By JONATHAN MARTIN | 2/11/12 6:56 AM EST
Mitt Romney wanted to use his CPAC speech Friday to allay concerns
about his candidacy on the Republican right, but with one ad-libbed
word he reinforced conservative fears that he's not one of them.
"I was a severely conservative Republican governor," Romney told the
annual gathering.
The response was immediate.
"Severely?"
"I have never heard anybody say, 'I'm severely conservative,'" Rush
Limbaugh noted on his show.
"That didn't get a lot of applause," firebrand Rep. Steve King
(R-Iowa) observed with a tight smile.
"Some things are too funny to comment on," a laughing Newt Gingrich
commented as he walked into the conference to give his own speech.
Romney's address won repeated applause. He outlined his conservative
credentials, both in his public and private life, and offered a strong
indictment of President Barack Obama. But by going off-script to use
an awkward modifier that no movement conservative would ever affix to
themselves, he made clear why, despite vast advantages in money and
organization, he's still struggling to win the trust of a party base
needed to secure the GOP presidential nomination. He's just not a
natural fit.
Success at CPAC is hardly a perfect indicator for how a candidate will
perform with the Republican electorate. Romney knows this well, having
captured the straw poll here in the past only to lose the nomination
to a candidate, John McCain, who was booed when he addressed the
conference just weeks before securing the GOP nod.
Yet Romney's trio of losses Tuesday and his all-out effort to woo the
base here — he used some variation of "conservative" 25 separate times
in his speech — underscores the degree to which the party has shifted
in the four years since McCain captured the nomination.
The old nominating game standbys, the notions of inevitability and
success begetting success, have proven irrelevant in 2012. Romney
rolled in Florida and cruised in Nevada — and then, without an
aggressive campaign, had nothing to show for it in Minnesota, Missouri
and Colorado. This election has proven momentum-proof to date.
Romney's still the smart-money favorite to become the Republican
standard-bearer, but it's increasingly clear that he's going to have
to make a more compelling case to conservatives to ensure victory.
The central question now looming over the race is, to borrow a phrase,
just how severely the party has moved right. How profound is the scale
of resistance to Romney?
"You've got to have a trust factor, you've got to make sure he's
genuine," said Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), a leading tea-party freshman,
in attempting to explain conservative unease with the front-runner.
"And with Romneycare there are a lot of similarities with the
Affordable Care Act."
The depth of Romney's challenge with the base was demonstrated by what
took place after his speech. After the candidate made no mention of
his signature accomplishment as Massachusetts governor, health care
reform, a panel took the stage and devoted significant time to
fulminating against the individual mandate.
The man who's making the latest bid to become the once-and-for-all
Romney alternative, Rick Santorum, all but grabbed the CPAC activists
by the lapels in his speech Friday, arguing that conservatives ought
to nominate one of their own this time.
"Conservatives and tea-party folks," Santorum said near the top of his
remarks. "We are not just wings of the Republican Party — we are the
Republican Party."
Listen The GOP, he argued, "will no longer abandon and apologize for
the policies and principles that made this country great for a hollow
victory in November."
Later in his address, Santorum directly brought up the tea
party-infused Republican 2010 wave, claiming that Republicans won
because they were enthusiastic about their candidates.
Turning to this year's election, and clearly alluding to Romney, the
former Pennsylvania senator asked: "Why would an undecided voter vote
for a candidate of the party who the party's not excited about?"
Santorum's introducer and the chief patron of his super PAC was more blunt.
"It didn't work with Bob Dole, it didn't work with John McCain," said
Foster Friess, warning against nominating establishment favorites.
But with Santorum re-emerging and Newt Gingrich still lingering,
Romney is making a newly aggressive case about what separates him from
both Dole and McCain and his current conservative rivals.
"I happen to be the only candidate in the race … who has never worked
a day in Washington," Romney said in his speech, noting that he has no
"old scores to settle or years of cloakroom deals to defend."
The address and his campaign's line of attack this week makes clear
that Romney's plan is to target Santorum's decades in Congress and his
decision to remain in the capital after his 2006 defeat — in other
words, to effectively do to Santorum what the campaign did to Gingrich
in Florida.
In a brief exchange with reporters after his speech Friday, Santorum
sought to highlight the limitations of such a strategy.
"Hopefully, people have already figured out that Gov. Romney going out
and just slamming and slashing and burning whoever is in front of him
is not going to be a particularly effective tactic to beat Barack
Obama," said the former senator, arguing that money won't be decisive
in the fall.
To the sort of conservatives who dutifully come to this conference
every winter, Romney's new offensive is a reminder that he's learning
the wrong lessons from Tuesday.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72749_Page2.html#ixzz1m6JOwtNC
Continued Here:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72749.html#ixzz1m6INcvfh
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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