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| Santorum Quits; Election will be Romney vs. Obama, and as for who will win... by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 04/10/2012, 4:09pm PDT | ||||
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| The news just announced Rick Santorum has "suspended" his campaign (a technical and legal specification, it allows him to continue to try to solicit funds, typically to pay campaign debts as opposed to closing his campaign, which does not.)
With Santorum out of the way, the Republican nomination has about as much suspense as the General Election for Mayor in the District of Columbia after the Democratic Primary (whoever wins the Democratic primary for mayor in DC is always elected Mayor). Newt Gingrich is basically a non-entity and has insulted the party so much that everyone hates him, and as much as I personally like Ron Paul he never had a chance to begin with. So, as Barack Obama is running unopposed in the 2012 Democratic Primary, and absent him having a heart attack or someone mounts a successful assassination, Willard "Mitt" Romney will be the Republican nominee for President of the United States. Now comes the interesting part. If you want to look at my video from 4 years ago, I stated - even earlier in that election cycle (Mar 20, 2008) than in this one - that if the democrats picked Obama he would win; otherwise the only possible way McCain had a snowball's chance in hell of getting the election was if Hillary Clinton got the Democratic nomination. Someone put their finger on the issues for this election. The Tea Party and possibly other influences are pushing the Republican candidates farther and farther to the right, with less and less concern for ordinary people and their interests, and more towards giving rich people tax breaks at the expense of the poor and middle class. And as such, the average person can probably see that, as bad as things are, the Republicans are basically proposing the exact same things the Bush Jr. Administration was doing, and as a result, I do not see how they can win. Romney was probably the best candidate that the Republicans could offer against Obama, and even at that, he's probably too far to the right for most people's tastes. A lot of people might not like Obama or might disagree with his policies, but I suspect most people will look at the two and figure that while Obama might be bad or might not be all that good, Romney will be much worse. Certainly, we have a lot of things that need to be fixed, but trying to find a way to fix problems with, say, Social Security and Medicare, and the basically wholesale defunding of them, which more-or-less is Rick Perry's proposal, is going to be anathema to the average voter. The U.S. tends to be center-right, a bit conservative, but you can't propose right-wing social engineering that people can openly see will make their own lives worse. Of course, proposing left-wing social engineering to give people benefits that people think either someone else will have to pay for it or if they do have to pay, they'll get more than they have to pay, is always popular. So to summarize, unless Romney finds a way to move from his hard-right position and show himself clearly as more interested in the problems of the average person - Romney generally has shown throughout his campaign that he has no empathy for, and no understanding of, the problems of people making less than 8 figures - he is not going to win the election and his hard-right stance will give the election to Obama. Here's my video from 2008: |
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