Romney on the precipice

Santorum is surging toward an improbable win in Michigan — a victory that might just push the juggernaut Romney campaign right off a cliff

Mitt Romney now has some breathing space vouchsafed by the right-wingers who reluctantly picked him in the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll, not to mention the Republicans who bothered to show up at the semi-real polling places of the sparsely attended and barely contested Maine caucuses. That breathing space stretches to primaries in Arizona and Michigan on February 28. Lord knows what will come out of Romney's mouth between now and then. 

At CPAC, Mitt eked out a narrow margin over Rick Santorum after the Romney campaign bought registrations to pad his total and the organization changed the voting rules in a way that benefited the establishment choice. The change was aimed at stopping Ron Paul, who'd won CPAC before, but didn't attend this year. It's part of a pattern in this year's GOP contest — from a "mistake" in Iowa that stole Santorum's victory on election night to the sudden rediscovery of previously unenforced rules in Virginia that are keeping Santorum and Newt Gingrich off the state's primary ballot.

Romney showed up at CPAC and offered the kind of trademark gaffe that in his campaign is prologue as well as past.

In Maine, where Paul was Mitt's only active opponent, Romney's 3 percent victory margin let him escape a disaster that would have compounded his trifecta of defeats in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado on February 7; this was supposed to be Mitt's month, with Newt the beleaguered alternative, but Santorum swept all three contests.  

On the rebound, Romney showed up at CPAC and offered the kind of trademark gaffe that in his campaign is prologue as well as past. He disobeyed his handlers again and spoke off script and off prompter. He's repeatedly derided President Obama for using a teleprompter, so Romney's reliance on it is just another flip-flop. Regardless, he ought to stick to the words on the screen. He was supposed to say that he was the "conservative" governor of Massachusetts; instead he extemporaneously proclaimed that he was "severely conservative."

This tin-tongued, all-but-senseless phrase created a head-scratching moment that provoked derision and rebuke from Republicans as diverse as David Frum and Rush Limbaugh. "Severely constipated" is a phrase that makes sense — and might apply to Romney. But "severely conservative" not only suggests that he's adverb-challenged, but reveals how hard he's straining, too hard, to prove he's something he's not — a genuine, card-carrying, consistent paladin of the hard right. He discards his past positions on basic issues of conscience like an old pair of sneakers so he can run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. This has led skeptical Republicans to doubt not only his convictions, but his character — and left him struggling for a nomination that, by all the conventional measures, long since should have been his. 

Instead, on the same day as CPAC and Maine, Public Policy Polling, which has been remarkably accurate during this turbulent primary season, showed Santorum leading Romney 38 percent to 23 percent nationally, with Gingrich at 17 percent and Paul at 13 percent. And with a pandering Romney increasingly self-positioned as T.S. Eliot's "hollow man, head piece filled with straw [poll]," you have to wonder whether the establishment-ordained candidate, the "inevitable" nominee according to many commentators (including me), could actually fail in the GOP for the first time since 1964. 

As empty — or craven — as Romney is, you can't beat no one with no one. But it should worry the Romney campaign that in the PPP data, his favorable/unfavorable rating among Republicans is just 44 percent to 43 percent, while Santorum's favorable is 64 percent, and his unfavorable just 22 percent.