Romney clinches nomination

Mitt Romney secured the Republican presidential nomination this week, after a primary win in Texas pushed him past the 1,144-delegate threshold. The symbolic milestone capped a bruising five-month battle for the GOP ticket, and the Romney campaign used the occasion to begin a renewed offensive against President Obama’s economic record. But Romney’s historic accomplishment—he is the first Mormon to win a major party’s nomination—came amid a controversy over his endorsement by real estate magnate Donald Trump. This week, Trump launched a new media blitz claiming that President Obama was not born in the U.S. Romney, who appeared at a Las Vegas fund-raiser with Trump, declined to repudiate Trump for his “birther’’ allegations. “I don’t agree with all the people who support me,” Romney said. “But I need to get 50.1 percent or more.”

Unbelievable, said John Avlon in TheDailyBeast.com. Pandering to a “clownish conspiracy theorist” like Trump may have been necessary to win the nomination. But the sale has now been made, and Romney needs to stop “being held hostage” by the far Right and take a stand. He “has real assets in this election,” like appealing personal values and a swing-state-friendly economic message. But if he keeps letting “extreme voices from his own party hijack the conversation,” he’ll scare off the independents he has to attract to win the November election.

Actually, Mitt “is right where he needs to be,” said Jonathan S. Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com. Even after a bitter and ugly primary fight in which his shortcomings were endlessly aired, Romney is now in “a virtual dead heat” with Obama in polls. Assaults on his record at Bain Capital aren’t sticking, and the economy, “Romney’s strongest issue,” shows no signs of a robust recovery that might guarantee the president’s re-election. Only the “most starry-eyed Obama idolators” think Romney has no chance in November.

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That’s why the Obama campaign is going into full attack mode, said John Heilemann in New York magazine. It plans to relentlessly portray Romney as a radical right-winger with dangerously backward social and economic ideas and a terrible job-creation record as Massachusetts governor. The attacks will be rougher than anything flung at John McCain four years ago. Obama, voters will soon see, is “a brass-knuckled, pipe-hitting, red-in-tooth-and-claw brawler determined to do what is necessary to stay in power—in other words, a politician.” To win another term, “2008’s candidate of hope stands poised to become 2012’s candidate of fear.”