quarta-feira, 29 de fevereiro de 2012

The New Yorker

February 29, 2012

Romney Has Big Night; So Does Obama

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Fair dinkum: it was Mitt Romney’s day, and he deserves some credit. For the second time in a month—the first time was after he lost South Carolina—he held his nerve and clawed his way out of trouble. For a politician who often comes across as an out-of-touch rich weenie, he has shown an ability to take some blows that will serve him well later on. But after saying all that, I can’t help but thinking that the real beneficiary of what happened yesterday was Barack Obama.
First, though, the Mittster. After two weeks in which it looked like his campaign might implode in his native state, he scored two big victories, heading off Rick Santorum’s underdog challenge in Michigan and winning easily in Arizona. “We didn’t win by a lot, but we won by enough, and that’s all that counts,” he said shortly after the networks had projected him as the winner in Michigan.
As someone who had rashly, if somewhat lightheartedly, tipped a Santorum victory, I can readily acknowledge the essential truth of his statement, even if the proportional allocation of delegates in Michigan renders it strictly inaccurate. Flanked by his wife and other family members, Romney looked mightily relieved, and somewhat sobered by what he had been through. No wonder. If he had lost in Michigan, there was a real possibility that a new and less damaged figure would enter the race and unite the Republican Party behind him: a Jeb Bush or a Chris Christie, say.
For the White House as well as Romney, this was a serious danger, if only because its consequences would have been unknowable. The results of yesterday’s primaries effectively ruled it out. Today, it is virtually certain that the Republicans will be saddled with a battered candidate whose approval rating with independents has plummeted almost twenty percentage points over the past couple of months (Romney) or, less likely but still not completely out of the question, with a surefire loser (Santorum).
If Romney isn’t quite restored to his position as “Mr. Inevitable,” he’s “Mr. Very, Very Likely.” But with Super Tuesday only days away, it is difficult to see how he can change the underlying dynamic of the race, which is slowly but surely dragging him down. What he really needs is an early end to the primary contest, but of that there is still no sight. His victory in Michigan was narrow enough—with 98 per cent of the vote counted, he was leading by 41.1 per cent to 37.9 per cent—for Santorum to harbor hopes of beating him in Ohio, the biggest prize next week. Even if Romney scrapes home in the Buckeye State, he will probably suffer some big losses in southern states like Georgia. (It emerged yesterday that Sheldon Adelson is sending yet another big check to Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC.)
The good news for Romney is that Santorum’s bubble has burst. (And not before time, I hear many of you saying.) While he performed pretty well yesterday in Michigan, especially in rural areas, he encountered the limits of a campaign based almost exclusively on social conservatism: suburban voters, the type who decide elections, shied away from him. In Macomb County, the ancestral home of the “Reagan Democrats,” Romney topped him by nearly nine points—43.3 per cent to 34.6 per cent. In Arizona, which is also a suburban state, Romney ran ahead of Santorum among seniors, conservatives, and Tea Party supporters alike, according to an exit poll. Romney also carried the Catholic vote.
Even in today’s Republican Party, it appears, you can’t become a Presidential candidate by promising to return the United States to the precepts of the Roman Catholic Church pre the Second Vatican Council. Santorum, who isn’t quite as dim and reactionary as he sometimes sounds, finally seems to accept that this is 2012 rather than 1912. In his consolation speech, he eschewed attacks on contraception, John F. Kennedy, and college education, in favor of speaking about his mother Catherine, a hardworking nurse who obtained a graduate degree. (For some reason, he didn’t mention his father, who is a clinical psychologist with a Ph.D.) Then he moved on to the economy, an area where has some unorthodox, if not particularly well thought through, things to say.

It looks like he’s missed his chance, though, slim as it was. While he was holding up a piece of North Dakota sand shale, which he said contained some excellent light sweet crude that the Obama administration is preventing the country from exploiting, CNN cut away from him to project Romney as the winner—a rare moment of drama in a night that was a bit of an anti-climax.
Around nine o’clock in the East, Romney took a narrow lead in the precincts that had reported, and he held onto it all night. At about 9:05, the betting markets decided Romney had it in the bag: on Intrade, the implied probability of him winning jumped from sixty per cent to eighty-five per cent. About fifteen minutes later, on Fox News, Karl Rove, citing early returns from the big populous counties around Detroit, called the race for Romney. Joe Trippi, his Democratic sidekick, seconded the call.
Romney’s focus on pocketbook issues had paid off, just as it did in Florida. The network exit poll showed that fifty-four per cent of Michigan voters cited the economy as their biggest concern, compared to just fourteen per cent who cited abortion. In the former group, Romney won by sixteen points: forty-five per cent to twenty-nine per cent. Pretty much the same thing happened in Arizona, where forty-eight per cent of voters cited the economy as their primary concern, and among these voters Romney led Santorum by sixteen points. (With more than eighty percent of the vote counted, his overall margin of victory in Arizona was an impressive twenty points: forty-seven per cent to twenty-seven per cent.)
Perhaps the biggest surprise was that the “sabotage Mitt” movement on the part of Democrats voting for Santorum failed to materialize, at least in a big way. In what was an open primary, the exit polls showed that about ten per cent of the voters were Democrats, not much different from the figure in the 2008 G.O.P. primary and quite a bit lower than the 2000 contest, when many non-Republicans voted for John McCain against George W. Bush. Evidently, the thought of pulling the lever for Santorum, albeit in a good cause, was more than many Democrats could stomach.
That’s an understandable attitude. Ultimately, as I said up top, it will probably work out to the benefit of the Democrats and Obama. Two months into this primary season, with eleven states having gone to the polls, the Republicans are still busy tearing themselves apart. In the short run, anyway, nothing that happened yesterday will change that.
Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images.