HALF FULL REPORT 03/09/12

I ran out of space in the last two HFRs before I got around to the Republican race for president, so I’ll begin with a discussion about what happened on Super Tuesday.

In short, Mitt Romney took a big step toward the nomination, but didn’t impress many pundits doing it.

There were 10 primaries.  Mitt Romney won 6, including the most important, Ohio. Rick Santorum won 3.  Newt Gingrich won his home state of Georgia.

RealClear Politics estimates Romney has won 404 of the 731 delegates selected through Tuesday (55 percent); Santorum 161 (22 percent); Gingrich 105 (14.4 percent), Paul 61 (8.3 percent).  It’s now all but mathematically impossible for either Santorum or Gingrich to win the nomination.

Romney is still 740 delegates short of the 1,144 he needs to win.  The results Tuesday indicate he’d have trouble getting there if he had to face either Santorum or Gingrich…if we make the reasonable assumption that for about 90 percent of Santorum and Gingrich voters, Mitt Romney isn’t their second choice.  But Mitt’s a heavy favorite if both stay in the race.  Intrade Thursday had the odds of him winning the nomination at 84.4 percent.

Santorum thinks Gingrich ought to drop out.  Tuesday’s results make his case:

Romney beat Santorum, 38 percent to 37 percent, in Ohio.  Gingrich got 14.6 percent.  If the Santorum and Gingrich votes had been combined, Romney would have gotten creamed.  He’d have gotten creamed in Alaska, too, where he won with 32.6 percent to Santorum’s 29 percent and Gingrich’s 14.2 percent.

Romney won impressively only in Virginia (where Ron Paul was the only other candidate on the ballot), Massachusetts, and Idaho.  Santorum won comfortably in Oklahoma, big in North Dakota and Tennessee.  Gingrich won big in Georgia, but finished far behind both Romney and Santorum almost everywhere else, and behind Ron Paul in Alaska, Idaho, North Dakota, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

There are 14 caucuses and primaries between Kansas tomorrow (3/10) and Wisconsin on April 3.  If Gingrich weren’t in the race, Santorum would be favored in Alabama and Mississippi Mar. 13; Missouri Mar. 17; Illinois Mar. 20; Louisiana Mar. 24, and Wisconsin April 3.

If Santorum were to win those contests, he’d be favored in Pennsylvania (4/24), Indiana, North Carolina and West Virginia (5/8), Nebraska (5/15), Arkansas and Kentucky (5/22), and Texas (5/29 maybe). 

The battle for the nomination probably wouldn’t be decided before June 5, when California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota hold primaries.

For Gingrich, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" was written in Tennessee.  In the state next to Georgia, he got just 24 percent of the vote. But Newt’s massive ego blocks his view of the handwriting on the wall.  Jonathan Tobin offers here 7 reasons why he won’t drop out.  Most persuasive to me is this:

There are some politicians who run for president not so much because they want it but because they are so besotted with the notion of their own greatness that they think it is only fair to give their fellow citizens a chance to do the right thing and put them in the White House. Gingrich’s self-regard and love for his country is such that he will not willingly deny Americans this last opportunity to make him their president so long as even the faintest hope for such an outcome exists.

Karen Santorum told Glenn Beck last month that her husband’s candidacy is God’s Will.

God may have any number of reasons for wanting Rick to run.  But if God wants Karen’s husband to win, He has a funny way of showing it.  So far, Santorum has had the kind of luck associated with Joe Btfsplk.  He’s come agonizingly close to overtaking Romney several times, only to fall just short. Had Santorum won Ohio by a percentage point instead of losing it by a percentage point, most pundits would have declared him the Super Tuesday winner.

In Michigan the week before (2/28), Santorum lost to Romney, 41.1 percent to 37.9 percent, with Gingrich getting 6.5 percent.  If Romney had lost in Michigan, many in the GOP establishment would have bailed on him. Gingrich’s intransigence is just the latest blow.

Rick shouldn’t complain too much.  Unlike Joe Btfsplk, who wasn’t responsible for the rain cloud that followed him everywhere, Santorum is to blame for much of his own bad luck.  He had comfortable leads in polls in Michigan and Ohio…until he bombed in what figures to be the last Republican presidential debate, in Arizona Feb. 22.  He was more defensive than he needed to be, a bit peevish, answered questions he should have ducked, and gave long, wonkish answers to questions that screamed for sound bite responses.

Surprisingly, Santorum’s strongest answers in Arizona were on social issues.  But in other appearances in his brief moment in the limelight, he often gave the impression he was running for Pope, not president:

Rather than sticking to his considerable working-class, Reagan-Democrat appeal, he kept wandering back to his austere social conservatism. Rather than placing himself in "grandpa’s hands," his moving tribute to his immigrant coal miner grandfather as representative of the America Santorum pledges to restore, he insisted on launching himself into culture-war thickets: Kennedy, college and contraception.

There followed one of the more spectacular collapses in the recent history of polling.  In Gallup’s national tracking poll Feb. 20, he led Romney, 36 percent to 26 percent.

That was the day before the Arizona debate.  Two days afterward, Santorum’s lead had disappeared. On the eve of Super Tuesday, Romney led by 11 percentage points.

And then underperformed.  Romney gets weaker every week, Charles Krauthammer thinks.

So the only thing that seems certain after Super Tuesday is that the Republicans will nominate a lousy candidate. George Will is ready to throw in the towel.  Neither Romney nor Santorum is likely to win, and a re-elected Obama won’t be able to do that much harm, Will said:

Granted, he could veto any major conservative legislation. But such legislation will not even get to his desk because Republicans will not have 60 senators. In an undoubtedly bipartisan achievement, both parties have participated in institutionalizing an extra-constitutional Senate supermajority requirement for all but innocuous or uncontroversial legislation. This may be a dubious achievement, but it certainly enlarges the power of a congressional party to play defense against a president.

Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard and Rich Lowry of National Review take sharp issue with Will here and here.  I’m with Bill and Rich.  A re-elected Obama could and almost certainly would do America enormous harm.  And it will be harder for Republicans to hold the House and take the Senate if they lose the presidential election.

But IF Republicans hold the House and take the Senate, an Obama victory might not be the Apocalypse.  I can see one scenario where a narrowly re-elected Obama wouldn’t be as bad as a narrowly elected Mitt Romney.

Sooner or later, we’ll pay a severe price for our massive debt, and the Fed’s monetizing of it.  The stock market will plunge.  The economy will go into deep recession.  Inflation will soar.

It matters very much when the reckoning comes.  If Romney wins and the crash comes afterward, the media will blame Republicans. I doubt Romney has the wit to respond effectively.  But if Zero is president when the fit hits the shan, he’ll be toast, and so will the entire Democrat party.

Most analysts think the reckoning will come after the election.  So is it good news that it’s growing more likely that a black swan event that triggers catastrophe will happen before the election?

The most important news of the week is the gulf between the Obama administration and Israel over Iran’s nuclear program. Iran may have tested a nuke in North Korea in 2010, a German newspaper reported Sunday.  Satellite images of a facility in Parchin reveal evidence of testing a neutron device to trigger a nuclear explosion, according to diplomats quoted in a British newspaper Wednesday.

Despite this, Zero wants to continue negotiating.  His policy is asinine and morally incoherent, says this Canadian observer.   Iran applauded it.  Here’s why, says Charles Krauthammer:

These negotiations don’t just gain time for a nuclear program about whose military intent the International Atomic Energy Agency is issuing alarming warnings. They make it extremely difficult for Israel to do anything about it (while it still can). 

Maybe Zero is trying to provoke Israel into acting alone:

Suppose you were the Obama administration, confronted by an intransigent Iran but facing an election in November and an American public weary of Middle Eastern wars. Wouldn’t you rather shoehorn an ally into undertaking this risky and unpleasant business in your place? Then, even if you too had to intervene (as you would, at the very least to keep open the Strait of Hormuz), you’d have avoided blame for starting the conflict.

What Obama said in his speech to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee Sunday makes war inevitable, Barry Rubin thinks. Michael Barone agrees. He thinks Netanyahu will order the attack very soon.  Bibi may already have decided to strike.

If Israel does attack before the election, Obama will be toast, Dick Morris thinks.  Zero may agree.  According to this report, he’s offered the Israelis a ton of weapons if they’ll postpone an attack until after the election.

Iran may be the most important story, but most in the news media were more interested in beating to death the trumped up controversy over the name Rush Limbaugh called Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke.  Newt Gingrich’s demolished NBC’s David Gregory Sunday over the news media’s priorities.  Karl Rove was impressed.

Could this be the end of Limbaugh? Asked columnist Clarence Page, one of many journalists who noted – and crowed over – the fact that some advertisers have dropped the Limbaugh program.

In your dreams, pal.  Losing 29 of roughly 18,000 local sponsors isn’t a big deal.  Others are eager to take their place.  A sponsor who cancelled last week is begging to come back.  Rush said no.

The loudest of the advertiser protesters has been Carbonite CEO David Friend, a major Obama donor. The boycott has hurt his company at lot more than it has Rush.

There’s also been some blowback from the obvious hypocrisy of condemning Rush, but not the misogynist comments of liberal men.  He was thinking of his daughters when he made that highly publicized call to Sandra Fluke last week, the president told reporters.

Bill Bennett wondered on CNN how Zero would explain to Sasha and Malia why he accepted a million dollar contribution from Bill Maher, by far the worst offender.

Speaking of media bias, Soledad O’Brien and her panel at CNN yesterday (3/8) tried to paint Breitbart.com Editor Joel Pollak (whose wife is black) as a racist because he criticized Zero’s embrace of radical Harvard Prof. Derrick Bell, a supporter of black separatist and Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan, and his theory that America is permanently racist.

The panel was sparked by Breitbart of a videotape of Barack and Bell at a rally in 1991.  Ms. O’Brien argued first that this was a non-story; then that Bell’s "critical race theory" isn’t radical, finally that Pollak is racist for criticizing it – and beclowned herself.

Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT, arguably America’s foremost climate scientist, so thoroughly pwned the warmists in his presentation to Britain’s House of Commons that the headline over the story written by the reporter who covered the event for one of Britain’s leading alarmist newspapers read: Is catastrophic global warming, like the Millennium Bug, a mistake?

I noted last week that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is likely to defeat the effort to recall him.  Walker’s gone on the air with this ad:

It should make his numbers even better.  Meanwhile, his reforms continue to produce results.

The decision to kill Americans abroad who are suspected of terrorism rests solely with the executive branch and requires no judicial action or oversight, Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech Monday (3/5) at the Northwestern University law school.

FBI Director Robert Mueller said at a hearing Wednesday he wasn’t sure whether the three criteria Holder gave for targeted killing wouldn’t also apply to Americans living within our borders.

I can’t imagine a Bush administration official ever saying any such thing.  They had too much respect for the Constitution.  If a Bushie had, you can imagine the outcry from self-styled civil libertarians.  When Eric Holder said it, you could hear crickets chirp. 

The number one moonbat in Congress lost his primary Tuesday.

I’m running real long, so I have to wind up things now.  Hero of the week is Bibi Netanyahu.  Putz of the week, month, year, decade, century and millenium is Barack Hussein Obama.  See you next week.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.