It is now as official as it is going to get for a while. Barack Obama has obtained enough delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination and it would take a rather major and unpredictable event to change the trajectory of the Republican race to deny Mitt Romney the Republican nomination. It remains possible that Romney might fall slightly short of the number of committed delegates to win, but there are likely to be near 600 unbound delegates, making it easy for Romney to pick up enough to win the nomination. This is ensured by the manner that the party leadership is increasingly backing him, seeing his nomination as inevitable. On the other hand, Joe Scarborough says that nobody in the GOP establishment believes Romney can win. Republican voters are accepting the reality of his nomination, feeling satisfied but only eleven percent are actually excited by this outcome. The same poll also shows that a majority of Republican voters realize that Romney says what he thinks people want to hear as opposed to what he believes.
With Romney’s nomination having been fairly certain for the last few weeks, we are starting to get some inside information about the campaign. After all, Americans have become too inpatient to wait until after a campaign is over as might have been the case in the past. According to the National Review, Mike Allen and Evan Thomas’ e-book, Inside the Circus says that “Romney didn’t even have an oppo book on Rick Santorum a few days before the Iowa caucuses.” Personally I think they were foolish to totally write him off, not that it mattered in the end. With the other conservative candidates rising and then falling, I expected Santorum to pick up enough conservative votes to achieve some victories over Romney. Ultimately Romney did have a winning strategy:
[O]n March 14 and 15, Romney had raised over $3 million in New York and Connecticut. … The Romney campaign had a clever pitch for the event. Schmoozing with his money pals before the events, a Romney fund-raiser pointed out that “slightly more than half the delegates” to the GOP convention at Tampa “are evangelicals.” These true-believer conservatives are averse not only to Romney but to semi-reasonable types like Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels. As a result, said this fund-raiser, the “responsible Republican guys” are “starting to realize” that at a brokered convention “it’s not going to be Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush and Paul Ryan, a ticket they could really love. It’s probably Huckabee-Palin or Palin-Huckabee.” That was enough to scare the Wall Street crowd into getting out their checkbooks.
With Republicans already showing little enthusiasm for Mitt Romney’s probable nomination, I wonder how the Huckabee and Palin supporters in the party accept this characterization of Huckabee and Palin as not even making his “semi-reasonable” list.
