GOP Primary Strategy: "Get Mitt"
The Daily Telegraph reports:
I’ve just arrived in Iowa, the Midwestern farm state that Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum will be visiting in the next 48 hours. Iowa may be bland and sparsely popuated but it hosts the Republican caucuses, the first contest in the battle to secure the party’s nomination, and it’s also a general election swing state.
The stampede of politicians to Iowa comes at a fascinating moment in the 2012 election race, which got off to a slow start but is now more intriguing by the day. A number of factors are making Mitt Romney the singular focus of what’s happening right now.
Most significantly, Republicans now sense that they have at worst a very real shot at unseating Obama. The jittery talk of a few months ago that Obama looked likely to coast to re-election no matter who was nominated is now a thing of the past. That raises the stakes considerably: whoever is the GOP nominee could well be the next president (though as Liz Mair points out, the identity of the nominee does matter as to how likely that is).
After Mitch Daniels decided not to get into the race, amongst Republican opertaives, a notional top tier of three candidates formed: Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman. Admittedly, Pawlenty never quite had the poll numbers to justify that and Huntsman was always a wild card.
Well, in the past fortnight or so, Pawlenty and Huntsman stock has dropped considerably. Pawlenty’s debate flub was very damaging – it gave the impression he wasn’t tough enough to take on Romney (let alone Obama)and his big chance to stand out was missed. That’s fed into significant money problems (some of his top staffers are working for little or no pay) and an Iowa poll that puts him way behind Romney and Bachmann.
It’s far too early to write Pawlenty off but he’s clinging onto that top tier by his fingernails while Romney relentlessly fundraises, builds his national organisation and sounds like the nominee. He’s essentially been running for president since 2006 and he’s much stronger this time around than many GOP operatives expected.
Huntsman looks, well, like toast. His announcement last Tuesday was unimpressive, his personal style underwhelming and his policy positions, to be it mildly, an unlikley fit for a Republican primary. On current form, it’s extremely hard to see him making much impression on this race. If you don’t want to take my word for it, check out these devastating pieces by Slate’s Dave Weigel and Politico’s VandeHei/Allen.
