{"id":15442,"date":"2018-04-24T14:55:21","date_gmt":"2018-04-24T19:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=15442"},"modified":"2018-04-24T14:55:21","modified_gmt":"2018-04-24T19:55:21","slug":"romney-is-not-an-automatic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2018\/04\/24\/romney-is-not-an-automatic\/","title":{"rendered":"Romney Is Not An Automatic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mitt Romney’s run for the Senate in Utah has run into a snag. From<\/a> The Salt Lake Tribune<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

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After 11 hours of political elbowing and shoving at the Utah Republican Convention \u2014 held appropriately at a hockey arena \u2014 delegates forced Mitt Romney into a primary election against state Rep. Mike Kennedy in the U.S. Senate race.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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In fact, Kennedy \u2014 a doctor and lawyer \u2014 finished in first place at the convention with 51 percent of the vote to Romney\u2019s 49 percent. The former GOP presidential nominee fell far short of the 60 percent needed to clinch the nomination outright. …<\/p>\n

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Romney blamed his second-place finish \u2014 out of a dozen Republicans seeking the seat of retiring seven-term Sen. Orrin Hatch \u2014 on delegates\u2019 dislike of candidates like him who hedge their convention bids by also gathering signatures to ensure at least a place on the primary ballot.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Romney collected more than 28,000 signatures and was the only Senate candidate to do so.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Conservatives have for several years fought in court and in the Legislature to overturn the state law allowing signature gathering, seeing it as weakening the power of the convention and its delegates.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Which is where the extremists of either party wield the most power, because they’re willing to show up – they’ve made their politics their lives. Of course the conservatives will squawk. But Ragan Ewing on the conservative The Resurgent<\/strong><\/em> is uneasy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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We may still see get a fresh Rom-nom in June. The numbers were close this weekend, and Romney\u2019s known to be a decent man with a solid, competent governing record. But Kennedy, for all of his policy agreement with Romney, displayed one thing at the convention that distinguished him from the more seasoned, recognized statesman: he openly supported Trump…not just individual actions, but POTUS himself. That, apparently, profoundly resonated with attendees.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I don\u2019t think this bodes well for November. I don\u2019t just mean for Romney\/Utah, but for the GOP\u2019s chances overall. If this event is evidence of a wider trend across the country, the tribal instincts of much of the grassroots Republican constituency appears to be recklessly doubling down on Trumpism. We know Democratic voters en masse are energized for the Fall, craving payback for \u201816 (not to mention a firewall against a conservative replacement for Justice Kennedy if he retires from SCOTUS). If the GOP base continues to eschew self-awareness and reject qualified faces like Mitt Romney for their alleged impurity, they doom themselves to permanent minority party status. I\u2019ll cop to getting it wrong, with countless others, in 2016. That does not, however, convince me that crass populism is a template for repeated victory in the future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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I\u2019m not saying Romney is the<\/em> right guy for the job. Only that the current internal party cleansing may be less of a swamp-draining and more of a self-immolation. Pray for sanity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Romney certainly was a good governor of Massachusetts, but that’s not the same thing as making laws from the legislative side of things – but I’ll stipulate it, because Ragan is echoing a lot of what I’ve been saying for the last couple of years. From Romney as Presidential nominee to a possible rejection as nominee for the Senate, defeated by a little-known hardliner, it seems that at least the grassroots is rapidly moving towards the extreme. The primary will indicate whether the rest of the party is moving to the right, or whether it’s just the grassroots.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, Gary Sargent had a similar observation<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Two new articles \u2014 one in the New York Times<\/a>, the other in National Journal<\/a> \u2014 illustrate what\u2019s happening in many of these GOP primaries. The Times piece<\/a>, by Jeremy Peters, reports that in West Virginia, GOP Senate primary candidate Don Blankenship is running an ad that says: \u201cWe don\u2019t need to investigate our president. We need to arrest Hillary \u2026 Lock her up!\u201d<\/p>\n

In multiple GOP races across the country, the Times piece reports, candidates are employing phrases such as \u201cdrain the swamp,\u201d \u201cbuild the wall,\u201d \u201crigged system\u201d and even \u201cfake news.\u201d The GOP Senate candidate in Tennessee ran an ad that promises to stand with Trump \u201cevery step of the way to build that wall,\u201d and even echoes Trump\u2019s attacks on African American football players protesting systemic racism and police brutality:\u00a0 \u201cI stand when the president walks in the room. And yes, I stand when I hear \u2018The Star-Spangled Banner.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, National Journal\u2019s Josh Kraushaar report<\/a>s that in the Indiana Senate GOP primary, Mike Braun, the candidate who is most vocally emphasizing Trump\u2019s messages \u2014 on trade, the Washington \u201cswamp\u201d and \u201camnesty\u201d \u2014 appears to be gaining the advantage. Braun\u2019s ads basically recast true conservatism as Trumpism in its incarnation as populist anti-establishment ethno-nationalism.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If Romney loses the primary, leaving a hard-right extremist running for the seat of the retiring Senator Orrin Hatch, then – shockingly, in my mind – a safe seat for the Republicans is suddenly in play. I had the Utah seat pegged safely Republican, mostly because the Mormons may not be progressives, but they tend to be sensible conservatives. If they’re faced with a choice between another authoritarian nutcase, rather than Romney, and, say, a fairly conservative Democrat, they may choose to go with the Democrat and avoid the taint that’s dooming the Evangelicals to historical disgrace in the eyes of the rest of America.<\/p>\n

Like I said a while ago, eventually the GOP<\/strong><\/em> will be down to three members – and two will be on probation for blasphemy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mitt Romney’s run for the Senate in Utah has run into a snag. From The Salt Lake Tribune: After 11 hours of political elbowing and shoving at the Utah Republican Convention \u2014 held appropriately at a hockey arena \u2014 delegates forced Mitt Romney into a primary election against state Rep. \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15442"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15445,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15442\/revisions\/15445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}