Only if Ron Paul wins.
"Paul may take Iowa, but it won’t matter" December 29, 2011|By Joshua Green
IT’S GETTING hard to imagine a plausible scenario in which Mitt Romney does not wind up as the Republican presidential nominee — he has the money, experience, and staff the other candidates lack, and enough dull appeal to remain competitive throughout.
That's what passes for "news" here in AmeriKa. It's how they come up with the rigged poll numbers.
Plus, the Republicans who surpass him have the longevity of Spinal Tap drummers. The latest is Texas Representative Ron Paul, who holds a narrow lead in most recent polls of Iowa and so stands the best chance of beating Romney next Tuesday.
Paul’s late emergence is universally regarded as a stroke of good fortune for Romney, and a Paul victory in Iowa would be seen as merely delaying, rather than denying, Romney’s eventual coronation. In fact, many commentators are already dispensing with the usual pretense of calling him a “long shot’’ and stating outright that Paul won’t become the nominee. They’re probably right — but at the same time, Iowans famously cherish their status as the first to weigh in on presidential candidates, and few would knowingly waste their vote.
So what’s going on? The best explanation could be that the diverging views of Ron Paul actually reflect different understandings of what a vote for him would signify.
Members of Congress and the national press view Paul as an amiable crank, more willing than most to stick to his libertarian principles — he once cast the lone vote to deny Mother Teresa the Congressional Gold Medal because the Constitution doesn’t expressly authorize the expenditure — but chiefly concerned with making a point. As David Fahrenthold noted in The Washington Post, Paul has sponsored 620 measures in his lengthy congressional career, only four of which even made it to the House floor, and just one of which became law. Paul also embodies the implacable extremities of the Tea Party, a fading movement inside the Beltway that last week lost the big fight it had provoked over the payroll tax, and has come to be regarded as slightly passé.
I'm amazed that a temporary, 60-day extension is viewed as some great Democratic win.
Then again, what would you expect from the distracting and diverting conventional media?
Furthermore, many of Paul’s positions, such as his fervid isolationism, are out of step with today’s Republican Party. These positions, along with his ties to the political fringe, would probably disqualify him were they better known.
Like the Jewish vote?
Just this week, a number of newspapers highlighted the vile, racist newsletters that Paul published in the 1990s, which, among other things, accused blacks of “racial terrorism’’ and asserted that AIDS victims “enjoy the attention and pity that comes from being sick.’’ (Paul claims he did not write them.)
He didn't, and we know who did.
Related: Boston Globe Lowers Its Standards
They didn't have far to go.
And as the caucuses loom, the other candidates have started drawing attention to these weaknesses. Paul has been written off because Washington observers assume that no one could survive such ugly revelations.
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But it will matter if Romney wins!!
"Romney looks good in Iowa" December 30, 2011|By Scot Lehigh
NORTH LIBERTY, Iowa — Hearing US Representative Ron Paul address his supporters in the central Iowa city of Newton, what most struck me [was] the adamant and — how to put this politely? — engagingly offbeat folks who rose to applaud Paul....
I'm so sick of the f***ing elitist insults.
Paul, for all the talk of his surging candidacy, his mid-day event in Newton lacked the excitement, energy, and bustle of Romney’s. Yes, he had his hard-core supporters, who applauded him to the echo. Yet a number of the people I talked to said that they were curious to see Paul, but weren’t likely to vote for him. Or that they liked some part of his message but found other aspects of it problematic.
PFFFFFFFFFFFFFTTTT!!!!!
My bet is that Romney wins here.
Related: Don't Bet on Mitt Romney
That sure was forgotten in a hurry.
Also see: Romney will not reveal tax data
Mitt Romney declines to answer whether he will release his tax returns
He knows we would be appalled at how much he is making and how little tax he is paying.
But short of an outright victory, a second-place showing behind Paul would still leave him in strong shape. That would elevate the 76-year-old Paul, a candidate whose support has a firm ceiling, while depriving more dangerous rivals of the oxygen they need to grow.
Either way, look for Romney to emerge from Iowa in very good shape.
Meaning the FIX is IN!!
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FLASHBACK:
"Caucuses are a test for Iowa" by Scot Lehigh | Globe Columnist, December 28, 2011
Finally, there’s Ron Paul, who sits at or near the top of a divided field, even as renewed focus on racially tinged newsletters once sent under his name have raised serious questions about both his views and his candor.
Related: Black Americans DO NOT Believe Ron Paul Is Racist
New Information Discredits “Racist” Media Smear Campaign Against Ron Paul
Eric Dondero (cited by Weekly Standard in Ron Paul smear article) is a Leftist and a Leftist Lover
"Eric Dondero aka Eric Dondero Rittberg is a self-described libertarian who supported Giuliani, which suggests that he infiltrated Ron Paul's campaign to be an agent provocateur, a role which was discovered resulting in his termination. Dondero is not at all well regarded on the blog-o-sphere and actually ran AGAINST Ron Paul in 2007! Eric has a long history of support for Zionist causes. Eric Dondero Rittberg blogs constantly preaching hate and intolerance against Muslims, and infiltrates in order to disrupt libertarian groups and events. In other words, Eric Dondero Rittberg is just the sort of "desperate for attention" person Weekly Standard would have to use to try to smear Ron Paul. And while we are on the subject of Ron Paul's alleged racism, will nobody in the corporate media have the courage to comment on the overt racism against Muslims being espoused by all the other candidates? -- Wake the Flock Up
And the Globe picked it up?
Paul can rightly claim to be winning converts to his libertarian cause. But for all the much-praised consistency of his positions, those same views frequently wander into the realm of the outdated, the impractical, or the downright absurd.
It’s impossible to imagine the 76-year-old libertarian becoming president.
No it's not: Election Night 2008
It’s almost as hard to imagine him becoming the GOP nominee. Should he win here, it will merely defer the GOP’s real decision - and signal that, once again, Iowa is marching to a different drummer.
Yeah, even if he wins he's not the winner.
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More: WTF?! Today Show 12/28/11 - Chuck Todd "Who ever Comes in Second, not named Ron Paul in Iowa is the REAL Winner" MSNBC site - has "Paul Bearers" under Ron Paul's profile to subliminally affect people's thoughts of Paul
Iowa GOP moving vote-count to 'undisclosed location'
Latest NY Times Iowa projection shows Ron Paul with 60% chance of winning ... unless the GOP steals it for Romney
Thus we get this:
"Momentum in Iowa tilting toward Mitt Romney; Latest polls suggest slight lead over Paul; in strong position heading into N.H." by Christopher Rowland Globe Staff / January 1, 2012
DES MOINES - Iowa voters may be on the verge of delivering a caucus plot twist Tuesday that seemed unlikely just a few short weeks ago: propelling Mitt Romney toward the Republican presidential nomination.
The state’s Republicans doused his ambitions in 2008, when they turned out in large numbers for Mike Huckabee. Romney shunned Iowa for most of 2011 as a result, placing his chips elsewhere in his second bid for the White House.
But in recent days, after a year of spectacular surges and flameouts by his rivals, the former Massachusetts governor is capitalizing on a tantalizing opportunity. He is attracting bigger and more enthusiastic crowds to his Iowa rallies. The most recent polls show he now has a strong chance of winning.
A Des Moines Register poll, a crucial final indicator of voter preference, said Romney was leading, with 24 percent of likely voters. US Representative Ron Paul of Texas was second with 22 percent. The newspaper poll’s results released last night were consistent with earlier polls by CNN/Time and NBC, which ranked Romney as a slight favorite over Paul, although the margins were statistically insignificant.
The Register poll revealed that former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum had risen into third place, with a small lead over Newt Gingrich and Texas Governor Rick Perry.
See: Santorum's Iowa Surge
If so, Gingrich and Perry are finished.
Romney’s forces in Iowa continued to dampen expectations even as the candidate revved up his campaign in Sioux Falls last night for his final two-day push. But a clear sense of momentum has taken hold here....
So we are told by the lying, agenda-pushing press.
If Romney secures a surprise victory Tuesday and then captures the primary election Jan. 10 in New Hampshire, where he holds a comfortable lead in the polls, he would be launched on a strong trajectory toward the nominating convention in Tampa.
Also see: Globe Splits Hairs in New Hampshire
That would make him the first Republican who is not an incumbent president to capture both contests in the same year. It would mean that Republicans, despite the grassroots strength of Tea Party activists, will be closer to nominating a candidate with a moderate profile and the best shot, many political analysts believe, of defeating President Obama in the general election.
Even finishing second behind Paul, the latest non-Romney candidate to rise, would give Romney a considerable Iowa bounce.
But if Paul wins it doesn't mean anything.
Paul holds libertarian views that many consider extreme, and he is seen by mainstream voters and party leaders as unelectable.
Says who?
Romney’s camp would seek to dismiss Paul’s win as a quirk of conservative Iowa, while pointing to Romney’s second-place spot above the rest of the field: Santorum, Gingrich, Perry, and Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann.
A third-place finish for Romney remains a possibility, to be sure, and would make it more difficult for him to claim momentum....
While knocking down Gingrich on the airwaves, the Romney camp is benefiting from discontent over Paul’s energetic candidacy, which many Iowans view as unsustainable.
You know who doesn't matter anymore? AmeriKan newspapers.
Roger Stigers, a real estate agent from Cedar Rapids who attended a Romney town hall meeting, worried that handing Paul a victory would reinforce the sense, after Huckabee’s victory in 2008, that the state’s Republicans are nominating candidates who cannot contend on the national stage.
“We don’t want to waste our vote,’’ he said....
Paul’s strong standing in polls has been fueled by students and active Tea Party supporters.
But they are going to go Romney because of electability, blah, blah, blah.
He is running an insurgent campaign against the Republican establishment, as well as the media, which has renewed scrutiny of derogatory writings on gays and minorities that were published in Paul’s newsletters in the ’80s and ’90s. Paul has said he did not write the articles and did not know what was published in his name.
There is that racist canard.
And I DIDN'T KNOW RON PAUL was trying to KILL US TROOPS! Looks to me like he is trying to get them OUT of harm's way.
Paul’s opposition to government bureaucracy, his attacks on the Federal Reserve, and his call for an end to military interventions resonated for some in the crowd, including Luke Adler, who served two years in Afghanistan in the Army.
“We’re fed up,’’ he said. “Government has become so obscene and ridiculous.’’
Oh, an ARMY VET is FOR PAUL?!!!?
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Related: Ron Paul: Iowa Vote Fraud
