney would try to steer that front runner’s path with Tim Pawlenty positioning himself to his right. In effect, Romney would have assumed McCain’s circa 2008 spot with Pawlenty assuming Romney’s circa 2008 spot. A wildcard is toosed in the mix — that candidate who had seemed to quietly being departing the race but now seems to be moving in for a run with a defiant movie in Iowa designed to tout her gubernatorial record. I gather it is key to reinvent herself from Tina Fey shadow. I do find it difficult to see how she can escape quitting — I guess her political clout is built around grievances, but her movie narrative on why she had to quit doesn’t hold up as — like, what? Obama and Clinton haven’t been tarred with inanities while still moving forward on the elected job?
She might be 2012’s Mike Huckabee? If it were not for Mike Huckabee, and his victory in the Iowa caucuses slicing up Romney’s (or anti-McCain) electorate, Mitt Romney would have been the Republican nominee.  Or she might hog the media oxygen and prove palatable to the Republican primary voter after all.
The media insist on priming John Huntman as a contender — nimble enough to track conservatives who are exhausted by a sense of outrage? It is hard for me to imagine this coming to pass — is he like this year’s Henry Cabot Lodge of 1964?
The others, I suppose eat into the main contender’s base, but have their followers all alone. Newt Gingrich’s defenders think Gingrich might win with the Youth Vote — due to them not remembering his record and battles of the 1990s. This is not likely to get him anywhere — or… he could win the vote of the megalomaniacal?
The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.
Bachmann and Caine won’t win dipsticks. (Is it possible Bachmann and Rick Santorum will eat away at Palin’s totals in Iowa?)  The writers at Reason are probably right with their belief that seeing that neither Ron Paul or Gary Johnson are going to win the nomination, for their purposes it is just as well to have them both on the road amplifying their Libertarian message in appealing to the same slice of the electorate.