His thesis:

I’ve argued that maybe we need a third party to break open our political system. But that’s a long shot. What we definitely and urgently need is a second party — a coherent Republican opposition that is offering constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises to advance its interests and those of the country.

This is, I think, a reasonable request as at the moment it does not seem that the Republican, as a coherent political collective, it especially interested in governing.  This is problematic because the nature of our system, one of separated powers and checks and balance, requires some degree of cooperation if governing is to take place.  This fact is further emphasized by the nature of the rules of the Senate.

Friedman focuses on three areas: globalization, debt and entitlements, and energy.

On globalization he is partially doing his Friedman thing, which is make bold assertions that ultimately sound interesting but at ultimately are more glittering phrases than useful analysis, i.e., “This is a world in which there will be no more “developed” and “developing countries,” but only HIEs (high-imagination-enabling countries) and LIEs (low-imagination-enabling countries).”  This leads to a similarly good-sounding but largely void formulation:  “We need strong government, but limited government, which enables our companies and individuals to compete globally.”

However, on debt and entitlements he hits the nail on the head:

The second of our great long-term challenges are our huge debt and entitlement obligations. They can’t be fixed without raising and reforming taxes and trimming entitlements and defense. We absolutely cannot just cut entitlements and defense. That would imperil the personal security and national security of every American. We must also reform taxes to raise more revenues.

But when all the Republican candidates last year said they would not accept a deal with Democrats that involved even $1 in tax increases in return for $10 in spending cuts, the G.O.P. cut itself off from reality. It became a radical party, not a conservative one. And for the candidates to wrap themselves in a cartoon version of Ronald Reagan — a real conservative who raised taxes, including the gasoline tax, when he discovered his own cuts had gone too far — is fraudulent.

This is simply true:  serious efforts are needed and pretending like cuts alone will fix the problem is simply wishful thinking (at best).  Likewise, “cartoon” Reagan is about right.

On energy he is likewise right when he states “can’t drill our way out of” the problem.  It sounds nice, but it ignores reality—this is especially true with, as he notes, “7 billion to 9 billion people by 2050, and more and more of them want to drive, eat and live like Americans.”

Fundamentally, the conclusion is spot on:

Until the G.O.P. stops being radical and returns to being conservative, it won’t provide what the country needs most now — competition — competition with Democrats on the issues that will determine whether we thrive in the 21st century. We need to hear conservative fiscal policies, energy policies, immigration policies and public-private partnership concepts — not radical ones. Would somebody please restore our second party? The country is starved for a grown-up debate.

Such competition is needed and is such a debate.  We aren’t getting such at the moment.  And yes, as some will no doubt state, the Democrats are far from perfect.  This is not a post about the virtues of the Democratic Party and it should not be interpreted as such.  It is, however, about the copious vices of the GOP.

Newt Gingrich was just days away from the Jan. 31 Florida Republican presidential primary when he told reporters that his campaign was down to its last $600,000.

Five losing contests later, Gingrich and Winning Our Future, an outside political action committee supporting him, are almost silent on television airwaves, offering free water and coffee at events, and revamping a fundraising strategy based largely on the support of a single wealthy backer, Sheldon Adelson, and the Las Vegas casino owner’s family.

In the past seven days, Winning Our Future has spent $61,290 on broadcast television advertisements, compared with $636,920 spent by Mitt Romney and a super-PAC backing him, Restore Our Future, according to data compiled by New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, a company that tracks advertising.

For now, the Adelsons don’t plan to deliver another big check to float Gingrich’s campaign, according to a person familiar with their deliberations. The family has donated a combined $11 million to Gingrich’s super-PAC in the past two months, according to interviews and Federal Election Commission records. An Adelson spokesman declined to comment.

Winning The Future now say that it is going to concentrate on smaller donors, but that kind of fundraising isn’t necessarily going to help in the big media, multi-state contests to come. Combined with the fundraising problems that the Gingrich campaign itself seems to be having, there’s no way that this can be considered good news for Gingrich.

A groggy Rick Santorum, donning suit and tie, sans sweater vest, didn’t think much of Mitt Romney’s 38-to-31 percent win over him in last weekend’s CPAC presidential straw poll.

When CNN’s “State of the Union” host Candy Crowley said she was surprised Santorum didn’t do better with party conservatives, he shot back: “Well, you know, those straw polls at CPAC… for years Ron Paul has won those because he trucks in a lot of people, pays for their tickets, and they come in and vote and they leave. We didn’t do that, we don’t do that. i don’t try to rig straw polls.”

Did Romney rig CPAC?

“You have to talk to the Romney campaign and how many tickets they bought, we’ve heard all sorts of things,” Santorum said.

“We didn’t pay them to turn out,” he added, speaking of his supporters at CPAC, Missouri and elsewhere.

He went on to say that he didn’t think there was anything wrong with that, except he doesn’t want to engage in that kind of politics.

The Romney campaign denies “rigging” the vote, but in reality the charge is meaningless. There’s really no difference between the CPAC Straw Poll and the Ames Straw Poll last August. In both cases, campaigns do what they can to get supporters to the conference to score a victory in the belief, mistaken I think, that it would actually mean anything. Ron Paul’s campaign excelled at it for the previous three years, but with Paul passing up CPAC to campaign in Maine and other caucus states, there weren’t nearly as many Paul supporters in attendance this year as there were last year. The Romney campaign, by contrast, seemed to be all over the place, as did Santorum’s. Obviously, Romney’s get out the vote effort was effective.

Mitt Romney won the annual straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), edging Rick Santorum and well ahead of Newt Gingrich.

Washington Times (“Romney wins The Washington Times/CPAC Straw Poll”)

Mitt Romney won The Washington Times/CPAC Presidential Straw Poll on Saturday, and also nipped Rick Santorum as the top choice of conservatives nationwide, according to a new version of the poll conducted for the first time this year that suggests Mr. Romney retains strong support among self-identified conservatives.

Mr. Romney won 38 percent of the straw poll, which counted the votes of 3,408 activists gathered for the Conservative Political Action Conference, which ran from Thursday through Saturday at a hotel in Washington.

Mr. Santorum was second with 31 percent, Newt Gingrich was third with 15 percent and Rep. Ron Paul was fourth with 12 percent — far below his showing the last two years, when he won with 31 in 2010 and 30 percent in 2011.

[...]

The poll results have no official meaning in the GOP’s presidential nomination battle but do give Mr. Romney a boost as he seeks to regain the momentum he appeared to have lost last week as Mr. Santorum swept Tuesday’s three contests.

Mr. Romney’s 38 percent of the vote among CPAC activists is the highest of any candidate since George W. Bush won 42 percent of the vote in 2000, en route to the nomination and the White House. The poll wasn’t held from 2001 through 2004, but has been held every year since then.

My position on the CPAC straw poll–and, indeed, straw polls in general–is that they’re an insipid waste of time yielding little to no useful insight. That remains true this time. CPAC, in particular, is not remotely representative of even the Republican primary electorate (it’s incredibly DC-centric and dominated by college students and activists in their 20s). And the vote is easily manipulable by organization. Ron Paul routinely does much better than his national numbers–and won the last two polls coming it to this year. (This year, he finished dead last, apparently having decided for whatever reason not to flood the convention with supporters.)

What’s worth noting here, though, is that this isn’t the first time Romney topped this poll. While Ed Morrissey is “severely surprised,” he shouldn’t be.

For Mr. Romney, his victory marks a return to the top. He won the straw poll here from 2007 through 2009, when he was seen as the conservative choice as he prepared, fought and then lost his nomination battle with Sen. John McCain.

This is a point I’ve made time and again: While Romney’s conservative bonafides can reasonably be called into question–I’ve done it myself–he was in fact the “conservative alternative” as recently as 2008. I was at CPAC four years ago when he made his announcement that he was ending his campaign and endorsing John McCain and was bemused that the CPAC crowd considered Romney conservative and McCain a moderate when their records indicated the opposite. Indeed, Romney won the straw poll after withdrawing from the race and when McCain was unquestionably going to be the nominee.

The related point is how much the goal posts on American conservatism have moved in just four years. While I’d still contend that Romney is a moderate in relation to McCain, he’s unquestionably a conservative in the grand scheme of American politics. Yet, in the era of the Tea Party, it’s probably impossible to find a candidate who will fit the bill. Rick Santorum passes the litmus tests on the social issues but he’s not a fiscal conservative by Tea Party standards. He’s voted for all sorts of big spending programs, supports ear marks, and even endorsed Arlen Specter voted to confirm Sonia Sotomayor to the federal bench. Gingrich is a Big Government Conservative with all manner of absurd projects in mind.

Faced with a Republican base that clearly doesn’t seem to like Mitt Romney and the apparent rise of Rick Santorum, Jazz Shaw wonders if maybe the GOP shouldn’t just go ahead and nominate the former Pennsylvania Senator and hopefully bring some resolution to a debate that has been ravaging the GOP for years now:

One of the chief sources of internecine scrapping and grumbling among Republicans has come from the ranks of the social conservatives, or Socons as they are frequently known. We have already spent time speculating what would happen if Mitt Romney becomes the nominee. If he loses to Obama in November, the Socons will once again say that it was because cowardly, establishment party leaders failed to push forward a sufficiently conservative warrior who would fire up the base as a champion of socially conservative principles. If he wins, the Socons could quietly grumble that he’d simply gotten lucky against a deeply flawed president running on a failed record and bide their time until the next open seat in the Oval Office came up for grabs.

Similarly, if Newt Gingrich were to lose to Obama, the blame could be heaped on his own shortcomings and extensive, frequently controversial biography. After all, his three marriages and “complicated” history didn’t exactly make him a darling among evangelical Christians. The same excuses could be applied with slight modifications.

But Rick Santorum is a horse of an entirely different color who could serve as the ultimate test of this theory and put the question to rest once and for all. Is the secret to electoral success truly found in a take-no-prisoners, hard-core, rock-ribbed conservative? Is this truly what America is pining for?

As Jazz goes on to point out, when it comes to the core issues of social conservatism, there’s nobody left in the race that’s as hard core as Santorum. Whether it’s abortion, marriage and other rights for gays and lesbians, or even evolution, Santorum takes the social conservative position on each issue and turns it up a notch. This is the guy, after all, who doesn’t recognize any exception to his opposition to abortion even in the case or rape or incest, who wants to roll back Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and who said that same-sex marriage would one day lead to men marrying dogs, and who peppers his speeches with warnings about the threat to the Republic posed by the so-called “gay agenda.” If you’re a social conservative, there’s a lot to like about Santorum. Of course, at the same time, if you’re not a social conservative there’s a lot to dislike about him as well.

That last part, and the fact that most Americans don’t share the extreme positions that Santorum takes, would seem to make the electoral outcome of a Santorum- Obama General Election inevitable:

If you were worried that Team Obama could turn a Gingrich nomination into a referendum on the speaker’s history, Santorum would make that look like child’s play. Gone would be discussions of the president’s paltry record on job growth or the disastrous downstream effects of his environmental regulatory policy. The DNC would dump hundreds of millions of dollars into running 24/7 advertisements in the fall featuring grainy, black and white clips of Rick Santorum reading off the quotes I cited above and many, many more. Tens of millions of moderate and independent voters who are currently looking with dismay at Obama’s record and are kicking the tires of a possible Republican alternative would thunder for the exits. In short, I believe a campaign such as that would lead to Barack Obama winning in a landslide.

That would seem to be the logical outcome of a Santorum candidacy, although Santorum’s supporters inside the GOP will argue differently. There are people here at CPAC, for example, who think that the way to win the election in November is to emphasize a Santorum-like position on abortion and hammer the President with it for months on end up through the General Election. One can call these people detached from reality, and for the most part many of them do seem to have no real conception of how politics works in the United States or how you win elections, but perhaps the only way to convince people like this of the fact that reality is, in fact, real is to let them have what they want. Put that hard-core social conservative on the ballot and let them run their campaign based on those issues even though poll after poll shows them to be out of touch with the mainstream of the electorate. At the very least, maybe it would be what’s needed to finally start reconstructing the Republican coalition that put Ronald Reagan into office 30 years ago rather than letting the GOP continue to drift down the road.

If the reaction of the attendees at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, and the conservative pundits who have been watching the proceedings here at the Marriott Wardman Park, are any indication, it’s pretty clear that Mitt Romney is still not sealing the deal with the conservatives who have had doubts about him from the beginning of this process:

Mitt Romney wanted to use his CPAC speech Friday to allay concerns about his candidacy on the Republican right, but with one ad-libbed word he reinforced conservative fears that he’s not one of them.

“I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” Romney told the annual gathering.

The response was immediate.

“Severely?”

“I have never heard anybody say, ‘I’m severely conservative,’” Rush Limbaugh noted on his show.

“That didn’t get a lot of applause,” firebrand Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) observed with a tight smile.

“Some things are too funny to comment on,” a laughing Newt Gingrich commented as he walked into the conference to give his own speech.

Romney’s address won repeated applause. He outlined his conservative credentials, both in his public and private life, and offered a strong indictment of President Barack Obama. But by going off-script to use an awkward modifier that no movement conservative would ever affix to themselves, he made clear why, despite vast advantages in money and organization, he’s still struggling to win the trust of a party base needed to secure the GOP presidential nomination. He’s just not a natural fit.

Success at CPAC is hardly a perfect indicator for how a candidate will perform with the Republican electorate. Romney knows this well, having captured the straw poll here in the past only to lose the nomination to a candidate, John McCain, who was booed when he addressed the conference just weeks before securing the GOP nod.

Yet Romney’s trio of losses Tuesday and his all-out effort to woo the base here — he used some variation of “conservative” 25 separate times in his speech — underscores the degree to which the party has shifted in the four years since McCain captured the nomination.

The old nominating game standbys, the notions of inevitability and success begetting success, have proven irrelevant in 2012. Romney rolled in Florida and cruised in Nevada — and then, without an aggressive campaign, had nothing to show for it in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado. This election has proven momentum-proof to date.

That’s not to say that Romney’s speech got boos yesterday, because it didn’t. In fact, the applause was generally pretty loud and sustained at the right times and the speech was, overall, fairly good for a Romney speech (at least he didn’t break into an extended discussion about America The Beautiful). At the same time, though, it seemed at many times that he was trying far too hard to emphasize his conservatism as a way to address the doubts that many in the crowd no doubt have about him, and it seemed force at times. The “severely conservative” line, for example, got heavy applause but at the time seemed even more forced than it reads on paper. Would Romney have used a line like that if it weren’t for the fact that his opponents primary argument against him has been to accuse him of not being conservative enough? I doubt it.

Based on the entirely unscientific discussions I had with several people after the speech, it didn’t seem like Romney’s speech did much to win over the doubters, either. If you were an “Anybody But Mitt” person before the speech, you still were one after the speech. One speech isn’t going to change minds overnight, but the fact that it seems to have done little to alleviate the doubts suggests that Romney still has a way to go to win the base over. Of course, there’s nothing that succeeds like success and if Romney is the guy who ends up winning the nomination I personally have little doubt that most hard-core conservatives will get in line behind him rather quickly, because if there’s one person in the 2012 race they dislike more than Mitt Romney it’s Barack Obama, and they’re not going to pass up the chance to vote against him in November.

If the conservatives at CPAC are not buying Romney, though, they appear to be really warming up to Rick Santorum:

The man who’s making the latest bid to become the once-and-for-all Romney alternative, Rick Santorum, all but grabbed the CPAC activists by the lapels in his speech Friday, arguing that conservatives ought to nominate one of their own this time.

“Conservatives and tea-party folks,” Santorum said near the top of his remarks. “We are not just wings of the Republican Party — we are the Republican Party.”

The GOP, he argued, “will no longer abandon and apologize for the policies and principles that made this country great for a hollow victory in November.”

Later in his address, Santorum directly brought up the tea party-infused Republican 2010 wave, claiming that Republicans won because they were enthusiastic about their candidates.

Turning to this year’s election, and clearly alluding to Romney, the former Pennsylvania senator asked: “Why would an undecided voter vote for a candidate of the party who the party’s not excited about?”

Santorum’s introducer and the chief patron of his super PAC was more blunt.

“It didn’t work with Bob Dole, it didn’t work with John McCain,” said Foster Friess, warning against nominating establishment favorites.

But with Santorum re-emerging and Newt Gingrich still lingering, Romney is making a newly aggressive case about what separates him from both Dole and McCain and his current conservative rivals.

Romney’s response to the rise of Santorum this time around looks like it’s going to be the same as his attacks on Gingrich, to point out the fact that Santorum’s record in Washington reveals him to be far from the conservative that he now claims to be. Whether that will work coming from a guy like Romney remains to be seen, but the more important point is that attacking your opponent’s bona fides isn’t necessarily the best way to convince the conservative base that they can be comfortable with you. And that, in the end, is the problem that Mitt Romney has had from the beginning of this process.

Photo via The Daily Caller

A new poll from Public Policy Polling shows Rick Santorum surging far ahead of Mitt Romney in among Republicans in a new nationwide poll: Riding a wave of momentum from his trio of victories on Tuesday Rick Santorum has opened up a wide lead in PPP’s newest national poll. He’s at 38% to 23% for Mitt Romney, 17% for Newt Gingrich, and 13% for Ron Paul.

It used to be that Gingrich was leading with all these groups and Romney was staying competitive enough with them to hold the overall lead. No more- a consensus conservative candidate finally seems to be emerging and it’s Santorum.

The best thing Romney might have going for him right now is Gingrich’s continued presence in the race. If Gingrich dropped out 58% of his supporters say they would move to Santorum, while 22% would go to Romney and 17% to Paul. Santorum gets to 50% in the Newt free field to 28% for Romney and 15% for Paul.

It’s all quite improbable, really. The former Senator from Pennsylvania who lost his 2006 re-election bid by one of the highest margins of any incumbent Senator in American history, and who spent most of 2011 languishing at the bottom of the polls now the front runner in the race for the Republican nomination? Well it’s worth noting that the PPP poll is not consistent with other nearly contemporaneous polls that were released shortly before it was. Fox News’s poll, for example, showed Romney leading by ten points and the latest iteration of the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll shows Romney up by 12 over Santorum, although it’s worth noting that Gallup’s poll does show that Romney’s support level has been steadily declining while Santorum’s has been steadily increasing.  At the same time, though, neither poll (and no other poll so far) shows the kind of massive surge for Santorum that PPP does in this poll so, we could be looking at a poll that is catching the cutting edge of a real trend or, we could be looking at a massive statistical outlier due to bad sampling or some other factor.

Nonetheless, it’s fairly clear that Santorum’s victory on Tuesday, as symbolic as they may have been, have benefited him. Additionally, his speech at CPAC yesterday was fairly well received and his supporters appear to be mounting an aggressive campaign for support in the CPAC Straw Poll, the results of which will be released later today. So, this really could be Santorum’s moment, and Nate Silver argues that he has a better chance at winning the nomination than some might think:

Republicans have so far declined several opportunities to coalesce around Mr. Romney. They did not do so after he announced his candidacy, nor after Mr. Perry sunk in the polls, nor when Mr. Cain withdrew, nor after Mr. Romney’s apparent win in Iowa and actual win in New Hampshire. And after big wins in Florida and Nevada, he is struggling yet again.

Mr. Santorum is a fresher face, comparatively speaking. He clearly did not get much momentum from his strong showing in Iowa. But his Iowa surge had been largely confined to that state to begin with, and he was hurt by the fact that the next state to vote was New Hampshire, a bad fit for him culturally, as well as the fact that he was not announced as the actual winner until after the New Hampshire voting. On Tuesday, by contrast, he earned victories in three states, and he seems to be on the move in national polls as well.

But Mr. Santorum will not be as easy a mark for Mr. Romney as someone like Mr. Gingrich. The results in Florida had seemed to suggest that Mr. Romney could win a state any time he wanted to by blanketing it with advertising dollars. But almost all of those ads were negative, and almost all of them attacked Mr. Gingrich — most of them on his personal failings like his resignation from Congress and his ties to Freddie Mac.

Mr. Romney’s attacks on Mr. Santorum, by contrast, have focused on more venial sins: that he is a “career politician” who defended earmarks.

Meanwhile, Mr. Santorum closed strongly and outperformed his polls in several states so far, including Iowa, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri and South Carolina (where he was projected to place fourth by the polls but finished in third). That could indicate that voters like Mr. Santorum the more they get to know him — indeed, his favorability ratings are strong among Republican voters — or that his supporters are more enthusiastic. Either quality would be an asset going forward, allowing him to win his share of close calls against Mr. Romney.

Thus, it seems at least possible that Mr. Santorum’s momentum will be more sustainable. To have a chance at winning in the delegate count, he will need to supplant Mr. Gingrich as Mr. Romney’s major rival in the South. The results in Missouri, a borderline Southern state where Mr. Santorum beat Mr. Romney by 30 points without Mr. Gingrich on the ballot, suggest that he could run strongly if Mr. Gingrich were to bow out.

Like I said, it all seems very improbable, and the idea of Rick Santorum as the Republican nominee should scare the crap out of any Republican who actually wants to have a chance of winning in November. But this is been a year of improbabilities and, given the continued reluctance of conservatives to make peace with Mitt Romney, maybe it isn’t all that improbable after all that they’d coalesce behind the most improbable, and seemingly unelectable, candidate of them all.

I noted after Tuesday’s contests in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado that turnout in those contests was down across the board, continuing a trend that we’ve seen since the beginning of the year in every contest with the exception of South Carolina. This has led many pundits, and especially many Democrats, to speculate that Republican voters are less enthusiastic about the 2012 race than some might have anticipated, which potentially does not bode well for November. Today in the Wall Street Journal, however, Peggy Noonan notes that there are other signs out there that there may be something else going on other than disaffected Republicans:

There are some small indicators something else may be going on. Cable news ratings, which should spike in an election year, and which indicate interest on both the left and the right, are relatively flat, with mild increases here and there. Broadcast evening news ratings continue their gradual decline. One network anchor, on being urged to capture more of the joy and ferocity of the Republican contest, sighed. “Every time we show those guys, our numbers go down.” A major website operator tells me people aren’t clicking on political stories.

But it’s not confined to the Republican side. Look at President Obama’s State of the Union numbers. That speech famously blankets all television and radio networks. His first speech to a joint session of Congress, in February 2009, drew 52 million viewers. A year later the State of the Union had an understandable fall-off to about 48 million. In 2011, another fall: 43 million watched. A few weeks ago his 2012 State of the Union drew just 38 million. From 52 to 38: That’s quite a decline. And again, during an continuing crisis and in a presidential election year. As for the president’s interviews and other speeches, well, when was the last time you heard someone ask excitedly, “Did you hear what Obama said?”

Whose numbers are up? The NFL’s.

Maybe the story the political class is missing is not “They don’t like the Republican field,” or “They don’t like Obama.” Maybe the story is that people are tuning out altogether. Maybe they’re bored with politics, and most especially with politicians. Maybe they don’t think our government can’t solve anything. Maybe, even, our political class has done such a good job depicting the crisis we’re in that the American people, with their low faith in institutions, think nothing, really, can be done about it.

There’s a problem with trying to draw a conclusion based on television ratings, of course. With the constantly expanding menu of choices available on television and online, it’s somewhat inevitable that the audience for any particular broadcast will be lower as people go off in search of other offerings. Additionally, the ratings services don’t currently track people who watch cable news online or on mobile devices, which is segment of the population that is only going to grow lager. At the same time, though, something like the State Of The Union Address is broadcast by pretty much every cable news outlet, and every broadcast network so a drop off of 14 million voters over three years, and lower viewership in an election year when people are arguably starting to pay more attention to these issues may indeed be indicative of something other than Republicans who are annoyed at a crappy field of candidates.

There’s other evidence to support Noonan’s thesis that we’re looking at an electorate burned out on politics in general rather than something indicative of the only the state of affairs in the Republican Party. Public dissatisfaction with Congress is higher than it’s ever been, and the only direction that public disapproval of Congress seems to be moving these days is lower and lower. In the new Gallup poll, for example, Congressional job approval hit the lowest point it has ever been at since galup has been polling that question. Eventually, Congressman is likely to be as disreputable a profession as Mafia Hit Man, and at least Mafia Hit Men bring some canoli along.

You can also see evidence of public dissatisfaction in the bellwether Right Track/Wrong Track poll which, while off the highs it hit in November, is still higher than its been at any time in the Obama Presidency. Given the still fragile state of the economy it’s not surprising that Americans would still think that the country is heading in the wrong direction. but I think there’s more to it than that. For three years or more now, they have seen a Washington incapable of doing anything to address their problems. Three times last year, they saw Congress drag a budget dispute down to the wire because of an inability to either compromise or seriously address the issues facing the country, only to “resolve” it by reaching a deal that accomplished nothing but kicking the can even further down the road. They’ve seen a United States Senate that’s gone more than 1000 days without passing a budget and House Republicans who have embraced a no-tax orthodoxy that even their great hero Ronald Reagan would not (and did not) embrace. And they’ve seen a President who seems more comfortable being a follower than a leader. And through it all they see a stagnant economy and a world where they can’t be sure that their children will have a better life than they did. Is it any wonder that people are pessimistic about the future of the country, or that they might be coming to have a “to hell with it all” attitude about politics?

Barack Obama was elected President four years ago on a message of “hope and change” and a promise to change Washington. Those who had faith in that message were, by and large, naive in the belief that change could or would happen quickly. However, when they look around and see that nothing has changed at all, one has to wonder if they’re just going to conclude it’s not worth caring about this crap anymore.

James Joyner, Steven Taylor, and myself have all written here over the past months of the Republican race for the Presidency about the utter ridiculousness of the idea that the race would end in a brokered convention, something Republicans have not seen since Tom Dewey was named the GOP nominee for the second time in a row in 1948 Even with the upheval we’ve seen in the race over the past month, and the trouble that Mitt Romney continues to have in closing the deal with conservatives, those conclusions still strike me as valid. Sean Trende, the Senior Elections Analyst at RealClearPolitics, however, says that for the first time you can see a viable path that the race could take that would lead to the ultimate political pundits fantasy:

My assumption — and the assumption of many — was that the GOP fight would eventually degenerate into an ideological battle between the very conservative and somewhat conservative/moderate wings of the party, with Romney on one side and a single alternative on the other. Unless there was a late entrant or Ron Paul caught fire in the caucus states, someone was virtually assured of claiming the requisite number of delegates in that scenario.

But for the first time, the two way faceoff doesn’t seem inevitable, and a viable path to a brokered convention is beginning to emerge. Let’s start with something else I overlooked. T0he GOP does have super-delegates of a sort, in the form of the 63 RNC members. They aren’t as numerous as they are in the Democratic Party, but they are still there. While many of them have already declared allegiance to one candidate or another, those commitments can evaporate quickly, as Hillary Clinton learned to her sorrow in 2008.

But more importantly, demographic and geographic splits are beginning to surface in the GOP that resemble the splits in the Democratic Party in 2008. That year, Hillary Clinton laid claim to working-class whites and Latino voters, while Barack Obama laid claim to college-educated whites and African-Americans. This divide continued throughout the primary, right up to the last day of voting.

Here’s how Trende sees the split developing in the GOP race:

Romney has done well in New Hampshire and south Florida; the latter is basically the North transplanted to the South. This suggests continued strength in the Northeast. He’s also done well in the Mountain West: Nevada was in his camp, as was a large portion of the Western Slope of Colorado. Note also the handful of counties in southern Colorado that went for Romney; they are heavily Mexican-American, and Romney has run well with Latino voters in the GOP contests thus far.

Next, Gingrich. As I noted a few days ago, there is continued resistance to Mitt Romney in the GOP among evangelicals. These voters are concentrated largely, but not exclusively, in the South. And as we see, the former House speaker ran well in South Carolina as well as in northern Florida. This caused many to conclude that Gingrich was on the verge of emerging as the definitive not-Romney.

But now we have to consider that Santorum has won Iowa and Minnesota in the Midwest, and won Colorado largely on the strength of his showing in eastern Colorado (which is basically the Great Plains). He also won Missouri — which is culturally more southern than Midwestern — but Gingrich wasn’t on the ballot there.  For now at least, he is the “anti-Romney” in the Midwest.

If this split continues — Romney in the West and Northeast, Gingrich in the South, and Santorum in the Midwest — we could easily find ourselves in a scenario where no candidate crosses the 1,144-delegate threshold by the time voting ends. Consider this: Right now, Romney barely has a majority of the delegates. If Gingrich successfully contests the winner-takes-all allocation in the Florida primary (based on the RNC’s rule against such a format before April), no one would have a majority of the delegates as of today.

It sounds plausible, but then a theory based on assuming that things will continue in the future the way they have in the past always sounds plausible, until the race takes a different path and all your assumptions get blown out of the water. There’s another way of looking at the race. Romney has done well in states where he has both an organizational advantage on the ground (which he can get almost anywhere at this point) and where his campaign and his supporting SuperPAC have run a focused attack on his primary opponent. That’s how he won in Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, and to some extent the reason he managed to beat expectations in Iowa. In South Carolina, by contrast, the negative campaigning came from the Gingrich campaign, and in Tuesdays largely inconsequential (to the delegate race) caucuses and primaries. There are already signs that the Romney campaign is not going to make that same mistake, concerning either Gingrich or Santorum from now on. What Trende sees as a regional split may actually just be a coincidence based on the way the race has played out so far. Does he really think that Romney is going to sit back and roll over at the end of the month in Arizona or Michigan, or at the beginning of March in Super Tuesday? We’ve already seen how a focused negative campaign can change the course of the race, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t happen again.

Nonetheless, let’s pretend for a moment that Trende’s analysis is correct, how might this regional split play itself out? Here’s one scenario:

We will find out how viable0 this path is in the next few weeks. In the lead-up to Super Tuesday, we’ll probably see Romney win Arizona, Michigan and Maine. Arizona and Maine are in his demographic wheelhouse, while he is a native Michigander and his father was governor of the state. Washington is a coastal state, where Romney’s strength hasn’t been tested, so it is up in the air.

Super Tuesday will likely be tougher for him. Four of the five largest states — Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Georgia — are Southern (or in Oklahoma’s case, culturally Southern). Romney will likely win Virginia by default, but he will probably fare poorly in the remaining three. If Gingrich can maintain his strength in the South, he will likely win them.

On the other hand, Romney will probably do well in Massachusetts, Idaho and Vermont. Santorum seems well-positioned to win North Dakota.

So the viability of a three-way split probably comes down to Ohio, which has a fair number of evangelicals, though not to the degree that Tennessee, Oklahoma and Georgia do. Santorum has some strengths he can draw on in the Buckeye State, as his blue-collar message could play well even among Republicans there. If he wins, it means that we probably do have a deeply divided GOP, with Gingrich taking the anti-Romney vote in the South, and Santorum taking the anti-Romney vote in the Midwest.

Of course all of this assumes that Gingrich and/or Santorum have the kind of campaign organization, and the money, that it would take to compete in a state like Ohio, something that is by no means certain. By all rights, Ohio seems like the find of state where Romney’s organizational and money advantages would play out to his advantage quite nicely. As for the races in the Southern states (except for Virginia, of course), with Gingrich and Santorum both in the race one could easily see the conservative vote in one or more of those states staying divided enough that neither one is a clear winner and, since all states holding primaries prior to April 1st are required to award delegates proportionally, Romney will add to his delegate lead even if he comes in second, or third. Under that scenario, the prospect of either Gingrich or Romney gaining sufficient delegate support to stalemate the race all the way to the convention seems pretty low.

Is it possible that Trende’s scenario could play itself out this way so that we come to the California primary in June with nobody either having a delegate majority or the likelihood of obtaining one? Yea, it’s possible, it just doesn’t seem very likely. Despite all his flaws, and despite the advantages that SuperPAC give to candidates like Gingrich and Santorum, both of whom likely would have fizzled out long ago without them, the only candidate in this race with a truly Presidential campaign remains Mitt Romney, and there’s still every reason to believe that he’ll have the nomination wrapped up long before Republicans gather in Tampa for their convention.

Not only was the Missouri vote a "beauty contest," binding no delegates, but the turnout there was less than 6 percent of the voting-age population — a paltry number for a statewide primary. Moreover, Missouri’s results were a bit askew because Gingrich did not get on the ballot.

In Minnesota, a state of about the same population, the party caucuses drew just over 50,000 participants (about a fifth as many as in Missouri). That was a little over 1 percent of the voting-age population. Again, no commitment of delegates.

In Colorado, again a state of roughly 5 million people, about 65,000 turned out, but that was still well below 2 percent of the voting-age population.

This, my dear commenters to James Joyner’s post on this subject, is why one cannot draw substantial conclusions from yesterday’s contest.

As Elving notes (and correctly, in my view):

That’s not much of a plebiscite. And it could be a poor indicator of the sentiment of most Republicans and independents. What it measures instead is the ardor of that fraction of the GOP vote that is willing to turn out for a nighttime caucus where no delegates are actually being decided.

Yes, this gives Santorum a boost, but it does not demonstrate some massive Santorum surge nor does it mean that Romney is on the rocks.

And  by the way, lest anyone think that I am arguing this position because I am in the tank for Romney and therefore am motivated to downplay non-Romney victories, let me note that this is not the case.  I am simply calling it like I see it.

For more than a year now, the conventional wisdom has been that the important issues in the 2012 election would all center around the economy, whether it was jobs, economic growth, health insurance reform, or taxes. Given the state of the economy over the past several years, it was hardly a risky bet. With unemployment in the 9% range, economic growth slow, and the dangers of another downturn seemingly everywhere it seemed logical that the GOP would be turning to candidates who would emphasize economic issues rather than the social issues that the party base often gets passionate about. Last year at this time, there was a boomlet of support for Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who called for a truce on social issues so that the nation could focus on the economy. More importantly, Mitt Romney was and is widely seen as basing his entire candidacy on a criticism of the Obama Administration’s economic record and the argument that, with his business experience, Governor Romney could do a better job at fixing the economy.

Judging by the headlines of the past couple weeks, though, you’ve got to wonder if that’s actually going to be the case. Although things still remain precarious, the economy does seem to be improving at a pace it was not meeting in 2011 and the President’s approval numbers and head-to-head numbers against Republican candidates are improving as well. Meanwhile, we’ve seen the headlines dominated by a fight between a breast cancer charity and its supporters over aid to Planned Parenthood, a new regulation requiring religious institutions to provide insurance to their employees that covers birth control, a new Court decision on same-sex marriage, and the seeming second act of Rick Santorum in the Presidential race. It’s enough to make one wonder if the culture wars are back after all and what impact they might have on the 2012 race going forward:

As we’ve said before, the economy will likely remain the top story in November’s general election. But events overseas, as well as inside this country, can change the issue matrix in the blink of an eye. And the question has to be asked: If the debate between now and the spring is about social issues — and not the economy — how much does that hurt Romney? And help Santorum?

Gut instinct would seem to suggest that it helps Santorum and hurts Romney. After all, Santorum is the candidate most identified with social conservatism remaining in the race and it’s likely the main reason that he was able to find success not only last night, but also in Iowa at the beginning of January. As this race heads into Southern states where evangelicals are more numerous, Santorum is likely to be advantaged to a degree that none of the other other candidates are. It remains to be seen, of course, whether or not Santorum is able to exploit these victories into some kind of momentum going forward. He utterly failed to do that after Iowa, although some will argue that he was hampered somewhat by the fact that the race headed into New Hampshire with Romney identified as the winner of the Iowa Caucuses and it was only a week or more later that we learned that it was in fact Santorum that had won that race. That doesn’t entirely explain Santorum’s failure to light a fire in a State like South Carolina, of course, and the fact remains that he simply doesn’t have the money or the organization to challenge Romney effectively going forward. Nonetheless, it seems rather clear that to the extent social issues become more of an issue in the mind of voters in the GOP Primaries, it will help Santorum to at least some degree.

Of course, things will be very different when the General Election rolls around. If by some set of bizarre circumstances the GOP nominates Romney,  or if the party continues to beat the culture war drums the way candidates like Santorum, Gingrich, and even Romney have in the primaries then the odds are it will hurt the GOP. By all accounts, this is an election that is going to be won and lost in swing states like Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, and Ohio. It seems unlikely that Republican efforts in any of those states will be helped if the party becomes identified with a hard right position on social issues rather than the economic message that they should be pushing, or if economic issues become less of a concern for voters because the economy is improving. Vehement opposition to same-sex marriage or gay adopting rights may help win over hard core Republicans in states that are going to Republican in November regardless of who the nominee is, but they’re not going to help the GOP one bit in the areas of the country that are actually going to decide this election. So, in the a true display of irony, it may turn out that this entire election may end up proving Mitch Daniels and the others who say that the GOP needs to deemphasize social issues right. And Republicans who have spent the last year or more fanning the culture war flames will have nobody to blame but themselves.

Missouri

• 2008 Turnout —- 588,720 voters
• 2012 Turnout —- 240,936 voters
• Difference — (-347,784 or 59.07%)

Minnesota

• 2008 Turnout — 62,828 voters
• 2012 Turnout — 47,661 voters
• Difference — (-15,167 or 24.14%)

Colorado

• 2008 Turnout — 70,229 voters
• 2012 Turnout — 65,479 voters
• Difference (-4,570 or 6.76%)

Overall, that’s a difference among all three contests of 367,521 fewer voters in 2012 than 2008. Obviously, the biggest part of the difference comes from the fact that, this year, Missouri’s primary was entirely meaningless since it has nothing to do with the delegate selection process. Nonetheless, with even the numbers from Minnesota and Colorado down one had to wonder if Republicans have already given up on 2012.

Rick Santorum, who has been an afterthought since his (belated) win in Iowa, swept three states that are off the media radar screen. Will it revive his campaign?

The media narrative of the race is that Iowa and New Hampshire winnow the race to the serious candidates, South Carolina is the first big contest, Florida the first big state, and then there’s a lull until Super Tuesday for the two top teams to get reorganized for the stretch run. Until some polls came out yesterday showing that Santorum was doing well, I was only vaguely aware that Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri were having non-binding primaries and caucuses.

Doug Mataconis noted that no delegates were technically at stake yesterday. That’s true. But, as I pointed out in the comments, “I’m not sure that delegates really matter at this stage. Otherwise, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul would be right when they argue that there are still 46 states to go and nothing has been decided. In reality, the outcome of each race leads to a shift in the media narrative and voter expectations.”

Will the narrative change? Or will the media stick to its pre-approved script? The early indications are the former.

The Washington Post uses the headline “Santorum’s hat trick in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri jolts GOP presidential race” to frame an AP story subtitled “SANTORUM HAT TRICK.”

Rick Santorum swept Tuesday night’s nominating contests, providing a jolt to the GOP race. Speaking at a rally in Missouri, Santorum cast his wins as a victory for conservatism.

“Conservatism is alive and well in Missouri and Minnesota,” Santorum said. A visibly jubilant Santorum spoke before his third victory, in Colorado’s nominating caucuses, was certain. Santorum’s victories validated a decision he made to campaign lightly in Florida and Nevada, which preceded Tuesday’s votes, and focus on Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri.

It marked a stunning comeback for Santorum, whose hopes seemed to fade after a narrow victory in Iowa was followed by losses in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida.

Santorum and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney both focused their speeches on President Barack Obama, deriding the man they hope to run against in November. Santorum called Obama a “radical” and worked to tie Romney to Obama on policy grounds. But Santorum was careful to show a general election focus.

“I don’t stand here to claim to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney,” he said. “I stand here to be the conservative alternative to Barack Obama.”

Romney congratulated Santorum on his victories, but said flatly he still expected to be the GOP nominee. He then ignored Santorum, spending his speech ripping into Obama’s leadership.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has been jostling with Santorum to be Romney’s principal opponent for the GOP nomination, tried to ignore poor showings in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri by largely staying out of sight. Instead of waiting for Tuesday’s results in one of the states voting, as the other candidates did, Gingrich plowed forward to Ohio, where he planned to campaign Wednesday. In third or fourth place in each of the states voting, Gingrich didn’t make a public statement about the results. Instead, at campaign stops in Cincinnati, Dayton and Columbus, he criticized both Romney and Obama and linked Ohio’s Wright brothers to his own call for an improved U.S. space program.

Politico went with “Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado results: A sweep for Santorum.” WaPo‘s own headline declares, “Santorum revives campaign with wins in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota.” NYT is more subdued with “Another Twist for G.O.P. as Santorum Fares Well.”

Nate Silver headlined an afternoon piece (written before the outcome was certain) “The High Stakes in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri.”

A cynic might say that tonight’s Republican contests in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri deserve an asterisk. In Minnesota and Colorado, which will hold caucuses, voters will pick their preferred presidential candidate in a nonbinding straw poll, while picking delegates to county and regional conventions in a separate vote. In Missouri, no delegates are on the line at all; the state will hold a separate caucus for that purpose on March 17.

The results, nevertheless, will provide an important test of how robust Mitt Romney’s coalition is on less favorable terrain than in states like New Hampshire or Nevada. And they could potentially revitalize the campaign of one of Mr. Romney’s opponents, Rick Santorum.

Nor should one go too far in dismissing the results. The process that Minnesota and Colorado use, holding separate votes for presidential preference and delegate selection at their caucuses, is essentially the same one that was used in Iowa. Missouri is a more debatable case, but as the first primary of any kind held in the Midwest — perhaps Mr. Romney’s weakest region — it may tell us something about how states like Michigan and Ohio are likely to vote when they hold key primaries on Feb. 28 and March 6, respectively.

But Silver also buttresses my “media narrative” argument, noting that, “We haven’t run forecasts in any of the states. The FiveThirtyEight forecast model was ‘trained’ on past cases in which at least three different pollsters were active in a state in the closing days of the election.” That is to say: nobody was paying an attention to these races until yesterday.

The results were nonetheless surprising. It’s not just that Santorum won but that he won in blowout fashion. In Missouri, which Silver reckoned to be “the closest contest, but probably leans slightly toward Mr. Santorum,” he won by a ridiculous 30 point margin.

I’m not sure what’s more surprising here: That Santorum, who most had written off, won all three contests (and thus has as many wins as Romney and Gingrich combined)? That Romney finished so far back in all three? Or that Gingrich, who the media had positioned as the conservative alternative to the establishment Romney, finished dead last in all three races–even behind Ron Paul.

My guess is that this will give all of us something to talk about for a couple of days but really won’t change anything. Santorum still doesn’t have any money or organization and it’s going to be nearly impossible for him to compete on Super Tuesday.

The next contest is the Maine Caucus on Saturday. There’s then a long lull until the Arizona and Michigan primaries on the 28th (3 weeks from yesterday). Washington holds a caucus on March 3rd (the following Saturday) and then Super Tuesday comes four days later with contests in Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia. That’s going to be a hell of a gauntlet.

Last night’s results reminded us that there’s very little enthusiasm among the hard core Republican base for Romney. And, apparently, none outside the Deep South for Gingrich. But, with Gingrich not going anywhere, I don’t see how Santorum can rally the base and beat Romney.

Joe Scarborough argued this morning that yesterday was a perfect storm for Santorum, the most socially conservative of the Republican candidates. The Komen-Planned Parenthood story, which was a huge win for the abortion rights forces, galvanized the base. Then there was the flap over the Obama administration’s boneheaded decision to force Catholic hospitals to provide contraceptives and abortifacients to their employees, which galvanized Catholics. And then the 6th Circuit came out yesterday and overturned a statewide referendum in California banning gay marriage. But I’m not sure any of that will have a lasting impact on the primary contest.

Photo: Reuters Pictures

I have been meaning to write a post testing Newt Gingirch’s claim that if Santorum would drop out that Newt could then lead a unified conservative attack against Mitt Romney.  Some early polling that I had seen seemed to indicate, however, that Romney was a fairly consistent second place choice for the bulk of GOP voters.  That would mean, therefore, that while a Santorum exit might increase Newt’s support base, it would also help Romney’s.

Patience (or procrastination/busyness/whatever) can be a virtue, because instead of looking at cross tabs, I can now look at poll that has specifically tested this proposition.

Rasmussen’s latest poll shows the following at the national level:

Gingrich remains Romney’s strongest rival, even when the race is reduced to a two-candidate faceoff. When it’s Romney versus the former House speaker with no other candidates in the contest, it’s Romney 46% to Gingrich’s 40%.

Pitted against Santorum, Romney leads 50% to 38%.

The frontrunner holds a nearly two-to-one lead – 58% to 30% – over Paul in their one-to-one matchup.

The poll shows that at the moment (in the multi-candidate race), Mitt’s lead is seven points nationally.  As such, Newt’s theory of an anti-Romney coalition isproblematic, since the Newy v. Mitt number only improves Newt’s position vis-a-vis Mitt by a single percentage point.

Granted:  Newt is clearly the strongest of the challengers, but we knew that already.

(A Condorcet winner is one who, when paired in head-to-head contests in a pool of candidates wins all such pairwise contests.  Such a candidate may not be the plurality winner, however.  The only reason I provide a question mark in the title is that this is one poll-I am actually pretty sure that Romney is the Condorcet candidate in this pool–as well as the plurality favorite for that matter).