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Thursday, January 10, 2008

RICHARDSON OUT; ROMNEY PULLS ADS

Big news is coming out of the world of politics today as one of the Democratic candidates has withdrawn from the race and a Republican has pulled his ads in two key states.

The Associated Press is reporting that Democratic Presidential hopeful Bill Richardson is pulling out of the race for his Party's Presidential nomination.

Richardson has struggled to reach double-digit support in the polls, and his showing in the primaries and caucuses so far has been dismal.

We feel that Richardson is making the right decision. We have not attempted to hide our dislike for Richardson, who, with the exception of his views on gun rights, is a big government Socialist like Hillary and Obama.

The other big news comes out of South Carolina as the Mitt Romney campaign announced that it is pulling its ads immediately from both South Carolina and Florida. The significance of this news cannot be over-emphasized.

Romney has managed only one win and two second-place finishes so far. Increasingly it appears that he will not do well in South Carolina, where John McCain, Mike Huckabee, and Fred Thompson are expected to duke it out for the top spots in the primary vote.

In Florida Romney faces a rather large Giuliani voter-base. Mike Huckabee is also expected to do well in the Florida primary.

Thus, the Romney campaign has decided to focus its efforts on Michigan, where the candidate has a good chance of winning. Romney's father, George Romney, was Governor of Michigan in the 60s. The elder Romney even briefly challenged Richard Nixon for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1968.

It is clear, however, that Romney is facing a major problem beneath the surface and beneath all of the headlines. In spite of the megabucks of his own money Romney has spent, he has very little to show for it so far, and the signs indicate it will only get worse.

Giuliani will do well on Super Tuesday. John McCain will do much better than expected. So will Mike Huckabee. And, depending on what happens in South Carolina, Thompson may become a major player on Super Tuesday as well.

In short, Romney is gradually being overshadowed by other candidates.

The fact that he has pulled his ads out of South Carolina and Florida is a clear indication that he has conceded those states as losses.

2 comments:

GunGeek said...

Living in SC and being a Mormon, I know that a WHOLE LOT of people here absolutely positively will NOT vote for a Mormon.

Romney could have everything else going for him and I seriously doubt he would win in SC at this point in time. Someday the people here will lose their bigotry (which won't happen until their preachers stop being afraid of the LDS church destroying their income- by taking away their members and letting people see a church that runs without any paid clergy) and a Mormon will have a chance. Not yet, though.

Welshman said...

Geek,

Well, if the reason he is losing in SC is due to religious bigotry, then that is a shame. I have condemned it here even though I am not a Mormon.

On the other hand, I think Romney's problems in SC go much deeper than that. He has flip-flopped on many issues over his career, and some of it, though not all of it, appears to be political expedience.

The other issue that people in the south have a hard time believing anything conservative can come out of Massachusetts. The state is so far Leftwing that even a Republican has to be Leftwing to get elected, and THAT, I think, is Romney's problem with GOP activists.