Rick Santorum could be headed for a big day in today’s contests in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri. Missouri looks like a probable win for Santorum. He’s at 45% there to 32% for Mitt Romney and 19% for Paul. Minnesota provides an opportunity for a win as well. Currently he has a small advantage with 33% to 24% for Romney, 22% for Newt Gingrich, and 20% for Ron Paul. And Santorum should get a second place finish in Colorado, where Romney appears to be the likely winner. The standings there are Romney at 37%, Santorum at 27%, Gingrich at 21%, and Paul at 13%.

Santorum’s personal popularity is the main reason for his sudden reemergence as a relevant player in the GOP race. In all 3 of these states his favorability is over 70%- 74/17 in Minnesota, 72/17 in Missouri, and 71/19 in Colorado. He’s far better liked than his main opponents- Romney’s favorability is 47-60% in those states and Gingrich’s is 47-48%. While Romney and Gingrich have hammered each other in recents weeks Santorum’s been largely left alone and he’s benefiting from that now.

There are three groups Santorum’s winning in all three of these states: Tea Partiers, Evangelicals, and those describing themselves as ‘very conservative.’

He is also coming out of the shadows with more than jabs. He is coming with convincing arguments that can stick:

“Gov. Romney is dead wrong on the issue of the day and he should not be the nominee of the party,” Santorum said in a hotel ballroom across the street from the hospital, adding the issue of health care is “central to our country, central to this race specifically why Gov. Romney is absolutely incapable of making the case against Obamacare successfully.”…
“The problem is, we have a candidate who is running and seen by the media as the prohibitive favorite, who is the worst possible person in the field to put up on this most fundamental issue in this campaign, and that is Gov. Romney,” Santorum said. “The plan he put together in Massachusetts is in fact ‘ObamaCare’ on the state level.”…
Santorum said the two plans have similar levels, using terms like “gold, silver, and bronze,” and in possibly his most aggressive attack he said they both use “government panels to dictate quality and cost containment,” and for the second day in a row brought up the controversial term “death panels.”
The candidate told the crowd the vulnerable could be at risk under the administration’s plan and are at risk under Romney’s plan because the government could “ultimately decide to ration care.”

Several bloggers are now getting behind Santorum and the momentum has arrived for it to be his turn. He should watch out. So far he has been fairly safe from the Romney attack machine the liberal media because they thought he had no chance. That is all about to change soon. I’m not sure he has what it takes or if he is the best choice, but I do think we will see a game changer tonight.

Meanwhile, I think Gingrich is truly and passionately planning to stay in and hopes for a Southern sweep later on. Don’t count him out yet either. Also, Mitt Romney is definitely not a foregone conclusion as the nominee.

(PPP) PPP’s tracking of the Florida Republican primary wraps up with Mitt Romney at 39%, Newt Gingrich at 31%, Rick Santorum at 15%, and Ron Paul at 11%. Our three days of tracking found very little movement in the race: Romney was at 39-40% every day, Gingrich was at 31-32% every day, Santorum was at 14-15% every day, and Paul was at 9-11% every day.

(Washington Post) A new Quinnipiac University poll released Monday on the final full day of campaigning in Florida shows Romney with a 14-point lead over Gingrich, 43 percent to 29 percent, among likely GOP primary voters. That compares to a lead of 38 percent to 29 percent at the end of last week, Quinnipiac said.

Florida is a winner take all state for the primary delegates, and The Politico has 5 things to watch

1) Mitt’s margin – Gingrich needs a close race more than Romney needs a blowout victory. (especially with no debates till Feb 22)

2) Newt and women – Gingrich did well in S.C. with women, despite, as they say, the affairs and divorces. Can he do the same in Florida?

3) Hispanic Republicans – Mitt was blown out in Florida in 2008 by McCain with Hispanic voters. What happens this go-around?

4) The Panhandle and Northeast Florida – In the Panhandle and in Florida’s rural north, GOP voters are demographically similar to the South Carolinians who propelled Gingrich to victory.

5) Rick Santorum’s performance – The former Pennsylvania senator didn’t do any campaigning in the state over the weekend and then spent Monday in Missouri and Minnesota. He’s largely written off Florida, despite winning rave reviews for his debate performances last week and continuing to win some local endorsements.

That’s weird, they don’t even mention Ron Paul. Perhaps the Jewish Florida retirees don’t care for his anti-Semitism and potential abandonment of Israel while he would ignore Iran moving forward to becoming a nuclear weapons nation. Maybe people in Florida aren’t into racist writings and conspiracy theories.

Back to the PPP article

The hubbub over Romney’s tax returns early last week may have enhanced his chances in the state. The truth is that being wealthy and successful is not a liability with Republican voters- it’s a selling point. We find that 66% of primary voters have a favorable opinion of ‘rich people’ to only 8% with a negative opinion of them. All the awareness of how rich Romney is may have sent Florida Republicans a message that Romney is someone who knows what he’s doing.

and

Gingrich erred with his proposal last week for a ‘moon colony.’ Only 21% of voters support his idea while 53% are opposed and more importantly it made Gingrich look like a flake. At the beginning of last week Gingrich and Romney were seen as equally electable against Barack Obama. Now 49% see Romney as the party’s strongest candidate in the fall to 25% for Gingrich.

Gingrich has stated multiple times that he is in it for the long haul. He’s also stated multiple times that Santorum should drop out.

Truth is, both Newt and Mitt need to put the negativity aside, stop beating on each other, and push their own positives, for the most part. Stop getting into pissing matches, especially during the debates with Liberal moderators from liberal TV stations, who push them to virtual blows on purpose. Santorum should stay in, if he wants. What’s your guess regarding Florida?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(Washington Post) President Obama ran — and won — in 2008 on the idea of uniting the country. But, each of his first three years in office have marked historic highs in political polarization, with Democrats largely approving of him and Republicans deeply disapproving.

For 2011, Obama’s third year in office, an average of 80 percent of Democrats approved of the job he was doing in Gallup tracking polls, as compared to 12 percent of Republicans who felt the same way. That’s a 68-point partisan gap, the highest for any president’s third year in office — ever. (The previous high was George W. Bush in 2007, when he had a 59 percent difference in job approval ratings.)

In 2010, the partisan gap between how Obama was viewed by Democrats versus Republicans stood at 68 percent; in 2009, it was 65 percent. Both were the highest marks ever for a president’s second and first years in office, respectively.

It’s surely because you wing nuts refuse to buy into fundamentally changing America, and don’t want to see Obama succeed because he’s half-black. Why can’t you just admit that Obama knows better than you what is good for you and the country? Jerks.

Our guess is that Jones’ latter hypothesis is the right one — that we are simply living in an era in which Democrats dislike a Republican president (and Republicans dislike a Democratic one) even before the commander in chief has taken a single official action.

There is something to that: the bases of both sides listen to what each candidate says and what they have done, creating that opposition. There is a battle for the soul of this country, and even some of the moderates on both sides are far apart from each other. Furthermore, each base is going to immediately state that the other party’s guy just plain sucks, and can almost never give credit where credit is due.

Where do we go from here? More of the same. But, then, that’s politics. The right doesn’t want increased Central Government spending obscene amounts of taxpayer and borrowed money, while the left wants the opposite. Of course, it doesn’t help when the Left attempts to destroy their political opponents in a personal manner, becomes extremely deranged against those political opponents, and thinks the right is about “hate”, rather than being engaged in a disagreement. Larry Elder said to Chris Matthews

“It’s called a disagreement,” Elder says. “You perceive it as hatred, just like you perceive that the Republicans want people to die on gurneys, and they don’t care about illegal aliens, and all the other silly things that you’ve said. That’s hatred. That’s hatred, Chris.”

And it doesn’t help that Obama acts more as leader of the DNC rather than president of the United States, even turning the official White House website into a partisan platform. He attacks and denigrates all who disagree with him. Interestingly, the only people Bush actually went after was his conservative base during the amnesty talks.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

It’s as if the conservative media over the past 24 hours decided Gingrich is for real, and they need to come clean about the man they really know before it’s too late. This is just a sampling of what’s hitting Newt:

• The overnight Drudge Report banner: “Insider: Gingrich repeatedly Insulted Reagan.” The headline linked to a devastating takedown by Elliott Abrams in the National Review, who wrote, among other things, that Gingrich had a long record of criticizing and undermining Reagan’s most transformative policies.

• Drudge also linked prominently to the American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s similarly harsh takedown of Gingrich over character: “William Jefferson Gingrich.” In it, Tyrrell writes: “Newt and Bill are 1960s generation narcissists, and they share the same problems: waywardness and deviancy. Newt, like Bill, has a proclivity for girl hopping… His public record is already besmeared with tawdry divorces, and there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out.”

Drudge runs hundreds of links to stories of all stripes about candidates, but has been seen by Republicans as favorable to Romney in the past.

• Bob Dole issued a scathing statement Thursday that the Romney campaign provided to the National Review in which he said “it is now time” to rally to stop Gingrich, blamed the former Speaker for losing House Republican seats in 1996, and warned that it could happen again, at all levels of government.

NRO joins in trying to make Newt, the candidate endorsed by Reagan’s son, seem anti-Reagan. Anne Coulter has an article linked at Drudge saying “Re-elect Obama! Vote Newt!

He’s also losing his edge to Mitt in quite a few polls. He is already fighting back though and Rush Limbaugh noticed the attacks and disagrees with them too. It will be interesting to see if he gains his momentum back through tonight’s debate.

Others that noticed: Legal Insurrection

Against the anti-Newt crusade stands a wealth of counter-viewpoints of people who were in a position to know and who share very differenct recollections of Newt and Reagan, via Josh Painter in the comments:

Reagan Nat’l Security Advisor Bud McFarlane: http://bit.ly/zd9eAF

Reagan Economist Art Laffer: http://bit.ly/xEDETi

Reagan WH political director Jeffrey Lord: http://bit.ly/zw2ZMb

Reagan Policy Analyst Peter Ferrara http://bit.ly/zq1QxI

Reagan media consultant Richard Quinn: http://on.msnbc.com/y2sPM2

Reagan’s Speechwriting Dir. Bently Elliott: http://thedc.com/xOkDvA

Reagan’s older son Michael Reagan: http://bit.ly/yYVy7L

Reagan’s beloved wife Nancy: http://bit.ly/zrWvAw

Wake Up America!

Republican voters can be influenced if the party establishment declares all out war against a candidate as they are doing against Gingrich, but voters should also be allowed and encouraged to see both sides of the issue, all the information available and not be forced toward one candidate or another by those with the loudest voices.

(ABC News) Jon Huntsman will drop out of the Republican presidential race on Monday, a campaign spokesman told ABC News.

A source close to the Huntsman campaign said the former ambassador to China and Utah governor was “proud of the race that he ran” but “did not want to stand in the way” of rival Mitt Romney, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination.

Huntsman plans to endorse Romney at an 11 a.m. press conference Monday in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Huntsman was running dead last in South Carolina with a whopping 3%. Dropping out won’t really change the dynamics of the primary in the least, though, according to the NY Times article

Yet late Sunday evening, a spokesman for Mr. Gingrich sought to portray the decision by Mr. Huntsman as a boon to him, saying in a statement, “We are one step closer to a bold Reagan conservative winning the G.O.P. nomination.”

Yeah, the funny part of that is that Huntsman was the most Conservative candidate in the race. But, as I’ve said, he never properly explained why he worked for Obama and how it could help if he became president, and, for those who could get by being Ambassador to China under Obama, you get to his belief in government regulation/legislation to deal with the climate change hoax. He never attempted to pander to the Conservative base, and pandering simply to independents is a prescription for low ratings and a loss. Huntsman ran an inept and absurd campaign, and his leaving the race will mean zip.

There has been a lot of lament by the far left in America that the Tea Party has somehow driven the Republican Party to conservative extremes. This, however, is untrue. The truth is, the American public has been trending toward conservative views for more than a decade before the Tea Party even came about.

According to Gallup, for the last three years more Americans have self-proclaimed themselves as conservatives than have claimed the moniker of moderate.

Political ideology in the U.S. held steady in 2011, with 40% of Americans continuing to describe their views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This marks the third straight year that conservatives have outnumbered moderates, after more than a decade in which moderates mainly tied or outnumbered conservatives.

But think about this for a minute. This means that fully 75% of America is more conservative than the Democrat Party, a party that decades ago stopped being a party of centrism becoming instead a European-like, liberal party.

Gallup’s several decades of polling finds that “moderates” have been in slow decline since 1992 with Americans calling themselves “liberal” now only measuring at 21 percent. With this we see a nation that is not just center-right as many political pundits have for years claimed, but is actually trending conservative.

As to the Republican Party, it is dominated by conservatives by 71 percent, a number that has grown by nine percent since the year 2000. So it is no wonder that Republican politics has edged toward conservative ideas, its base is getting more conservative.

This all seems to bode ill for the sort of far left policies that President Obama and his comrades dearly love. In fact, one can see the progression of conservatism in America in many areas. Twenty years ago, for instance, liberals were full-throated in their criticism of the Second Amendment and aimed to ban not just handguns but all firearms. Today, with every state but one now offering some iteration of law authorizing concealed carry, anti-gun ideas are the last things Democrat politicians talk about openly. Abortion is also an issue that has trended toward the conservative point of view, though not nearly so quickly as gun issues.

Spending is also an issue that is trending toward conservative ideals. For the first time in well over 100 years the discussion in Congress is how to actually cut spending instead of merely how much to limit the growth of spending and voters are quite high on fiscal responsibility. Look at Wisconsin, for instance. 100 years ago, Wisconsin led the country in left-wing progressivism yet last year Wisconsin was among the first states in the union to vote in a Governor one of whose main promises was to scale back the undue power of government employee unions.

Certainly the country hasn’t gone far enough to the right to suit conservatives — just as the country was not far enough left in the 60s and 70s to suit liberals — but without question the United States has been drifting to the right for several decades.

So, conservatives, don’t feel self-conscious about being a conservative. After all, you are in the majority.

Paul is doing too well and there are many reasons besides his uncanny ability to raise lots of money and a spooky, devoted blind following. He is one of the best spokesmen for libertarianism out there and people are tired of what the status quo two party system has been bringing to the table. He preaches small government and fiscal conservatism and has a record to back it up and that is the appeal to many people.

His anti-war and irresponsible isolationist philosphy on foreign policy is appealing to many independents and democrats weary of war. As a matter of fact more Democrats voted for Ron Paul in New Hampshire than Republicans. He got 24% of the Democrat vote, 32% of the independent vote, and only 16% of the Republican vote. Huntsman got 41% of the Democrat vote! I guess appealing to all parties is important in the general election, but there is no way it will make much of a difference against Obama.

The bottom line is that Ron Paul, as right as he is on many issues, has a dangerous foreign policy position that everyone needs to study closely before jumping in and pulling the lever for him. He also has a lot of fringe baggage. Just so it’s all out in the open while his popularity is pulling votes away from other conservatives….there is a case against Ron Paul.

He may be worse than Obama on foreign policy. He is an isolationist that would allow Iran to gain nuclear weapons. That is a big deal. Remember that the leaders of Iran are insane and have repeated several times how they would wipe Israel off the map. Ron Paul blames America first, and as a matter of fact has blamed America for the 911 attacks while courting 911 conspiracy nuts. There is also the racist publications published under his name. Fair or not, don’t think that won’t come up in the general election running against the first black president.

If his magnet to fringe isn’t enough, then take a careful look at his foreign policy. First off, he doesn’t want a border fence because it could be used to “keep us in”. He uses arguments of moral equivalency as the foundation to his isolationist views. I understand that Viet Nam and Iraq were unpopular wars and I understand people weary of America’s interventionalism, but not all interventions are unnecessary. What would the world be like if America had not intervened against Hitler? What if we didn’t contain Communism? Standing by and doing nothing but talk and appease while allowing evil to play by its own rules is a recipe for disaster.

Rich Lowry has a good summary of some of Paul’s views:

In the debate, Paul went on to warn against a push “to declare war on 1.2 billion Muslims,” as if a country that has resorted to force of arms to save Muslims from starvation (Somalia), from ethnic cleansing (Bosnia, Kosovo) and from brutal dictators (Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya) is bristling with an undifferentiated hostility toward all Muslims.

This isn’t an expression of an anti-interventionism so much as a smear. It goes beyond opposition to American foreign policy to a poisonous view of America itself.

Paul never knows when to stop. He lets his suspicion of centralized power slip into paranoia worthy of a second-rate Hollywood thriller about government malevolence. In January 2010, he declared: “There’s been a coup, have you heard? It’s the CIA coup. The CIA runs everything, they run the military.”

On his latest appearance on the radio show of the conspiracy-mongering host Alex Jones, he opined that the alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador on US soil was “another propaganda stunt.” He exclaimed that the latest defense bill authorizing the indefinite detention of enemy combatants will “literally legalize martial law” (yes, “literally”).

Check out what a former staffer of his has to say:

Ron Paul is most assuredly an isolationist. He denies this charge vociferously. But I can tell you straight out, I had countless arguments/discussions with him over his personal views. For example, he strenuously does not believe the United States had any business getting involved in fighting Hitler in WWII. He expressed to me countless times, that “saving the Jews,” was absolutely none of our business. When pressed, he often times brings up conspiracy theories like FDR knew about the attacks of Pearl Harbor weeks before hand, or that WWII was just “blowback,” for Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy errors, and such.

I would challenge him, like for example, what about the instances of German U-boats attacking U.S. ships, or even landing on the coast of North Carolina or Long Island, NY. He’d finally concede that that and only that was reason enough to counter-attack against the Nazis, not any humanitarian causes like preventing the Holocaust.

There is much more information I could give you on the sheer lunacy of his foreign policy views. Let me just concentrate on one in specific. And I will state this with absolute certainty:

Ron Paul was opposed to the War in Afghanistan, and to any military reaction to the attacks of 9/11.

He did not want to vote for the resolution. He immediately stated to us staffers, me in particular, that Bush/Cheney were going to use the attacks as a precursor for “invading” Iraq. He engaged in conspiracy theories including perhaps the attacks were coordinated with the CIA, and that the Bush administration might have known about the attacks ahead of time. He expressed no sympathies whatsoever for those who died on 9/11, and pretty much forbade us staffers from engaging in any sort of memorial expressions, or openly asserting pro-military statements in support of the Bush administration.

The majority of Republicans and Americans in general will not get behind Ron Paul. He is too fringe and too radical. So as far as Ron Paul asking everyone else to get out so he can beat Romney, I think he should be the one dropping out. I don’t like Romney, but I’d rather vote for him than take a risk with Ron Paul’s foreign policy.

Ron Paul is a pure, absolutist libertarian extremist with a dangerous isolationist foreign policy. He may be right on some things, but not on everything (foreign policy for sure). If the only issue important to you is the legalization of drugs then vote for Ron Paul. If you think foreign policy is even a little important pick someone else.

Doug Mataconis says last night was Paul’s high mark. I agree, but he is still sucking votes away from other non-Romney candidates and while he should drop out I think we all know he won’t. So, perhaps someone else should so the votes for “other than Romney” are not so divided up. I pray South Carolina shakes things up for this race, and I pray Ron Paul doesn’t run third party in the general.

And Curt, please…you are scaring me.

Update: More insane positions from Ron Paul:

Other than abortion, there is no particular on which Ron Paul differs with either libertarianism or the Libertarian Party. Like them, he would legalize hard drugs and abolish age of consent laws, which violate the rights of 24-year-olds to have sex with 14-year-olds.

(CNN) Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney won a convincing victory in the New Hampshire primary, the second straight triumph for Romney and one that bolsters his front-runner status to take on President Barack Obama in November.

All six Republican contenders head to South Carolina on Wednesday ahead of the next primary.

With 95% of precincts reporting, Romney received 40% of the vote in Tuesday’s balloting. Texas Rep. Ron Paul received 23% and former Utah Gov. and U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman garnered 17%.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum came in with 10% and 9%, respectively, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry had 1%.

Now we move into the South Carolina primary on January 21. Why is S.C. important?

“As goes South Carolina, so goes the rest of the South.” Those were the words of late South Carolina GOP Chairman Dan Ross in 1979 when the South Carolina Republican Party officially established its presidential primary beginning in 1980.

Since then, and with every presidential election cycle since, South Carolina has always gotten it right. They got it right when Ronald Reagan defeated John Connally in 1980, when George Bush defeated Pat Robertson after his surprise Iowa caucus win in 1988, when Bob Dole stopped Pat Buchanan following his New Hampshire primary win in 1996, when George W. Bush defeated John McCain in 2000, and when John McCain beat back a challenge from Mike Huckabee in 2008.

Could South Carolina change and not be the predictor of the GOP nominee this year? It’s possible, based on whether or not they buy into a possible “President Romney.” According to a recent poll (in a story about Stephen Colbert leading Jon Huntsman)

Leading the pack in the poll, released Tuesday, is Mitt Romney with 27 percent, followed by Newt Gingrich (23 percent), Rick Santorum (18 percent), Ron Paul (8 percent) and Rick Perry (7 percent). Last is former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer, who also trails Colbert, with 1 percent.

The question in S.C. will be “do they like the scorched Romney campaign of Gingrich?” Remember, part of Southern culture (despite lots of carpetbaggers) is politeness. They may not take too kindly to the heavy handed attacks, especially on capitalism.

Anyhow, if Perry doesn’t do well, at least a 3rd place finish, if not 2nd, his campaign will surely be toast. Huntsman should probably give it up now. He is actually the best conservative in the field, yet, he has never attempted to explain why he worked for Obama as ambassador for China, he supports legislation and regulation on the climate change hoax, and he is going after independents during a primary. Speaking of quitting

Rep. Ron Paul’s campaign called on the rest of the Republican field to drop out of the race and unite behind him in order to defeat Mitt Romney.

Someone sounds desperate. Also, funny how “The Last Man Who Follows The Constitution” isn’t really happy dealing with competition. You know who should drop out? Ron Paul. Were he to somehow win the primaries, he would be an embarrassment that would drive the GOP into minority party status for the next 20-30 years.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.