Mitt Romney won three more states Tuesday and is giving Rick Santorum a race in Pennsylvania, the former senator’s home state. More to the point, President Barack Obama attacked Romney by name in Washington, D.C. Tuesday, recognizing him as the candidate-apparent, and signaling the beginning of the fall campaign.
Republicans in every state should hope that Obama is not being premature. The last thing the party needs is still more knife-to-the-throat combat among its contenders for the nomination. Every day the nomination fight continues drags the GOP farther to the right. Even the conservatives who make up the majority of those who vote in primaries sense the danger. For the first time, the exit polls in Tuesday’s elections in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington, D.C. showed that strong Tea Party supporters, evangelical Christians and those who label themselves “very conservative” voted for Romney in large numbers.
Again, a plurality of those who voted for Romney told pollsters their primary motivation was to support the candidate with the best chance of defeating the president.
Romney, in comparison to Santorum, Gingrich and Paul, surely deserves that evaluation.
President Obama, speaking to the annual convention of the Associated Press, paid no attention to Romney’s competitors but focused instead on the philosophy of government represented by the budget written by Rep. Paul Ryan and passed by the House. Romney warmly endorsed Ryan’s budget, calling it “marvelous.”
Even though it faces certain death in the Senate, it has been attacked as a radical vision which slashes away at food stamps, Pell Grants, federal spending on research and infrastructure, Medicaid and Medicare.
The president labeled it “social Darwinism” and condemned it as a recipe for decline.
His speech to the nation’s publishers and AP reporters was a full-throated attack, which set the tone of his re-election strategy: he will paint Romney and his party as reactionaries who would try to take the U.S. back to the small government days of an earlier era.
Here is a sample:
“Ronald Reagan, who, as I recall, is not accused of being a tax-and-spend socialist, understood repeatedly that when the deficit started to get out of control — that forced him to make a deal — he would have to propose both spending cuts and tax increases.
“He probably could not get through a Republican primary today,” he observed.
The president also recalled one of this year’s presidential debates in which the entire field of Republican candidates rejected the idea of matching every $10 in spending cuts with $1 in new revenues, demonstrating the Republican refusal to consider any deficit reduction compromise, no matter how modest.
WHILE THE PROSPECT of seven months of Romney vs. Obama (and vice versa) takes the blush from an otherwise invigorating spring, the debate from this week forward will move several notches up in content. Both men will be seeking to become the nation’s CEO. Both will, therefore, be expected to tell the voters how they think the federal government should act to make things better for the American people.
That’ll be a switch.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
